Next door "playdates" work really well for my family

A thing that is way cooler than I expected about having friends as neighbors

As some of you may know, my family got a house on a street with some other families we were friends with. (And some other families have come and gone from the street since then.)

Having in person neighbor community has been amazing for me, and also I haven’t really known how to share much about it, mostly because I want to be pretty careful when narrativizing anything that involves many people I care about who are not me, who see things differently from me, and are more private people than I am.

I love CHH’s blog post, The Village Nobody Wants. I lean pretty bullet bite-y about trusting people’s revealed preferences, and I think lots of people who say they want more community haven’t really considered the costs and whether they want to pay them.¹

When I think about the topic of living near friends, I am currently overflowing with disorganized and opinionated stories and takes, many of which are very close to my heart. My plan to mostly skip almost all those takes for today, and try to share a little piece I didn’t expect to be so good for me and my family about living very near friends.

I love having “playdates” with neighbors, especially when I have toddlers.² I do better with a lot of social time, so it’s always been a parenting priority for me to set things up so that I can hang out with other adults.³ For me, this used to mean I scheduled playdates, attended park days, and sometimes other mom-centric activities, like parenting groups. This worked out well, but IME I was basically perpetually asking my kids, especially my toddlers, to put up with (at least) a little more of a bunch of stuff than was good for them, because the fixed cost of hanging out was pretty high.

First there was scheduling, no mean feat, and then there was travel time. Even when I went to go hang out with friend who was a 20 min walk away (quite close in an objective sense), it was ~totally unworkable for me to go home to get something, and then come back.

My neighbors and I have a couple of recurring times a week when most of us usually get together, and we also do a ton of spontaneous hanging out. I expected that to happen, and I enjoy it about as much as I thought I would.

The thing I didn’t think about much was that when it’s low cost to pop home for a bit, I do it really really often. When I hang out with my neighbors, I might bring stuff to deal with a diaper change, but I might not, because I can always go home to change a diaper and then come right back. I rarely bother to bring snacks I know my toddlers will eat, because if the food at my friend’s house isn’t working, we can always go home and eat there, or get some snacks and bring them over to share.

And, for me at least, kid conflicts and frictions feel systematically much lower stakes when the everyone’s BATNA is to be back in the comfort of their own home in under 2 minutes. When one kid or the other needs to recharge, or wants alone time for some other reason, that doesn’t mean we either somehow push through or our families don’t see each other again for a week, or whatever the “hanging out when we have to make real plans” cadence is.

Also, I have five kids. My oldest is 12, my youngest is 1, and they all have different social preferences. If I’m hanging out with my neighbors with my little kids, my 12 year old and 10 year old can join for a while, and go back home when they want to do something else.⁴ When we have to drive to get somewhere, or even take a long walk together, a bunch of our family plans are very tightly coupled for logistical reasons. I usually try to make this work with planning and negotiation. I might let my kids know that this will be the sort of visit where I won’t be very receptive to leaving early if they get bored, and ask them if that means they want to stay home.⁵ I’ll remind all our older kids to do and bring things that will make the visit work for them (such as wearing clothes where they won’t want to go home on account of the weather a few hours later, or because bugs are biting them). I might bring our massive stroller wagon (which operates as a mobile home base), so that I can get any combination of my younger kids set up in there with water, snacks, and entertainment for when their other siblings want to stay but they are pretty done and would have wanted to go home half an hour ago. I’ll try to charge up portable fans for when some people want to stay and some people are too hot, and blankets for the opposite scenario.⁶ I’m not trying to complain—I make these sorts of plans because I consider them helpful and worth it! And sometimes I prepare less, because sometimes it seems worth it to leave more quickly.

But when we hang out with our next door neighbor friends, our plans aren’t tightly coupled anymore. And this decoupling generates a bunch of slack that I really appreciate.

Last night, some people were hanging out at the house down the street. My oldest three kids opted to stay home, and my youngest two wanted to go over. But then, when we got there, my youngest mostly wanted to run around the neighborhood instead, so the three of us did that! And some of the people from the hangout followed us for a while, and we hung out that way :-).

Last night, I wouldn’t have had the energy to do any sort of hangout last night where we all had to go somewhere together, especially since some of my kids wanted to stay home. And if we had driven anywhere, or even taken a long walk in a stroller (or baby wrap), my youngest two would have almost certainly fallen asleep and then not transferred to their beds on the way home. If I had made official plans to hang out, I would probably have felt invested in the sort of hanging out where we don’t wander away and explore the streets with an unplanned and variable subset of the people there (and also some people who hadn’t been there that we ran into on the street!). I quite liked what we ended up doing. My youngest kid hasn’t had that much opportunity to explore the neighborhood at her own pace, and I can’t realistically imagine having done it with friends without those friends also being neighbors.

I really value the type of hanging out my kids and I can do with our neighbor friends. People often think of people living near each other as a communal thing, and of course in many ways it is, but I think a bunch of the value for my family is that it allows us to have friends and community in a what I think of as a less communal way, with more room for individual expression.

I wrote this post in large part as a response to this comment from Ben Hoffman. I don’t know if my post addressed Ben’s actual curiosity (I hope it did at least a little!), but it’s a thing I realized I wanted to share anyway.

1. And in many ways, I think I’m a usually bad fit for community living. Many years ago, I remember one of my best friends from elementary school, who had significant experience with community living herself, expressing surprise that at the time I was renting a room in an intentional community. She said she couldn’t really imagine me being happy making day-to-day decisions with a group of other people. And I think her read of me was spot on, perhaps because of rather than in spite of the fact that we logged the bulk of the hours we ever spent together when we were young children.

I’m super grateful for the dynamic where tech progress means appliances that means my nuclear family can live very independently as a unit, by historical standards.

2. I have had toddlers for well over a decade now… Making it hard for me to imagine life being any other way, but soon it will be different.

3. We locked down pretty hard for early covid, but even then I was on the phone (and Clubhouse) a lot.

4. I know people have all sorts of views on what ages it’s okay to leave kids alone in a house, but in our case my husband works from home, so it’s not even a “older kids home alone with their parent right next door” thing, it’s a “older kids home with one parent at home but the parent who is more responsible for them during that time is right next door” thing.

5. The other week, my three year old insisted that he wanted to come to “the boring place” where I would be talking to adults and there wouldn’t be much for him to do. I took him, and he was right that he enjoyed being there and listening! So that was great, but it felt a little high stakes for me beforehand, since I wasn’t sure whether to trust his assessment of whether he’d enjoyed the hangout (he’d never been to anything very like it before).

6. Some people might argue that the sort of planning I’m describing is bad, and that constraints that leave kids being bored and unhappy are good for various reasons. I disagree. I don’t relate to this sort of planning as free, because it isn’t, and there are things I don’t do because I find them too effortful, but one of my strongest philosophical commitments is putting bad things go in the costs column, not the benefits column. And I consider my kids being bored and unhappy bad things.