It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood...or is it?

Growing up, we knew everyone in our neighborhood. I had tons of friends to play with--just go outside on any given day and I could find a kid close to my age. We would play a lot of sports together or sometimes we would play massive neighborhood-wide games of Hide & Seek or Capture the Flag. It was the best. I would take off on my bike and ride around the neighborhood--I would be gone for hours and my parents never really knew where I was, but it didn't seem to matter. As long as I reappeared back home for meals, they didn't seem to mind or get worried about it.

My child will not grow up that way. Things are just different today. For one thing, the national sex offender registry has opened my eyes to the fact that there are at least 3 registered sex offender living just miles from my house--one of them lives exactly .3 miles, according to Mapquest. So for that reason alone, I would not allow him to run around unsupervised the way I used to.

The other reason is that we just don't know everyone. The house we are in now is the first house we bought. I was so excited to move in, thinking that neighbors would show up to greet us with baked goods or at least a friendly hello, the way it used to happen in the neighborhood where I grew up. No one did that. No one came to welcome us. We did eventually meet our immediate neighbors (next door and across the street), but those are the only ones we know....with the exception of one couple down the street whom we happen to bump into on walks sometimes. Maybe we should make more of an effort to introduce ourselves around to people...but the neighborhood just doesn't seem very conducive to that. We rarely see people out walking around or in their yards. And no one seems to have kids--I see the swing sets and sandboxes, but I rarely see kids using them. And there are definitely not many kids my son's age (2), as far as I can tell. There was one family with a little girl around his age down the street...but soon after we met them, there was a for-sale sign on their lawn and they were gone. Most of our neighbors are card-carrying members of the AARP.

It makes me sad that my son will not grow up the same way I did--that he will not experience those care-free days running around in the woods or biking around the neighborhood. Maybe we should have done more research and looked for a neighborhood with younger families...but our son was not even a twinkle in my eye at that point, so we didn't really think about that when we were house hunting.

I guess we'll just have to settle for scheduled play-dates and structured activities such as soccer or tee-ball. I just hope all of that is enough to make his childhood as happy as mine was.