My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).
Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.
We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.
Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.
Yeah if i was a kid i'd be mortified at having to do this.
I have certainly gotten to know some parents at pick up, but there’s a whole bunch I have not met.
But this is likely the worst forum in the world to talk about typical social skills.
We are talking about school kids here though please remember.
I get the idea, but I would suggest the reaction to an attempt at lubricating social interaction as “cringe” is part of the issue OP is describing.
We don't have a landline, and there's no way in hell they're getting their own phones at that age.
At least when parents are addicted to alcohol they can still be social and function as parents. Not so with Instagram/tiktok.
Also social interactions nowadays have become so "one of a kind" and disconnected from a general contract that sometimes it's hard to not feel overwhelmed, I remember being 10 years old and just knocking on the door of my neighbourhood friends to check on them and kind of invite me in, depending on the time I would stay and grab dinner there and only come back home when it was getting too dark. Now as a parent I feel this serendipity is almost gone, you have to officially arrange play dates on parent groups, pick kids up, ask parents what kind of food should I offer, is it ok if I let them play videogames, is it ok to offer sugary drinks, list goes on and on.
In that world consuming media is much easier, but I wouldn't say that's because it is addictive on itself, I think there's a big portion of people that just got tired of trying to navigate how to interact with others. My impression is that the proportion between lurkers to posters increased with time on different platforms including in real life.
A major issue is the death of independent child play. In a lot of places if a kid — and we are talking up to early teens — is unsupervised police will be called. It’s entirely the result of daytime TV and true crime making people think there are pedophile nuts hiding in every bush when in reality abductions by strangers are incredibly rare. If a kid is abused or worse it’s almost always someone they know.
One of the things I love about where we live is that kids do still play outside. It’s a safe Midwestern suburb. We moved from SoCal and there you would definitely have some busybody call the cops. Of course it was perhaps more dangerous — not because of crime but cars. All the suburban streets have like 60mph speed limits in SoCal.
I don’t know what the reason is for this phenomenon
Some of my kid's friends are raised by their parents, and others are (apparently) raised primarily by grandparents.
When my kid wants to get together with friends whose (50-60 year old) grandparents bring them by, the grandparents come up to the door, socialize for a bit while the kid runs inside, and then we talk about when the playtime will be over and they can come over to pick the kid up. If it's an event where we both bring the kids, I find it easy to shoot the breeze with the grandparents, have small talk about how the week went, and so on.
When the parents are, say, 25-35 year old range, it's a totally different vibe. They'll drive up, let the kid out of the car, and then race away without even getting out of their car. When playtime is at a local park or something, they sometimes hang around, but they go off into a corner, engrossed on their phone, totally ignoring the other parents (who, depending on their own ages are either chit chatting or locked into their Instagram).
I remember when I was a kid in the 80s, and not only would we love to get together at someone's house, but the parents would also be happy to get together for a little socialization, maybe throw some steaks on the grill, put on some Sportsball, or whatever. This practice seems to be dead now that I'm a parent!
the behavior you described of the 25-35 year range is appalling. and those aren’t my kids so that’s saying something.
Call it what it is, antisocial. Baffling to me…why are people so weird?
We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low crime, the dream.
No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age ranges. In fact, I’ve loosely associate with exactly one neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we head too many heads on our shoulders.
Despite a heavy presence of children, no one here celebrate Halloween despite it being a beloved night growing up around here. Our first year we invested heavily in decorations and spent hundreds on the King size candy bars.
Society feels… dead compared to me as an early 90s child.
I barely knew anyone in the neighborhood when I was living with my parents in the suburbs. My friends were all from school and required a car to hang out.
In contrast, now as an adult, I live in a dense major city (that's supposedly filled with crime according right wing news) and I see kids all the time walking around. I have a young kid and he interacts with his neighbors a lot more. My mailman knows of my kid and when we moved across the street.
Our closest couple's friend is a 5 minute walk away and its nice to randomly run into them on a weekend when taking a walk.
We regularly have wine and food on Fridays with one of my neighbors who have a kid close to our age and its easy and without friction.
It’s an area thing. I think the biggest thing that leads to it is age stratification in a neighborhood - when every family is in the exact same “place” something weird happens.
But looking at a neighborhood on Halloween might be a great way to check.
Where my wife and I raised our kids, there was one neighbor with kids, and that's it.
Also, kids are more occupied now. "Back in my day" elementary school kids didn't have homework, and it was pretty minimal even through high school. My kids had homework starting in first grade. Naturally you want it to get done early while the kids are still awake, but this cuts into the prime hours for play. We should simply have revolted against it. But that's hindsight.
This, over time, leads to familiarity with those around you.
Now most people would be highly suspicious if you sit in your front yard.
Parties typically have some sort of rules-based activity, be it beer pong or board games. Playdates themselves are perhaps the first manifestation of such phenomenon.
When was a kid, you were done with your car seat by elementary school so one parent could offer to carpool a minivan full of kids to/from an event.
But now that some kids need their car seat into middle school carpools are gone and every kid needs their parent to pick them up. It requires way more planning and parental involvement
> I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents
If this isn’t the only thing you/your kids do that’s well outside typical social norms, that’s probably the reason nobody else is inviting them. This is almost on the level of parents accompanying their adult kids to job interviews and then wondering why their kid didn’t get an offer.
During the week I get maybe 10-30 minutes of quality time with them outside of the routine of weekly life. Maybe?
So if I want to do something with my children and have a relationship with them, the weekends are all I have.
Aaaand of course,quality of life in America is generally in decline and parents usually have no support structure (family etc) so no one has interest in the extra work of doing playdates.
I think at some point, we need to acknowledge media sensationalism (traditional and social media varieties) have not only poisoned politics and bolstered conspiracy theory popularity, but have vastly overstated the dangers of every day life, making childhood and parenting much worse than a generation or two ago.
Now, watching the kids my friends have - they won't even leave the house if their parents didn't plan a playdate and brought them there. Something is completely off.
Seems like an opening to build a SaaS to encourage kids to socialize.
/s
It seemed like a really far distance that I went to see people but now I realize I never went more than a quarter mile from home to see someone. There were just a lot of families in my area that had kids.
Of course, that’s not true in a lot of the areas I’m in now. My friends experience the same where it’s hard to meet people who have kids of similar age. There might be 50 homes and only 1-2 will have kids near the same age. Many won’t have any kids at all.
Thinking back on it, it was surprising how many kids there were near me near my age growing up compared to now.
And god forbid I try and provide fresh fruit and beverages on that budget…
Find me community like this anywhere in America these days. Immigrant communities perhaps? Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it's to complain or they want something transactionally.
It’s much easier to entertain constantly when one half of the relationship has the availability to do it.
If I’m mistaken, then holy heck how did your grandparents do it lmao.
People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves more. Sad what we've lost. We're still an immigrant community but the immigrants are from different places. I'm sure they paid too much for their houses and feel the stress. There are also some obvious cultural differences with respect to socializing and partying.
Can you say more about open garages and community? Is that about car culture, music, pool tables, garage "bars", sofas, TVs, or something else?
Would the whole local neighborhood be welcomed into open garages, or was open-garage-culture limited to people whom people already knew?
It certainly depends. I had great neighbors when I lived on the river in a non-HOA community... many parties were had with sunset beer hangouts on the dock or beach. Military communities are also notably close-knit so what you say makes sense.
That said, being an immigrant poses other kinds of challenges. So it's not all like the 1970s in the US, or where we came from.
My family moved into a small cul-de-sac with 5 houses total. I wanted to introduce myself, so I wrote a short letter with a little about ourselves and our contact info, and then dropped it into each neighbors mailbox. Only 1 neighbor wrote back, and 1 neighbor literally _returned the letter_ to our mailbox. So yea, that's the neighborhood I live in.
That said, party culture had been excessive in the past and it was impoverishing to many people. I and others my age more wisely do without, which leaves us with money for things that are more important than one offs.
Young people aren’t becoming homeowners at the same rate, so there’s a sense of transience to their living situations that make forming neighbor communities seem like a waste of time.
Our social structure isn't built around neighbors. I could name 2 people I've shared an apartment building with in the last 5 years. Incidentally, they were a couple in the same 3-flat as me, who were there for my entire time in that building. I think the lower density and shared spaces (in that case, a garage) made the difference.
Bit different for those in the high cost of living area. Hanging out is usually a pregame to go to bars because you can't fit very many people in the apartment. Not to say it doesn't happen just you can't exactly throw a party and have a big table of food and a bbq going and cornhole and beer pong and three available bathrooms all at the same time like you can out in the flyover states. At least not without dropping literally 10x as much on what would be a smaller property anyhow with no basement and not much of a lot.
In many ways it seems like the old life of yesteryear these sorts of articles bemoan is still in fact the current year in many places if the housing prices support it. And there are many places that fly under the radar that aren't in those top 5 major metro regions.
People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
Likewise, the larger someone’s home is, the more likely it is to be location in an area with low population density and little to no public transportation. Congrats, you can throw a party, but who are you inviting? All your friends are far away. How can they get there? How long can they stay? Can you accommodate them sleeping there? You aren’t friends with your neighbors who can party easily. You are friends with people on the Internet who are strewn about the world.
And of course, if you live in a major city with lots of friends, small apartment strikes again.
This is part of the reason we have seen the rise of more public events like conventions. There’s a hotel involved. It’s a multi-day event worth traveling to. A lot of people you know will be there. It costs everyone some money, but it’s not out of the realm to go a few times a year. Best part, nobody’s home gets trashed!
Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small space with the right attitude :)
good riddance btw. but we need to adjust because partying is nice. we are still working ad if we have a free employee taking care of half our lives.
welp, it's always a class issue.
About 2/3 of households in the US own the home they live in. Renting is the minority, not the majority.
Owning a home in an HOA area can drastically cut down on what kinds of parties you can host.
There are shifting trends in generational home ownership rates, but these are still just initial trends we're seeing. If you look at the data [0] owner occupied has gone down from the 2000s housing bubble, but in the grand scheme of things is not even particularly low.
People also have this mistaken belief that investors like Black Rock are buying up huge swaths of property, when in reality most "investment" properties are bought by families and individuals, consider anyone who know who owns an AirBNB rental or other rental property, they would be considered "investors".
Most Americans still live in a house, and own that house (or at least, some member of their household owns it).
Like I said, I don't know about the US. It's a big place and you're probably taking too much of a "grand scheme of things" view here. Aside from geographical diversity, total % of home ownership doesn't change that fast – lots of older people already own homes, their children often inherit those homes. Houses aren't like hotdog sales and numbers change slowly.
What matters more is how much does an average 25 or 30 year old pay in housing costs? What hope does someone with a decent (but not exceptionally well-paid) job have of purchasing a house? A single % of home ownership across the entire population doesn't really capture that. Doubly so for such a large country as the US. I'm sure there are affordable homes out in the sticks, but also ... no jobs. That might work for the remote software dev, but not everyone is a software dev.
In Ireland the total housing ownership has fallen, but not dramatically. However, the reality for people not already having a home is quite bleak. Buying a house now is significantly more expensive than it was a decade or two ago, as is renting. I could buy an apartment on my own ten years ago with a salary that really wasn't all that great. I'd have no hope today. My rent today is about three and a half times what it was 15 years ago. There is a generation of working 20 and 30-year old who are still living at home because they can't really afford to move out.
How many of that 2/3 is households that have owned the home for 20+ years—ie, since before the subprime crash?
How many of that 2/3 is households of people 65+? And how many is people under 30? Partying is still largely a young people's game, and even if your "household" owns the home you live in, if that's your parents or grandparents, you're much less likely to be hosting parties there.
Makes for a very angry native population who are being pushed out of the places they were born for new arrivals. We'll never be able to build enough housing to account for the continual flow of well to do immigrants and native population.
I can’t count a single immigrant in my network that was rich by American standards (which makes them filthy rich by most other nations standards) and then chose to move here.
Sure my sample size is probably 30 families (across a dozen countries) but that’s not nothing.
Every single one built their net worth here. Meaning that opportunity is also available to natives.
If you’re meeting someone who has a Masters or PhD from a US university and came from another country - often their family is well off. Certainly better off than a typical middle class family in the US that can’t pay for college for their own kids and aren’t even paying international rates.
The article says a similar decline is seen among the wealthy.
I don't think the real estate situation helps but I think there's a deeper social problem driving both of those effects.
I'm also wondering if the rising political polarization is at least in part caused by the "antisocial" phenomenon. If you're not exposed to a spectrum of political worldviews through being involved with all these people you randomly met back in the day, it becomes easier to dehumanize the people you disagree with. You also never have to listen to their talking points, because you can just block them out online.
In the last 50 years, the US has bulldozed dense, mixed used housing that enabled community and tight knit neighborhoods. More economically/socially viable housing (read: an apartment on top of a business) has literally been banned in much of the US. Ensuring that there's a large plot of asphalt to house personal vehicles that are ever increasing in size is baked into zoning laws (though some cities have finally banned parking minimums). Suburbia sprawls, literally requiring most of the country to own a car.
I would love to see some data on this, but my intuition is that everyone is physically farther away as a result, which weakens their general connection and likelihood to party together, and makes it harder for them to get to/from a party in the first place.
There's other feasible side effects too like less savings due to the cost of owning a car (I've seen estimates of the US average exceeding $10k/yr), or expensive housing exacerbated by all of the above - less space for housing due to roads/parking (and the cost rising as a direct result of a developer needing to include parking), and rising taxes to finance more and more infrastructure: suburban sprawl means more roads, pipes, electrical lines, while contributing significantly less economic value (Strong Towns has done some great graphics on how much dense urban areas subsidize their sprawling single family home filled counterparts).
Even in my 20s I went to... the pub! Mayhe a nightclub. To me parties are more school age/university thing and are a great way to have a good time on a budget. Just some drinks and a speaker required.
Spurious. This has likely always been true unless you live with said friends.
Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities where they are unleashed. Its well known that such drugs have chemical compounds capable of "hacking" our physiology and causing a whole host of negative effects while ensuring the user stays addicted. I consider these "Brain Hacking" systems just the same as I consider social media like TikTok and Instagram. They both are designed specifically in ways to entice users to be addicted without any concern for the harms they cause. It baffles me that simply because it is not a physical substance it gets treated as less dangerous than the harder substances.
We keep seeing these issues in America when its very clear that similar things would occur if we made recreational substances as common as water and just as accessible. Revenously addicted people, dont party, they dont socialize, they retreat from society, and stop forming deeper releationships. It is no surprise that this is creating issues for us.
Americans have always been the world's leading consumer of drugs, and now that we have digital drugs, they are more accessible and in demand than ever. So much so that the cartels desinging and pedeling these products, are basically the most powerful companies in our society.
Like.. Stable adults indulging in pot or mushrooms? IME has quite the opposite effect. Addictive drugs which devastate communities are usually not referred to as "recreational".
You're spot on about the outdated threat model and people not fully grasping how damaging social media/internet addiction is.
There's a huge difference between not hosting or attending a party and not attending a social event. "Party" has very specific connotations. If I go out bowling with my friends or have a game night, I don't call that a party, but it is certainly a social event.
I wish I had a ublock filter or a userscript to deal with this…
eplatzek•6h ago
Like with World Wars there's been a generational impact that changed how people relate to one another. The tribal momentum, of one monkey teaching the next, gets lost.
xeromal•6h ago
Similar to discord for gaming, talking to your random peers has completely fell off
openbankerX•6h ago
parpfish•6h ago
carl_dr•6h ago
api•6h ago
luckydata•5h ago
esseph•2h ago
But everybody hates everyone else online.
southernplaces7•6h ago
Given the mortality rate for people typically in the partying age group (and especially those under 30), you were more likely to die in a traffic accident on your way to or back from the party, or from alcohol poisoning, than from a case of COVID acquired there. Let's not exaggerate.
From the NIH: The median IFR for COVID based on age groups: 0.0003% at 0–19 years, 0.002% at 20–29 years, 0.011% at 30–39 years.
The 1918 Flu it was certainly not.
sltkr•5h ago
add-sub-mul-div•5h ago
southernplaces7•4h ago