Playborhood
In Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Place for Play, you'll find inspiring stories of innovative communities throughout the US and Canada that have successfully created vibrant neighborhood play lives for their children. You'll also get a comprehensive set of step-by-step solutions to change your family and neighborhood cultures, so that your kids can spend less time in front of screens and in adult-supervised activities, and more time engaging in joyful neighborhood play.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
4mentions
4people
2018–2023years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Parents looking for screen alternatives: Check out the book "Playborhood" by Mike Lanza.
His neighborhood had no kids playing outside, so his kids didn't want to play outside. He did something about it, and he tells us how to do the same where we live.
- Seconding this recommendation.
The idea of solving this issue at a societal level is really daunting, but Playborhood was an empowering read as a parent. It makes the case that, at least for your children and your (hyper-local) neighborhood, you can create conditions that significantly change your kid's childhood (and mental well-being) for the better. And it provides actionable steps and examples to do that, rather than just bemoaning the state of the world.
- I wrote a book advising parents how to give kids a life of independent neighborhood play. Check out Playborhood - http://playborhood.com
In a nutshell, I contend that this is a social problem of neighborhood culture, and parents should work to make their neighborhoods as fun and inviting as video games and the Internet. Simply cutting off electronics and shoving them out the door won't do it because there's no one out there - neighborhoods are very boring. Somehow, we need to create a culture of play, first with parents, and later without, in our neighborhoods. The book Playborhood is all about that.
- Playborhood, by Mike Lanza, describes a related endeavor to transform one's yard into an inviting area for neighborhood kids. My wife and I have been discussing this quite a lot lately. How do we bring back neighborhood play so kids can get outside, meet each other, and just be kids?
