Some morning back when I was maybe nine, I walked out the front door after breakfast and didn't come home until I was hungry again.
I don't remember where I went, because it didn't matter. Probably the park. Probably somebody's backyard first. There was a kid down the street who had a rope we'd tied to a tree branch that was almost certainly too high, and there was a drainage ditch we weren't supposed to play in, so we played in it. At some point I got in an argument with a friend over the rules of a game we'd made up ourselves, and we sorted it out ourselves, because there was not one single adult anywhere in sight. My mom had a vague sense I was "on the block."
I'm guessing a lot of you just remembered your own version of that. The ditch, the rope, the bikes, the kid whose mom always had popsicles or cold cokes in the garage fridge.
Now a kid's day runs on two tracks: the stuff we schedule for them, and screens. If families have the money for it, the scheduled stuff looks like practices and lessons and travel teams. For families that don't (and that’s a ton of families, especially in this economy) there are a lot of hours spent online.
But whether it’s back-to-back scheduled “things” or sitting at home and scrolling, both types of kids are missing the same thing: the hours of just being loose in the neighborhood with other kids and no adult running the show.
By most metrics, we are pouring more into our kids than any parents in history—more money, more coaching, more supervision, more college—and the result is mostly that kids are more anxious, more depressed, and more lonely than ever.
A stunning number of them can't seem to grow up and move out. They’re not even launching.
So what happened?
In the 1970s, about half of American high schoolers said they saw their friends almost every day. By 2017 it was under a quarter. Most of us never even noticed it happening, because we were in the car driving to the next thing.
Community and family used to form a kid's character, but now that's the school's job. It used to give children a sense of belonging, but now that's a counselor's job. It used to be where you learned to take a risk, skin your knee, and get back up, but now that's a league with a coach and a waiver form. We took every last thing the neighborhood did for free and shipped it off to somebody with a title and a fee.
But it doesn’t work, because the “work” was never the activity—it was being actually known by a bunch of people (your friends, your friends' parents, church leaders, your parents' friends who came over every weekend) who weren't your parents.
Alexis de Tocqueville came to the U.S. in 1831 to figure out what made America so great, and the thing that knocked him sideways was how Americans dealt with problems. To massively paraphrase: they didn't wait for the government. If a barn needed raising, a widow needed her field worked, or somebody needed help—the people nearby just… did it.
He called it the "art of association" and credited it with being a major factor in making the American experiment a success. He saw the flip side too, and he wrote one sentence way back then that seems like it was especially for us today:
"The more government takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help."
He was talking about government, but it's true of every institution we've outsourced our village to.
The more the programs and professionals we hire to take over the neighborhood's old jobs, the more we forget how to do them, the more helpless we get, and the more we think we need manufactured associations instead of natural ones.
But all is not lost. Yet.
You can't fix the missing-village epidemic with a vote. There's no bill, no budget, no expert, and no app, but that’s actually really good news. Because if no institution can fix it, then nobody's permission is required, and no funding has to come through, and no committee has to approve or argue about anything. What it actually comes down to is you, and me, and our streets, and whether we decide to bother with it or not.
I know that there are still neighborhoods where kids ride to the park and bang on each other's doors, and all the parents know each other's names. I’ve seen them. And where that life still exists is where some regular adults simply decided that they wanted it to be that way, so they met their neighbors and gave their kids some freedom, and built the very village they’d been missing.
I wonder what could happen if this week, we all set out to rebuild one small piece of the good ol’ days?
What if you and I just walk over and meet the family down the street we’ve somehow never actually talked to, or send our kid to knock on a door instead of booking a playdate for three Thursdays from now. What if we spend this Friday evening sitting out front where people walking by can actually see us instead of in our fenced back yards? Or if we let our kids walk somewhere we’d normally drive them. Do you know the names of the kids on your street? I know I could probably do a whole lot better at that.
Of course the most important work is still done within the walls of our own homes and around our own dinner tables. But think of what could be done for good if several nights a week other people’s kids are sitting around your dinner table for those talks too?
Aren’t those first-steps in stitching together the webs of everyday relationships that have for all of history turned kids into steady, capable adults?
Really, that’s the whole idea behind everything we do at Tuttle Twins, too. A book never raised anybody's child—that’s the job of parents. But we’re motivated by the same truth Tocqueville observed almost 200 years ago: that free people, handling things together at the smallest and most local level, beat any faraway institution, every time.
It starts in your house, then on your street, and it spreads from there until somehow we’ve rebuilt the humanity-saving infrastructure that government has worked so hard to tear down and replace.
Could it really be as simple as just making friends with our neighbors again?
I don’t know.
But I’m willing to give it a shot.
— Connor
