As I’ve gotten older, I have found myself asking why I didn’t always relegate playing to the backyard. I was a bookworm throughout early grade school, so most exposure to culture I got was through literature. And in books, you always play in the backyard. It is what backyards are for, in theory.
I never was a backyard playing person. My most notable experiences of being a kid who played outside come from two different places, both in multifamily developments. When I was in first grade, we lived in these townhomes that had a courtyard-field thing that all the townhomes had an exit onto. All the neighborhood kids would go out into the space, and we would play. After we moved away from there, we moved to a terrace house development (townhomes that share the back wall with another townhome), where all the neighborhood kids would play in the street. We had a little playground, but also a patch of grass in front of my family’s unit that we could play in. All of the playing was forcibly relegated to the street because of the spatial constraints made by the physical houses – it was a great place to run, bike, play, do whatever kids do.
I think kids are naturally drawn towards playing in the street. In the suburbs, because streets are designed as places for cars, and the kids are directed through space towards backyards to play, you can drive through (rarely walk through) entire residential areas in summer afternoons and find no kids out playing, even though there might be kids of playing age in the area.
A few years ago, when my neighbors entered peak playing outside age (I estimate this to be about 7-10 years old), they played outside every single day during the summer. They would do everything – play soccer, football, basketball. Water guns would come out on hot days, and when the ice cream truck drove by, they’d dash in to grab a few bucks to grab ice cream. I was a bit past my prime in the playing outside department, but I would watch them. They had a lot of fun. They’d dash across the road, going to one of the boys’ houses who was on the other side. One week, foam swords came out, and those were fun. But the most important thing I noticed that the main spot they’d play in, a hub for their shenanigans, was in the crossover of two of their front yards – not their backyard. It was easy for all the boys to come together, and see when the others went outside, and for their parents to peek out and see what was going on. When it came time for lunch, one of their moms would pop their head out and call them in. When the evening glow started to settle in, a parent could easily call her son in.
My other neighbors had four kids, all of different ages. They’d always have guests over – young parents, I think, so many friends with kids of similar ages – and the kids would always be all over their front lawn, playing with chalk, hopscotch, pushing around bikes and other rolling toys, laughing, jumping, dancing.
In 2019, I was a day camp counselor at a drop-in municipal day camp. We hosted it in four different parks, and counselors would rotate. It wasn’t very convenient as a place to put your kids while you went to work, but for a place to send your kid for a few hours to give you some alone time during the summer, it was great. I personally had a lot of fun– and I think the kids did as well. We would play games, not just on the play structures, but on the field, sidewalks, sitting under the pavilions. Any place you could fit kids, we found a place to use it to enjoy our summer days.
The common thread that I see between all these experiences is that kids find the most enjoyment in public space. By public, I just intend to mean that the space is visually shared with others. I am far from the first person to realize that doing stuff in front of where people live, work and play creates great results. Jane Jacobs notably wrote about that, and if you haven’t “Sidewalk Ballet”, please do. Children seek out these public spaces – shared space lets kids find each other, play with supervision, and develop creativity in playing. A little playscape in a backyard can’t replicate the child’s desire to create their own fun – go around any neighborhood at any time of the year, and you’ll see that every backyard playscape is neglected in favor of more raw types of playing. Even in parks with big jungle gyms, the fun never comes from the physical sliding. The jungle gym simply acts as a canvas for kids to throw their creativity onto – there’s no instruction manual on how to play zombie tag written on the post. No one watches a YouTube video explaining how to play grounders, and there are hardly any written rules on how to play “the floor is lava”.
Kids need the ability to be creative, to channel their energy, to play with each other, and to find a space to be. Taking away their ability to play together and forcing them into private spaces will just push them inside their homes, away from others, away from socialization, and ultimately away from better health and well being. Kids need to play outside – but is outside ready for kids to play?
But what about cars?
Sure, you’re convinced – kids should play in functionally public space, including the street. But the streets are full of cars! It would be dangerous for them to play in the road, they might get hit!
Unfortunately, I have to agree. At the top of this post, I included a captionless photo. The caption that came with it read: 1962: Children doing the twist in Montclare Street, Bethnal Green, East London 1962. It was the children's way of protesting against cars being parked in their play street (Kids, welcome to the war on cars!). Cars being in the way of kids playing on the street is a problem that has arisen after the inception of streets and kids – cars, and their extreme prevalence, is a relatively recent concept. Montclare Street still exists today, and I take no pleasure in informing you that the kids lost their battle against the cars being parked in their street.
Cars are at a permanent odds with human life, unfortunately. They operate at a different geometry and on a completely different mental plane. They are most definitely at odds with children playing in the street. But streets don’t have to exist solely for car travel. They can exist for other purposes as well (if that were false, then it would be hard to explain the presence of streets in pre-car developments such as Bethnal Green).
There are two options for making streets safe for kids to play in. The first, is obviously to ban cars. In my opinion, that is an unrealistic one. In the United States, we need cars to get around, at least in the present day. If not in the actual cities we live in, but most definitely get between cities throughout a region, at least in most of the US. Cars are, to my dismay, here to stay as an important transportation mode, for at least a significant part of my personal future.
The second option is to make residential streets safe for kids to play by designing them as places for kids to play instead of places for kids to pass through. The woonerf can play a role here, a street designed for living. Cars can exist on a street designed for children – they just aren’t the primary user. The main obstacles for this are mostly in engineering frameworks. In the present, we measure road success by throughput and congestion, with Level of Service as our main goal. Transitioning to roads that prioritize all users, in a sense stakeholder theory but for roads, can help make roads that let kids play in them without banning cars.
A vivid memory of mine is from a few (ahem) years ago – I was probably around 10 or 11 years old, and I was out in front of my parent’s house. It was wintertime, and an enormous blizzard had just passed through town, leaving a lot of snow covering nearly everything. I was rolling around in the snow, enjoying myself, failing at making a snowman, as one does, except I was doing so in the front yard of my parents house. Now, that wouldn’t be an issue, but I looked around my street, and noticed that I was disrupting the pristine snow, and now my parents’ house was the only one with non-smooth snow. A very silly concern, especially seeing how snow melts, but an interesting one, at least interesting enough for me to have held onto it until now.
I think that the reason I felt that way stems from a latent desire to not disrupt shared space – I had never seen it disrupted, and to an extent, because the space was “shared” it did not feel like it was ultimately mine. Designing a space that allows for kids to play in it, and has kids playing in it, disrupts the public-private boundary that much of America operates on (strangely enough, we also have a thorough legal framework to make sure every single neighbor operates identically).
We need to shift our mindsets – away from the idea that cars need to dominate space, and towards the idea that humans should occupy the in-between. A shift away from the idea that you only need to exist within your own four walls – embrace shared space as common property, as something that you should steward but also bear the fruits of. A shift away from the idea that children need structure, towards an understanding that sometimes, especially during play time, it is best for children to channel their own creativity.
At the end of the day, the future is in our hands. It should be a conscious decision when we think about what we want the future to look like. At present, making one road have chicanes and bump outs and speed cushions and whatnot might seem silly and inconsequential. But cities were never and will never be built on command, rather, they are constantly developing, dynamic places. The future isn’t really in the hands of the youth that would ideally take up the streets. We need to embrace the dynamism of streets and make a world that is more friendly to all of its residents, of all ages.