The Montessori Metropolis

Preparing the Urban Environment for a More Playful Childhood

Growing up in small-town America in the 1980s and 1990s, neighboring kids and I would walk the half-mile to and from elementary school each day (uphill only one way). After school, we’d disappear to a neighbor’s house down the street or into the woods nearby. Those years were spent climbing trees, tromping through streams, scraping knees, and getting dirty. I once came home with a gushing gash across my eyebrow when a piece of metal flew out of a busted electronic device that my friend had disassembled—with a rock. While there was always an adult relatively close by, nobody was surveilling our every move, and we were free to roam the mean streets of suburban Connecticut. 

It was a typical boyhood, with all the blood, toil, sweat, and occasional tears that come with it. Mine was largely what psychologist

Jonathan Haidt

would call a “play-based childhood”—and it was already on the way out by the late 1980s. 

Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, chronicles the decline and disappearance of the play-based childhood over the past thirty or so years. It’s been replaced by what he calls a “phone-based childhood,” one typified not by freewheeling outdoor play but by computers, video game consoles, and since the 2010s, smartphones. Coupled with the rise of social media, the phone-based childhood has had a profound effect on child development and is implicated in the rise in anxiety and depression among Generation Z, those born between 1996 and 2010. 

At the same time that new technology was transforming our world, a loss of social trust among adults and a shift to safetyism—i.e., an overemphasis on small dangers in the physical world—changed the culture of parenting. Parents began to fear for their children in the real world while remaining oblivious to dangers lurking online. As Haidt writes,

We decided that the real world was so full of dangers that children should not be allowed to explore it without adult supervision, even though the risks to children from crime, violence, drunk drivers, and most other sources have dropped steeply since the 1990s. At the same time, it seemed like too much of a bother to design and require age-appropriate guardrails for kids online, so we left children free to wander through the Wild West of the virtual world, where threats to children abounded.

Consequently, Gen Z became the first to grow up in an environment characterized by “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world.” Haidt argues that “The members of Gen Z are, therefore, the test subjects for a radical new way of growing up, far from the real-world interactions of small communities in which humans evolved.”

He calls this the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.”

The book has kicked off a robust debate in recent weeks about Haidt’s interpretation of the data and the merit of his proposals for dealing with the problem. I found his overall argument compelling, so my purpose here is not to interrogate his presentation of the science regarding smartphones and social media (Haidt publishes a lot more about his research and methodology on his Substack,

After Babel

).

As a former Montessori school leader, I wholeheartedly agree with Haidt's view that self-directed play and independence are crucial to healthy child development. As an urbanist, what I want to highlight here is how specifically cities can help bring children back to the real world by creating a better-prepared, real-world environment for a playful childhood. As Haidt puts it: “That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.”

Early education pioneer Maria Montessori understood that “play is the work of childhood.” In the schools I helped build and run for nearly a decade, we adhered to the Montessori Method, creating child-focused prepared environments that cultivated developmentally appropriate independence. Our programs also featured mixed-age classrooms as well as unstructured outdoor time on, wherever it was feasible, natural playgrounds. Montessori educators recognize not only that children are far more capable than we may think, but that they crave opportunities to demonstrate and experience independence as they mature. Inside and out, a Montessori school is a purposefully-prepared environment that supports a child’s growing independence—physical, social, and intellectual.

In recent weeks,

City of Yes

has discussed how urban land use policies make life difficult, expensive, and stressful for families by limiting family-friendly housing options and childcare. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these same land use policies may also be robbing children of a play-based childhood. Real life, particularly the built environment of our towns and cities, has been wired in ways that reinforce the idea that the world is a dangerous and scary place. 

The Anxious Generation is not an urban planning book, yet Haidt emphasizes three areas where cities and towns can improve to be more child-friendly: transportation infrastructure, mixed-use neighborhoods, and playgrounds. A good neighborhood needs all three to be child- and family-friendly.

Call it the Montessori Metropolis—a prepared urban environment for a more playful childhood.

Haidt writes that a “world designed for automobiles is often not one that children find accessible,” yet so much of our urban fabric is knit with pavement meant for tires, not feet. In Austin, the city is missing an estimated 1,500 miles of sidewalks, a situation that is not only precarious for families with small children, but also and especially for the disabled. Forget about walking to school when kids have to “share” the streets with huge pickup trucks with massive blindspots. When my husband and I take our dog for walks in our largely un-sidewalked residential neighborhood in Central Austin, drivers speed by oblivious to us and the speed limit. If it feels unsafe even to adults it’s because it is unsafe—for everyone. 

The message such streets convey is that basic activities like taking the dog for a walk, pushing a stroller, or walking to school are essentially trespassing on car-centric rights-of-way. Such streets have no place for children—to ride bikes, to skip rope, to hopscotch on chalk-drawn squares, to walk to school or the store—which means no place for children to engage in unsupervised free play, to develop social skills with friends, or to cultivate a sense of agency and independence from walking to school or running errands. 

Our cities are carefully prepared environments—for cars, not kids.

Haidt argues that cities should invest in “good sidewalks, crosswalks, and traffic lights” and “install traffic calming measures”—all sensible stuff that makes the pedestrian experience safer for everyone. Yet while better pedestrian infrastructure is an important first step, there’s a lot more cities and towns can do.

Cities and towns can expand the realm of safe play areas through “Safe Streets” programs, which simplify the permitting process for temporary street closures, allowing for neighborhood block parties or after-school play time, a low-cost model being deployed in European cities. Thanks to the work of concerned local officials and advocacy organizations like Safe Streets Austin, Austin is pioneering a similar Living Streets program that enables neighbors to reclaim some portion of their neighborhood streets some of the time for uses other than driving.

These measures do not take the place of infrastructure investments, but they are a means of quickly and inexpensively transforming auto-centric public spaces into temporary prepared environments for families. (Don’t worry: the bulk of the remaining transportation infrastructure still caters to drivers.)

Creating pedestrian-friendly infrastructure is great, but it’s even better if families have places to walk to. Haidt argues that cities should 

change their zoning to allow more mixed-use development. When commercial, recreational, and residential establishments are more mashed up together, there is more activity on the street and more places that children can get to on foot or by bike. But when the only way for a kid to get to a shop, park, or friend’s house is by “parent taxi,” more kids will end up at home on a screen. 

As Haidt notes, kids “want to be where the action is. Easily accessible mixed-use spaces where everyone, young and old, can hang out, see, be seen, do some playing, shopping, eating, flirting, and, when tired, bench sitting make everyone more engaged with the world beyond the screen.” In the same way that mixed-age groups in Montessori classrooms foster opportunities for learning and leadership, mixed-use neighborhoods provide opportunities for children to engage with a broader range of people in real-world civic and commercial settings. Of course, many urban environments are not prepared in such a way thanks to single-use zoning, which segregates residential from other uses and creates boring neighborhoods that often require a car to get anywhere useful or fun.

Similarly, Haidt also suggests that playgrounds should be scattered throughout neighborhoods, referencing a study that “found that kids who can get to a playground by bike or foot are six times more likely to visit it than kids who need someone to drive them.” Those playgrounds should also be designed with a play-based childhood in mind, which means playgrounds in which kids can take risks and, occasionally, get hurt (Haidt calls for “adventure playgrounds'' filled with nature or even junk, taking a lesson out of the European playbook where such playgrounds still exist). So many of our playgrounds are instead designed to be safe instead of fun, which limits the imagination, discovery, and growth of the children they were allegedly designed for.

Changing the culture of parenting in the way Haidt suggests is both necessary for reversing the Age of Anxiety in which too many children are growing up—and also really hard when safetyism is so entrenched in our culture and our urban environments have been prepared for cars instead of kids. 

Cities and towns can take some of the load off of parents who are ready for that change by taking a page from Montessori and preparing an urban environment that is more child-friendly. One with better pedestrian infrastructure, accessible playgrounds, and mixed-use neighborhoods that put urban places—and a more playful childhood—within reach and range of children and adults alike.