Safety culture undermines community

Also, live close to family

People and cars sharing the street in Paris.

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This week is going to be a multi-parter, because I want to discuss a few different things:

Love is expansive

First, I interviewed my dad for a Father’s Day post that the Institute for Family Studies just published. The thesis of the piece is that fatherhood is good for men, and that men need to hear more about it. And, somewhat unusually, my dad has a large number of kids — something that led him to make the point that “love is expansive. The more you love, the more you can love, and the more you’re able to love.”

Safety culture undermines community

I’m on the record as an opponent to over caution with regard to safety. I once wrote about disliking car seats, for example, for the Deseret News (and subsequently on this blog) and that didn’t seem to make anyone happy. Indeed, one of the hardest parts of arguing against safety-obsession is trying to convince people that there is a cost to that obsession. What, the argument goes, do we lose by being safer?

As it turns out, though, I recently saw a video that illustrated some of the costs of safetyism. The video showed a family playing in the middle of what looked like a quiet suburban street. Then, a car came by, forcing everyone to get out of the way. The person who posted the video added a caption suggesting the car was traveling too fast.

Unfortunately, literally as I was writing this post, the video was delated, so I can’t link to it. But before it disappeared, the video had racked up several thousand comments, most of which were highly critical of the family for playing in the street. “Go in the backyard” seemed to be the general consensus.

So what we see here is the popular idea that the best way to handle risk is to avoid it altogether — which in this case means retreating from the public sphere.¹

The problem is that you cannot have a community if everyone is always in their backyards, homes, or SUVs. Community happens in public spaces, and so retreating from public spaces to avoid danger also means retreating from community.

When I’ve written about safetyism in the past, I’ve tried to bring up hard data that illustrates the costs. Car seat laws, for example, lead to huge financial burdens for new families and have been linked to lower birthrates. So, there is a quantifiable tradeoff.

But I actually think the bigger problem is the messaging associated with safety-obsession. Parents and kids alike learn, for example, the lesson that playing outside is prohibitively dangerous — and that they’ll get yelled at (either in real life or in online comments sections) until they get with the program. The fact that the video I saw was deleted is actually perfect because it suggests that the family in question was bullied into quiet submission. Next time, maybe they will just play in their backyard.

I’ve seen this first hand. During the just-ended school year, my first grader started walking home by herself. The walk is about a mile, and along the way she would make friends with other (older) kids, and stop by a local restaurant to get free leftover pastries. It was a pretty social experience. But one day, her teacher discovered this was happening and wouldn’t let her leave. Eventually, my daughter ended up in the office and my wife got a call to come pick her up.

Everyone involved was well-intentioned and I don’t begrudge the teacher or office staff. They were looking out for my kid, which is great.

But the lesson for my daughter from this experience is that walking home alone is too risky for someone her age, and that the consequences look a lot like what happens when you get in trouble. Is that going to make her want to walk home, make friends, and visit that restaurant more? Or less? We talked about it and she has continued walking home, but the episode highlights how pressure to retreat from risk also creates pressure to retreat from social and public environments.²

You need to live really close to your family

The thesis of Nuclear Meltdown is that everyone needs a village and that family is generally the logical and best foundation for that village. And I’m personally enamored with the idea of family compounds — something I’ve written about before — because obviously when you’re in close physical proximity to people you can provide a greater level of support.

Stephanie H. Murray recently highlighted some research related to this idea on her excellent Substack. The study found, as Murray summed it up, that “the further you live from a grandparent, the less likely you are to give each other your time.” Murray goes on to note that very small distances have a huge impact:

So for example, an adult child who lives within a mile of Grandma is getting a median 208 hours of Grandma’s time every year. That drops to 186 hours for those living between and 1 and 5 miles from Grandma, and all the way to 120 hours for those living between 5 and 10 miles away. By the time you’re in the 10-30 mile distance-from-granny range, you're down to 100 hours of Grandma’s time, less than half of what the under-1-mile crew is getting.

I have seen this play out in my own life. When I moved back to Salt Lake City to be closer to family, I figured that living within the same metro area as my parents and siblings was close enough. And so we ended up choosing a neighborhood that’s roughly 45 minutes from my parents house.

But that proved to be a mistake. The distance is too great for us to ever just pop in, for example, or for us to ask my parents for things like last-minute babysitting. The same goes with my siblings who are scattered throughout Salt Lake valley. We see each other all the time, but it’s difficult to provide meaningful levels of support because getting together requires advanced planning and coordination.

On the other hand, I also have family living two doors down. When they asked me a few days ago to take care of their cat while they were traveling, I was able to come over within five minutes. We see them, if briefly, nearly everyday, and our kids spontaneously play together frequently.

What I’m saying is that I’ve had the somewhat unique experience of having family relationships separated by 50 feet, one mile, 10 miles, 30 miles and so on. And because of that firsthand experience, I can say that the depth of the relationship is definitely impacted by even short distances — as the study suggests.

The ideal environment for village building, then, is probably something resembling a literal village. Obviously that’s not something most people can just create overnight, or ever, but I think it’s useful to be aware that shrinking distances to almost nothing is a useful way to improve social connection.

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1. The urbanist in me wants to say that the real solution is to just eliminate cars from the equation. Streets would be delightful public spaces if not for cars. But I think that’s the wrong lesson. Obviously, in the real world that’s just not feasible on most suburban American roads. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but practically cars aren’t going away. But more deeply, it’s also sort of the same argument as “go in your backyard,” just from the other side. It’s suggesting that two modes of transportation — foot and car — are too risky to coexist, and so we must somehow eliminate risk from the equation. I think the real solution is risk management, not risk avoidance. In practice, that looks in my opinion like many crowded streets in Europe, where cars exist but share the road with large numbers of pedestrians. In other words, the solution here isn’t to remove either people or cars from the street. It’s to create a better balance between the two — probably by drawing more people out of private spaces and into the street.

2. I’m also lucky that I live in a state that has enshrined free range parenting in law. So while I found this whole walking home episode disheartening — apparently so few younger kids walk home that teachers can’t even comprehend the idea — I at least didn’t have to worry about getting into any sort of legal trouble.