Connect dots: Building community in this crazy age

Yes, families need help finding ways to let children play together (and churches can help)

I don’t know about you, but I’m having trouble thinking straight this week.

Thus, I think I will flash back to a topic that I dug into a month or so ago, but set aside. Plus, I just hit a chapter in an excellent new book — “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be” by Timothy Carney that reminded me of the importance of this subject.

The name of the Carney chapter is “Want Fecundity in the Sheets? Give Us Walkability in the Streets.” It makes sense in context. Trust me on that.

Now, where was I?

Right. The topic is this strange age of ours, in which many stressed-out parents are afraid to let their children play in the yard, but are more than willing to let them have a portal into the Internet in their pockets. Statistically speaking, where are the predators?

I get it. There are parts of America in which the decision to let your own kids play in your own yard, let alone walk to a nearby park, could turn into a visit from child services agents if someone happens to walk by and then calls in a claim that you are a negligent parent. Check out the video at the top of this post. Is that for real?

We are tempted to think that all of the challenges facing families today are brand new. However, check out this quote from a recent Rod “The Benedict Option” Dreher diary post with this headline: “The Diabolic Civilization.” Note the date on this reference:

… I often refer to Carle C. Zimmerman’s 1947 book Family And Civilization, in which the Harvard sociologist talks about how the form of the family relates to broader civilization structures. Zimmerman identifies three basic family forms in the West, from Greco-Roman times till now: the trustee family (clans), the domestic family (nuclear family + a close family network), and the atomized family (the nuclear family alone). Societies typically evolve from trustee (which usually proves too restrictive for society to advance), to domestic (a good balance), to atomized, which proves incapable of resisting the strong forces of dissolution within society.

In our time, the atomized family has been breaking apart under social, economic, and cultural pressures.

Now, if atomized parents don’t have family members nearby (and that is almost everyone, these days), where are they supposed to turn for support — even at the level of trusting people enough to let your kids play with their kids?

Things can change in a minute. In one neighborhood, years ago, we had parents nearby who backed our beliefs that there was more to life than images on screens (this was very early in the Internet age). Thus, alien planets and Tolkien-esque kingdoms were created in our basement and in the woods next to our houses. Things were totally different in the next city in which we lived.

Is there any hope?

OK, check out this post from Amber Adrian at her “One Tired Mother” Substack: “How to create a free-range neighborhood — What we've got going on and what's worked for us.”

Here is the overture. Click here to get to some specifics:

American childhood is slipping away. But you can do something about it. You can give your kids less freedom on screens and more freedom in the real world, and a great step toward that is letting them play outside unsupervised. The places we live vary so much—so take what feels helpful or relevant and leave what doesn’t—but based on our experience, here are four things it takes to build this type of culture in a neighborhood.

It’s countercultural these days to let your kids play freely outside. It just is. So at first, people might think you’re weird. It definitely takes a boldness, but you gotta get out there. Be friendly. Hold the vision. (My husband is fond of saying “you have to show people how fun it can be.”¹) Kids may also take time to adjust to unstructured play. Many kids are used to a lot of stimulation and schedules (being told what to do when), so this type of vibe can be a change! Be patient and let them be “bored.”

Because of the way things are these days, parents are likely to be hesitant at first. They may be concerned about their kids’ well-being. Is this okay? Are the kids safe?

Here is one helpful byte of specifics, under the sub-headline “Being okay with imperfection.”

Even as things get established, there will likely be tricky situations that arise. We had an incident with pets one time that involved tears on all sides. Thankfully no pets were harmed², and it was a good teachable moment. It’s important to see things like conflict and hurt feelings and mistakes as a normal part of life, and furthermore as an opportunity to practice real relationship, which includes apology and forgiveness.

Rational Sheep readers will not be surprised to know that I think this is a topic that should be addressed by pastors, teachers and counselors, as well as parents.

It is possible (we have friends who have done this) for people to intentionally live close to one another, buying or renting homes to form circles of support and links to their faith. Orthodox Jews have done this for centuries in megacities. Think of it as spiritual infrastructure that helps support families and faith.

The Carey book has many helpful community-building suggestions to help people connect key dots. So does “Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name” by Leah Libresco Sergeant. Here is the overture to my column about her book:

It was the feast of St. Mary, Mother of the Church, so writer Leah Libresco and some friends decided to have a traditional procession through their neighborhood, while praying the Rosary out loud.

"I live in New York City, where this was still not the weirdest thing that anyone would see that day," said Libresco, speaking earlier this winter at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C.

The procession received some puzzled looks along Broadway, near Lincoln Center. Their images of St. Mary sure didn't match the vision of womanhood seen in advertisements they passed.

This wasn't a public statement. All these New Yorkers were doing was celebrating the feast together, creating a face-to-face community with faith, food and fellowship. There's more to life than sitting at home, firing tweets and text messages at the world.

Let’s connect one more dot in this important chain of ideas.

All of this is connected to today’s screens-culture and mental-health crisis.

However, this After Babel essay by Zach Rausch — “The Great Deterioration of Local Community Was A Major Driver of The Loss of The Play-Based Childhood” — notes that faith communities do seem to offer some degree of shelter. That is true, although I think that they could be doing much more.

This is a must-read essay for parents, pastors, teachers and counselors. Here is a chunk of the material linked to faith-based communities.

… This disintegration of community did not happen as significantly for one subset of Americans: Religious conservatives continued attending faith services, and those adults and teens continued to engage in civic activities like volunteering and youth groups at higher rates than others. It seems that kids from conservative religious communities may have been less likely to lose their community- and free-play-based childhoods.

Here are some of the sub-headlines in this long piece:

* Religion protects young people’s mental health

* Religious teens reported fewer issues with their emotional well-being

* What religious communities are getting right

* Religiosity is declining among American high school seniors

* Religious conservative teens have more social support

* Religious conservative teens are more likely to live with both parents

Could churches be doing more? Of course. All kinds of real-world activities could help connect young people in faith communities, from cooking classes, multi-generational game nights, hiking, raking leaves (or shoveling snow) for senior adults. You get the idea.

But here is the big idea from the Rausch essay:

Tight-knit communities provide a stable network of peers and adults (not just parents!) whom children can trust, collaborate with, and learn skills from. They also offer connections with supportive, trusted adults who act as guardians and mentors and can help a child through hard times during adolescence. The community features that help children thrive are much more difficult to build into the virtual world.

This can help us understand — beyond differences in parenting — why most secular teens across the political spectrum raced into the virtual world more quickly and stayed online longer than their religious conservative peers: They were searching for a community many felt was missing from their lives. Religious conservative teens, on the other hand, were more likely to be rooted in their real-world communities and less likely to move their lives so deeply into the virtual world, and thus less likely to have been harmed by a phone-based childhood.

“Less likely.” Note that.

The bottom line: “Virtual networks are not sufficient replacements for real-world communities.”

Just saying.