Where are all the kids?

Originally published in 2014.

Dusk on a residential street. Lightning bugs pulse first here, then there. A lawn mower whirrs far in the distance as somebody races darkness, hoping to find not too many missed lines the next morning. Otherwise, quiet. Too quiet.

Where are all the kids?

It’s something I ask my wife more and more frequently on our evening walks. There are no kids. No kids catching lightning bugs. No kids playing hopscotch. No kids riding bicycles up and down driveways or wrestling in yards or turning cartwheels or.

Or anything.

I feel more and more like a character in a Ray Bradbury story, strolling down some woebegone street in a slice of small-town America that has been scooped up in its entirety and re-planted on Mars. Everything perfectly replicated — houses, garages, shrubs, roads and stop lights.

Everything but kids.

I know this city has children. I see buses filled with them on weekday afternoons during the school year. I see their photos in the paper and on friends’ Facebook pages. I see them in malls and restaurants.

I just don’t see them outside. Not at dusk, not anytime.

When I mention this to other people, I always get the same answer. “Oh, when I was a kid, Mom pushed me out the door in the morning and only let me back in for lunch and dinner and when the streetlights came on. We didn’t sit in front of the TV all day or play video games or text on phones like kids these days.”

This is the answer no matter the age of the respondent, including people who were just kids themselves a few years ago, when older people said the same thing about their generation.

In my own youth, my sister and I played outside a lot, but I’m not fooling myself — I was never an outdoorsy-type. The big difference between summer and winter was that I could read a book on the porch in the summer instead of on the couch in the winter.

Still, we went outside. We set up Slip N’ Slides and got sunburned and played basketball and blew bubbles and built makeshift ramps for our bikes and just ran around.

Maybe parents don’t think it’s safe for kids to do that nowadays. Too many stories about too many creeps. Maybe in a lot of single-parent or two-income homes, kids have to come in early, even in the summer, and go to bed to get up before dawn the next day to be carted off to childcare. Maybe spontaneous play really has been replaced by more scripted scenarios — organized sports, playdates at the movies or crawling through plastic, yellow tubes that spill out into boxes of rubber balls at fast-food franchises.*

Or maybe kids really are content to stay indoors, even on beautiful early summer evenings, when dusk hangs in the air like a gauze curtain, and watch TV and play video games.

One house on our walking route, however, is like an oasis to my soul. There, kids are doing all the things that I expect to see kids do on a beautiful summer night. They’re skipping, yelling, playing catch, and doodling with chalk. They look dirty — the glorious kind of dirty that comes from lots of exercise and from finding worms in the drive after a hard rain, the wonderful kind of dirty that parents have to scrub off in the bathtub once the sun goes down.

But in the surrounding yards, nothing. Silence. The flickering of TV screens through picture windows, and uncaptured lightning bugs holding sway over all.

Where are all the kids?

*In 2022, I would add extreme heat to the list of reasons why children might not be outside as much.