I just finished reading an article, The Saddest Thing About Living in Our ‘Playdate Society’, by Jennifer S. White.  It struck a chord.

When I was a little over two years old, our family moved to Glasco, a small town in North Central Kansas.  For the first few months, we lived in the south part of town in a duplex of sorts.  An elderly woman had converted part of her home into an apartment, and all that separated our area from her home was a set of double doors that my brother and I would sometimes spread apart half an inch to watch silently as she had afternoon tea with her friends.  Sometimes she would invite our mom and us to visit, so we would go around to the front door, and Jon and I would play with her Barrel of Monkeys game while she and Mom had tea or coffee.  This apartment was located across the street from the town park, so we had the opportunity to meet and play with the neighborhood kids who lived in this part of town.

We soon moved to our own home in the north end of town, and this brought a new set of neighborhood kids.  Mom worked at the nursing home and sold Stanley home products, and Dad held various jobs as a county road worker, ambulance crew member, Lions Club member, and business owner when he opened his own auto repair garage downtown.  Mom and Dad were involved in the community, and they met many people through their hobbies and jobs.  These friends had children our age, so we had instant playmates.  The town was small enough that even moving to the other end of town did not extinguish our first friendships.  We kids could walk 2 or 3 blocks to our friends’ homes to play.  If Mom was worried, she could always stand on the porch and watch as we walked down to Greg’s or Darlene’s houses; when we reached our destinations, we would wave and she would go inside.  There was never a question of who would be invited to birthday parties.

On summer evenings, our parents’ friends would come over to drink beer or tea and visit, and all of us kids would play in the yard.  We’d push each other down the sidewalks in the wagon and play freeze tag.  When the sun went down and the streetlight came on, we switched to playing hide-and-seek and the “witching hour”.  Summer days were spent meeting our friends at the library for story hour.  All of the kids were placed by age in semi-circle rows, and we sat and listened to stories while our parents ran a few errands.  It always seemed odd to my brother and I that we were separated by age; our friends were a range of ages between 1-3 years older and younger than us, and we played with their siblings, too, so we were used to playing with kids who were not only our age.

When I was in first grade and Jon was in kindergarten, we moved to WaKeeney, my mom’s hometown in Northwest Kansas.  We went from being town kids to being farm kids.  Did this have an impact on our ability to have playmates?  You betcha.  The logistics of living miles out of town were difficult to overcome at that age; it got easier when we could drive.  We had a small circle of people to play with since the mom of our classmates babysat us after school and during the summer.  The babysitter’s neighborhood was our surrogate neighborhood when we were in town.  Our grandparents lived in town, and we spent quite a bit of time there, but there were few kids our age in that neighborhood.  WaKeeney was bigger than Glasco, so neighborhoods were more separated and didn’t mingle much.  Jon had the fortune to make a town friend, so he would have playdates with Michael, but my only friend was our babysitter’s daughter.  When we were home, there was one other child in the neighborhood.  Auby lived about a half mile down the road from us, and Jon and I would either walk down there or ride our bikes through the deep sand on the country road to reach his house to play.  Auby had a treehouse, and he had a grove of trees where we spent hours building forts.  Beyond that, Jon and I were pretty much on our own to entertain ourselves and each other.  If an activity required more than two people, it probably wasn’t going to happen.

The friendship world opened up quite a bit when Jon and I got motorcycles (scooters, whatever you want to call them–50-80cc, so nothing too powerful at first).  Now we had a way to collect friends from town and bring them out to our farm to play.  We knew the back roads of our corner of the county pretty well, since we often went to relatives’ homes with our parents.  We didn’t have licenses yet, so we couldn’t take the highway to town, but we could weave through the country roads to the north end of town.  Our friends’ parents would bring them there and we would hand them helmets; they climbed on the back of our bikes, and we rode back to the farm to race bikes or go-carts and play in the Saline River, exploring and floating on innertubes.

When our kids were younger, we lived in Stockton, a small town in Northwest Kansas.  They had pretty much the same set-up I had in Glasco, surrounded by neighborhood kids.  Our house was constantly full of kids, ringing the doorbell, grabbing drinks out of the fridge, needing band-aids after climbing trees.  We parents didn’t have to set up these playdates, which is a good thing, since we had no close friends with kids our kids’ ages; the playdates just happened because our kids were in close proximity to kids their age.

This changed when we moved to Scranton, in Eastern Kansas.  Scranton is smaller than Glasco, WaKeeney, or Stockton, but there is a less-secure vibe here.  I’m not sure if it is because the town is close to a city (Topeka), or because it is easy to pull up sex offender location lists now, or just my being paranoid as a parent.  Our kids had to get older before we could really feel safe letting them ride their bikes across town to play outside of our yard, and even then they needed to travel in pairs and not alone.  Our schools are consolidated with two other towns, and unfortunately, there are not too many kids our kids’ ages in our town; although there are 80-90 kids in their classes, there are maybe 3-6 kids their ages in our town.  There are only a few kids on our street, so play opportunities are slim pickings.

There are days when I wonder if it would have been better to move our family back to NW Kansas to one of our hometowns, simply for the friend/play factor.  But I look at my friends on Facebook from my hometown, and many of them no longer live in our hometown, either.  Those that do, do not have children my daughter’s age; her older brothers would have been set, but I started a family later in life than many of my classmates, so my oldest kids are the ages of their youngest kids.  Even using the tactic of parents’ friends’ kids being friends would not pan out for my daughter.

I will keep being hopeful that somehow we will find a way to build this circle of friendship that I grew up with, because I know it is important.  Until then, we will keep finding social activities for our kids through sports and youth organizations.  This will result in our kids developing friendships with people younger and older than they are, but that’s not a bad thing.  They may lack the spontaneous play activities that I grew up experiencing, but they will build a sense of community and belonging.