What's the ideal environment for a family?

Families need a place where they can evolve into a village

Credit: Jim Dalrymple II

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In my last post, I wrote about how I may have erred when I chose to live on a somewhat busy street in a somewhat big city. Since that post, and also thanks to a great conversation in the comments, I’ve been pondering a question: What exactly is the ideal environment for a family?¹

In my mind, the short answer to that question (assuming we’re not just talking about basics like good schools and low crime rates) is that the ideal environment for a family is the one that best helps the family become a village. It matters less in my mind if it’s a city, a suburb, or the countryside. What’s most important is if it’s a place where family members have frequent and positive interactions with each other, where they offer mutual support, where they can prosper, and where their non-family networks (eg workplaces, schools, clubs, etc) intersect and enrich everyone’s lives, among many other things.

There are a lot of factors that make such an environment work. In theory, we could wonk out and discuss different communities all over the world, or perhaps those that are the least WEIRD². But I’m not sure how useful that’d be; most of us can’t relocate to villages on the other side of the world. So instead, below are a few of the things that I’ve looked for when thinking about where I want to live. The list isn’t comprehensive³, but rather a starting point.

1. A place with economic opportunity

I think this is the single most important characteristic of a successful place for families, and yet it’s often the least appreciated. But if a place doesn’t have a strong and diverse economy, it’ll be exceedingly difficult for each successive generation to stick around. Some day, your kids will move away. And while a person can certainly have good relationships with relatives who don’t live nearby, it’s hard for those relationships to blossom into an actual village where people provide companionship and day-to-day support.

I think about this a lot because I work remote, so in theory I could live anywhere. I could easily keep my job and live in the middle of a remote forest — which sounds pretty dreamy sometimes.

But I always end up asking myself what would happen in such a scenario when my kids grow up. At some point they’d need jobs, and would have to move away. That’d make me sad and lonely. But more importantly, it’d also mean that I wouldn’t be there to provide support for them. I couldn’t alloparent any grandkids.

The point is that if the goal is to maximize the number of family members who live in close proximity to each other, then you need a place where those family members can find diverse means of supporting themselves.

I want to be clear that I’m not necessarily advocating for, say, cities or towns or whatever. Cities do exist because they cluster opportunities into one place, so they make sense for a lot of people. But there are plenty of cities that are mostly suburban, if that’s more your style, and plenty of others which have inexpensive rural land very nearby. Some people also have networks outside of conventional major job markets — farmers, for example, or people running companies in rural areas — that open up opportunities for subsequent generations.

But when I think about people like me, who don’t have extensive professional infrastructure that’ll easily transfer to the next generation, the question I ask is, “can the kids get the jobs they want without moving hundreds of miles away.”

2. A place with a network

The obvious counter to the economic opportunity argument above is that you can always move. I could live in an isolated place for a while, but if my kids decamp someday for another city I can follow them. Plenty of people do that.

But it takes time to build a network. We’ve lived in our current neighborhood for about five years and we’re only just now starting to have a good list of plumbers and roofers and window guys who can fix things that break. We only recently found a good dentist for our kids and a good auto shop for our car. Each year, we meet a few more neighbors, whose company is both generally enriching and also materially beneficial when it comes to things like childcare.

If we stick around, our kids can plug into this network as they grow up. I experienced this first hand myself; I got several of my first jobs as a teenager through my parents’ network of friends and fellow church-goers. Eventually, I moved away and lost access to that network, forcing me to start from scratch in a new location. But some of the other kids my age stuck around and ended up finding careers through that community.

I’ve also seen how this works on the flip side; I wrote before about how each successive generation of my family chased economic opportunity in new locations for over a century, and how over time that actually set us back compared to our now-distant relatives who hunkered down in the same place. I benefited from my parents’ network, sure, but that network was only one generation deep. And then I repeated the pattern again as an adult when I opted to live in places where I didn’t have any network already in place.

As I’ve come to appreciate the importance of a deeper and bigger network, I’ve also made it a goal to break this pattern so that my kids and every subsequent generation don’t have to keep starting from scratch. I think they’ll be both professionally more successful as well as happier if they don’t all keep arriving in new cities with no prospects, no friends, no romantic partners, etc.

3. A place with humane design

What I’m talking about here is basically good urban planning. Part of this is just basic safety; the problem with my street right now is that it’s busy enough that I can’t be quite as free range-y with my kids as I’d like.

As a parent I think a lot about how this applies to kids, but it also applies to older adults. The New York Times just ran an excellent interactive piece about how challenging it can be for older adults to navigate both cities and small towns that aren’t designed for them.

The point is that if a place is not designed to accommodate people of all ages, people of all ages will not and cannot live there. And that breaks up the village; when grandparents are isolated in senior communities, for example, they have a harder time kinkeeping or playing any meaningful role in a family.

What all of this means is that I’m looking for a place that has things like stores, schools, restaurants, entertainment and more within walking distance — neither kids nor many older adults can drive after all. Good public transit is helpful, especially for families that live in cities. Narrower streets force cars to slow down. A mix of housing types in one location is better than vast swaths of identical houses; it means you can have empty nesters, families with kids, and young professionals — potentially all from the same family — living side by side. A village includes people in different life stages, so the housing, the streets, and the amenities need to take that into account.

It may sound like I’m describing an actual big, dense city. And there are some cities, especially outside the U.S., that fit the bill. A place like Paris definitely has more family-friendly urban design than the California suburb where I grew up.

But these features exist at all scales. I’ve been to tiny hamlets in Europe where a nightly ritual plays out: Kids run in the town square, couples stroll for their evening passeggiata, and the elderly who can’t easily walk anymore sit on benches and take it all in. Similarly, the book I discussed about in my last post, Hunt, Gather, Parent, describes basically what I’m talking about in both a small Maya village and in the semi-rural East Coat community where the author grew up.

The question, then, isn’t, “should I live in a city or the country?” The question is, “can my kids learn some degree of independence in this environment, and will it let members of our community age in place?” If the answer is yes, it’s probably not a bad place for a family to grow into a village⁴.

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1. Obviously most of us don’t have the luxury of looking at a map of the entire world and choosing the perfect place to live. But I do think it’s worth trying to understand the best environments for families so that we can either gravitate toward those places as opportunities arise, or so we can try to make wherever we happen to live even better.

2. WEIRD is an acronym that stands for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Harvard evolutionary biology professor Joseph Henrich has written extensively about the concept, which he uses to describe how the West became so prosperous — but also individualistic to the point of heavily deprioritizing clan or tribal family structures. I’ve cited or written about this idea here and here, among other places. Though I don’t use the term WEIRD in every post, the concept is a major underlying influence of this blog.

3. Other big things to look for that I’m not discussing today include environmental factors (drought, hurricane risk, etc.) and cost of living, especially housing. These are such big issues though that I’d prefer to discuss them in future posts.

4. Unfortunately, these types of places are difficult to find, especially in the U.S. But again, it’s worth considering the features of successful places.