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This excellent piece on age segregation has got me thinking about how serious and pervasive this problem is. As the author states:
As discussed in @2rafa's post downthread, a major issue of the fertility crisis is a lack of time. Another issue it seems is a lack of even interacting with children unless you have some yourself, or have some in your family. I wonder if the lack of time among young adults in the West is causative of this age segregation?
Regardless, it likely has its roots in the K-12 education system. It's profoundly unnatural from a cultural standpoint to only be in the same peer group as people right around your age. I'm convinced it's unhealthy, and it predisposes us in a massive way to only socialize with people close to our age.
Do you think age segregation is an issue as well? If not, why not?
I think the thing that the ‘tradwife’ (almost always sitcom nuclear family tradwife, not how it actually was) memes don’t get is that many women don’t want to spend more than a decade without much adult company. Yeah, yeah, working for the man may be soulless or whatever, but you can make friends, you can gossip, you can go out for a drink after work or have lunch with your coworkers, you work together with other adults to achieve goals through the daytime hours.
I like children fine enough (and so did my mother) but to be the stereotypical suburban American SAHM you need to like children so much that you are fine only hanging out with them for a huge chunk of your life. Even on the weekend and in the evening mothers are primary parents. If you don’t have relatives nearby, then until the last kid goes to school, you’re mostly a 24/7/365 parent with the exception of times you pay for daycare (and while the kids are at school, at least for the first few years, much of your day is still going to be solo domestic chores or errands).
This means that, at least among smart or educated women who choose when or if they have kids, often only those most set on motherhood have children. People on the fence might like the idea of having children, might feel the biological imperative, but they override it because it seems like an impossible sacrifice.
Sometimes online SAHMs try to justify this lifestyle (I’m happy for those who enjoy it, by the way) by telling me how important it is to be around for every milestone, every development, to know everything about one’s children, to be deeply and thoroughly involved in every aspect of their education (maybe even homeschooling, which is especially popular on the right). But like, I don’t really care if I’m not around for a specific milestone. I’m sure I’ll love my children, but like my mother I doubt I’ll feel extreme pangs of jealousy if my kid sees their nanny as a maternal figure (as I did mine). And having accepted that most personality traits and intelligence are largely hereditary, pouring immense personal time into homeschooling seems redundant, as it’s unlikely to make a substantial difference to life outcomes (as Cochran etc have shown).
This idea of leaving one life and entering another (which again, if you like the company of other adults, is strictly worse in ways) is what scares many women about parenthood. Your social world goes from being huge to being yourself, your husband, some couples friends you see a few times a year and maybe another mother or two you see sometimes. Ideally the latter are pre-existing friends but often even this isn’t possible. The great majority of the time you’re alone with the kids (or just alone if they’re at school and you’re cleaning/cooking/shopping). You can see this even in the thread posted this week by someone asking where they could meet similar mothers, and where people were very excited by the idea some might live near each other. It’s clear this is a lonely business, and women are smart enough to realize it.
Many mothers don’t need to ‘work’ necessarily, but I think in many cases they need regular, consistent, significant time away from their children and/or in the company of other adults throughout their childhood. I think many women I know would be more willing to have children if they could be guaranteed this as an option. Currently it’s limited to the rich and to those people who still live in remaining tight-knit traditional communities.
Suburbia is souless and atomizing conpared to traditional towns and cities. There aren't people on the streets, there are cars. There are no natural places to meet people, distances are vast and people are isolated in their fenced in homes. suburbia encourages loneliness. It is quite absurd that people are so isolated that they prefer being in a cubical just to have people around them.
What's funny about this is that my experience is largely the opposite: I recently visited some friends in the north Dallas metroplex, which is about as close to the platonic ideal of detached-house suburbia as you can get sprawling in all directions, and they know their neighbors on all sides by name (and which tools and skills they regularly trade), and live within a few hundred meters of an HOA-managed playscape where they regularly encounter the same few dozen children and parents. As far as I can tell, the folks I know in the NYC area have much more trouble meeting their neighbors behind closed apartment doors, with front yards replaced with dark interior hallways, and porches replaced with coffee shops and bars.
I'd buy that the experience varies a lot by personality, though: if you are looking for a particular niche interest friend group, the city is probably a better choice, and suburbia can be pretty underwhelming. But I do think suburbs are often undersold generally.
Indeed, when I lived in an apartment, I have not known a single person living in the same building. I asked my friends about, and this has been everyone else’s experience as well. Now, I know all the people on my SFH suburban street, and regularly hang out with some of them.
When people say things like suburbia being atomizing, I’m really dumbfounded — compared to what? Just because there are a lot of people walking down the street doesn’t mean that it’s easier to socialize, in fact it is the opposite. Humans enter different behavioral modes in different settings. When there are a lot of people around, we naturally tend to detach ourselves mentally, and treat everyone as an irrelevant blob. If, on the other hand, we get bunched together with only a couple of people at a time, it feels more natural to strike the conversation (in fact, sometimes it’s awkward not to). Go to a mass rock concert, and try to make new friends, and then go to a jam session in a hole-in-the-wall bar and try the same. Which is easier?
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Maybe I'm too dense, but at the end of the day, does this metroplex actually offer what sociologists call third places?
I don't find that suburbia has a shortage of parks (or churches). The example of the HOA playscape (small park) isn't gated, but is probably only used by local residents. I'd also count the grade-separated mixed use paths through the area.
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It does, but they are outdoors.
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You mean the playground he just referenced?
And I mean ‘talks to other moms while both their littles climb on the playground equipment’ basically is my mental image of what UMC stay at home moms do when they aren’t busy with housework/childcare/whatever. It’s not as if a park as a third space is difficult to imagine.
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As I've mentioned before, I think place hardly matters.
Take a sociable Puerto Rican from NYC and drop him in a Miami suburb, and he'll build up a social network quickly - or the other way around. Strong communities are found everywhere from Svalbard to the Amazon, and yes, in the Dallas suburbs.
The lonely PMC people in NYC were lonely in the suburbs they grew up in (and are rebelling against).
So much of the angst about suburbs specifically and place in general are driven by loveless and unlovable people moving from place to place because they don't realize that their problem isn't what's outside the, but what's inside them.
In previous generations these people mostly did completely fine. Denying that environment and culture has any impact on community is ridiculous. Sure, the NYC Puerto Rican will be fine in a Miami suburb, but will his kids raised there still have a social network as dense and as local as he had?
You really can force people to make friends by putting them in the same spaces frequently (and making them collaborate), and it's a good thing. The military does this, boarding schools do this, many traditional social institutions did and do this. Things start awkwardly, and then people get comfortable, and they become in many cases firm friends even if they are very different (and especially if they're similar).
Nobody's denying that a conscientious, outgoing, charming and confident individual with lots of time can build a big social circle anywhere, but most people aren't this. Most people need a little help. They're not broken, they want friends, it's just harder. If you go to "traditional" societies almost nobody has friends they deliberately made like an autistic tinder user. They have friends from childhood, friends who are their parents' friends children, or their grandparents' friends' grandchildren, or their cousins or cousins' childhood friends.
That what this actually means. In a traditional society your entire circle can be an organic web of friends and family that stay with you your entire life.
If they stay in Miami for as many generations as they did in New York, of course they would. There are plenty of older East Coast suburbs where families go back for generations. Any permanent settlement where people stay for generations is going to form communities.
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I think it depends where in NYC you live, but it's also about social circles, for sure. Manhattan is so dense, though, that your kids are very likely going to have classmates who live less than ten minutes from you by foot, if not much closer. I had friends growing up who had other kids their age in their co-op / apartment building who went to the same school that we did, so they could play and go in together.
People who raise parents in Manhattan and who don't tend to move out to the burbs also tend to be (regardless of their wealth, which is also a requirement for the most part) lifelong New Yorkers, often born and raised, and so often have much more extensive networks of friends and family in the city. Or they're expats, who have their own social circles.
Every detached single family home suburb I've lived in had classmates a lot closer than a 10 minute walk. There were always classmates on the same street even. And that's in various towns.
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