Townhouses line a shared private garden in Sunnyside Gardens. Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg
Family life has always been stressful. But a declaration by the US Surgeon General that parenting is a public health crisis has reignited conversations about how families might stop the endless spiral of expectation. What’s been less discussed is how the physical design of housing, transportation and public space makes life harder by increasing commute times, reducing communal play spaces and creating barriers to children’s mobility.
Parenting experts say children need to learn independence and resilience. But cities and suburbs don’t offer safe pedestrian and bike routes to school, malls kick teenagers out on the weekends, and free time disappears under a spreadsheet of activities. All of those “musts” take more of the parents’ time or money to navigate, because the child can’t do it on their own.
As Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist, wrote in the New York Times, “underparenting requires structural change.” Unlike most political pundits, she’s not just talking about economic policies like family leave and subsidized child care. She’s talking about actual physical structures, and the cultural change required to populate them. We need to “build back our tolerance for children in public spaces,” she writes, “and create safe environments where lightly supervised kids can roam freely.”
Calls for such environments increased during the pandemic, as cities nonsensically closed playgrounds, and families found themselves pinched between remote work and remote school. Philadelphia’s Parks & Recreation department moved summer camp to the street, while parents whose kids had previously been too busy to socialize found driveways, garages and cul-de-sacs made great play zones when no one was driving in and out.
While many temporary fixes disappeared once the pandemic was declared over, Queens’s Paseo Park, a 1.3-mile-long corridor in family-heavy Jackson Heights, is finally getting a permanent open streets design to reduce car traffic after people experienced the joys of not having to text to make plans, pay for organized after-school activities, or battle with cars when learning to ride a bike.
Cities, already in dire need of more affordable housing and ways to retain families, should look to the past: History has no shortage of other examples of designs that foster more spontaneous interactions and spaces for play. Indeed, urban planners have been trying to design dense, connected, family-friendly neighborhoods since the turn of the last century.
Progressive-Era transit-oriented suburbs like Radburn, New Jersey, turned the cul-de-sac inside out, creating a connected greenspace on the doorstep of dozens of homes, and banishing cars to the periphery. Denser versions built in the 1970s, with stacks of mid-rise apartments rather than single-family homes overlooking an open green, also proved so successful that people haven’t wanted to abandon their community — even after the children are long gone.
An interior courtyard at the Sunnyside Garden Apartments. Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg
Unlike most postwar suburbs, these developments prioritized common space over individual square footage, with small private yards and few bonus rooms; birthday parties happened in the common house, and child-led play on the common playground. You don’t need your own swing set when the community provides.
The same kind of thinking prevails in family-oriented urban buildings: While developers do need to provide more three-bedroom apartments, shared amenities like playrooms, courtyards, and party rooms can take the pressure off individual apartments. Cohousing, a longstanding intentional community model, usually adds shared guest apartments and a big kitchen to the mix to encourage group activity and make smaller apartment sizes acceptable.
A town doesn’t need to redesign its housing stock to achieve many of the same ends. Widening sidewalks, closing streets for play on afternoons and weekends, adding speed humps and opening schoolyards after hours can immediately provide the same ease for impromptu hang-outs, with even more potential playmates. Neighborhoods that mix housing with retail and offices have built-in amenities that make such spaces more conducive to child independence and whole-family convenience: Corner stores for coffee and snacks, shops for running errands before, after or during play, and often more ambitious and more varied play equipment.
Additional conveniences along daily routes can and should be built into street designs. In 2019, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, released the report Designing Streets for Kids, which underlined two major design imperatives: increased and independent mobility, and more spaces to pause and rest. The report stresses the physical and mental benefits of streets designed with kids in mind, but also warns that “children’s bodies and brains are less developed and more vulnerable to the environment in which they live,” and that they need an “environment in which unhealthy risks from the street” — traffic violence, pollution and noise — are minimized, while opportunities for play, independent movement, and social interactions are maximized. As transportation scholar Tara Goddard said in a December 2024 episode of The War on Cars, “We want to have places, especially in our dense urban areas, where, you know what? It’s OK if a kid darts out. …We need to build an environment that is more forgiving of that.”
While open streets and open schoolyards are nice, families also crave no- and low-cost indoor activities. In winter, it can be difficult to squeeze in a park visit before dark, so cities need to invest in good lighting, both for the equipment and, in a larger park, on the paths from sidewalk to playground. Some new park designs address this by adding indoor-outdoor spaces: In its masterplan for Tucson’s Reid Park, Sasaki leveraged the redesign of a restroom pavilion into a large overhanging roof, creating a shaded space with tables and chairs next to a playground with a brand-new splash pad.
As the planet warms, low- and no-cost climate-controlled spaces like community centers and public libraries also need to be considered family amenities — and built to accommodate physical play as well as story time and craft classes. There are fewer shopping malls than there used to be, yet they have also long served both the very young and very old in extreme weather, with hot and iced drinks, bathrooms and plenty of seating.
For teens, public amenities can provide needed opportunities to take their interactions offline. Hanging out in groups is not necessarily prohibited in urban parks the way it is in playgrounds with age restrictions, parking lots with “no loitering” signs, and malls with curfews and parental escort policies. In cities, they don’t need drivers’ licenses and cars to meet up. But parks also need to be designed for these uses, with conversational seating, bigger and riskier swings and climbing structures, and young adult-centric programming like skate parks. Passive supervision in these spaces — from concessionaires, older skaters, or just good lighting and circulation — can help to defuse the inevitable “teens can’t handle it” pushback.
Ed Benedict Skate Plaza in Portland, Oregon. Photographer: Tojo Andrianarivo/Bloomberg
If children have been raised for independence — walking or riding to school, rather than being driven, for example — the transition from childhood to adolescence, and the ability to access first the block, then the neighborhood, then the city, is much smoother. Psychologist Jacqueline Nesi noted in a recent edition of her Techno Sapiens newsletter, “We often lament kids’ filling their free time with screens, but here’s the thing: we need to be providing them with alternatives.”
American childhood has become so privatized that political parties fight child-care subsidies. In this climate, child-friendly street improvements, much less teen-centric hangout spots, may seem like a bridge too far. But most of the amenities that would make having a family easier benefit everyone. You might not care about slow streets, shaded benches, or walkable shops now, but you are one pregnancy, knee operation, or visit from an older relative away from becoming suddenly, even painfully, aware of the location of every bench, elevator, ramp and bathroom on your daily commute.
A city of singles and young marrieds is a city that is constantly reintroducing itself to the world, chasing dollars with brunches and happy hours, and then having to do it all over again as those couples depart for places with affordable three-bedrooms and trees within reach.
Parenthood is a time when adults should naturally become more rooted in place, as they re-experience the built environment at toddler pace, and a time when they often seek community with other new parents. Urban areas, built right, could support families by making their lives easier — one courtyard, speed bump and playground at a time.