Navigating Suburbia with Kids

Can we teach children to be street-savvy among the cul-de-sacs?

Joseph Pennell, New Oxford Street, London, 1893

I read once of a culture in which children learned to walk long distances from a very early age. The story went that a three-year-old would be expected to accompany a parent three miles (being carried for much of the distance), and that a four-year-old should be willing to go four (again, not entirely on foot). The five-year-old would go five miles, the six-year-old six, and so on. The older the child, the greater their ability to trek long distances with adult help and support. The earlier the tutelage began, the greater their endurance and independence as they got older.

Since then, I have not been able to verify the truth of the story, and so it might be false. Nevertheless, my three littles have been encouraged to do a lot of walking in their young lives, and we’ve sought to grow their mental tenacity in order to last through mental hikes and Sunday adventures. When we lived in Oxford, England, we did so without a car (I’ve written about that here), and so our kids got very used to walking 1.5 miles to church in the morning, or exploring the towpaths for a few miles on a Saturday. I noticed that they were often capable of long walks physically, but that the greater challenge was mental: in being willing to endure the slow monotony of walking. It is a process of teaching them how to notice and delight in the world around them, so that they realize how much wonder and joy there is in the walking process. Nowadays, I don’t have any trouble getting them to walk for three or four miles—the greatest challenge is that it takes us hours, because they want to stop and collect every rock, or to stare at every butterfly. It is a wonderful problem to have.

Now that our children are getting older, we’ve embraced a new challenge. I do not just want my children to walk. I want them to navigate: to have a strong sense of where we are walking, and how to get there (and back again).

The reasons for this are numerous, but I’ll touch on a couple of them here. Eventually, I hope this will help combat the modes of helicopter parenting and indoors-focused life so common among American kids these days. Eventually, I want them to be able to confidently walk outside our front door and navigate their neighborhood with a sense of ownership. I do not thinking they will be walking themselves to the park anytime soon, but at this stage, I do want them to be able to take me there, and direct me homewards. The older they get, the larger the navigational challenges we can pose. Can they take my husband and me hiking? Can they get us to the grocery store? To church? To their grandparents’ house?

A second reason for this relates back to the importance of place and our relationship to it. I am convinced that our relationships with our places must be active rather than passive, animated by a sense of stewardship and belonging. But children do not grow these muscles if we constantly shuttle them around in a car and avoid interacting personally and actively with our landscapes. The instant they must lead themselves and others through that landscape, using their feet, eyes, and ears to interact with the soil, buildings, flora, fauna, and street signs, the landscape becomes theirs. This shift marks the beginning of a new relationship with place—one no longer defined by parents or family, but by their own sense of belonging and situatedness.

In the UK, my oldest began to develop a clear sense of direction as we walked. She could recognize familiar street corners, signposts, and shops. She could take us comfortably from our home to the towpath, and from the towpath to central Oxford (and back).

Now, however, we are living in Idaho suburbia. And I have realized that the challenge of navigation has changed drastically.

Compare, just for example, these different street grids. The first few are random selections from Oxford’s residential areas, such as Jericho and New Hinksey:

The streets don’t form a perfect square grid, but they have a logic and rhythm to them that is easy to follow. Streets all connect to each other, with homes lining them at regular intervals. A few streets terminate at the river or at various colleges, but there are almost always walking paths that take over and guide the walker where normal streets end. It is easy to explore this city without getting terribly turned around.

Various parts of London are similar. (These are screenshots of Notting Hill and Chelsea.)

Again, things are not perfectly geometric here, and there’s a chance you might get a bit turned around here and there. But the average walker can enjoy this city with ease because every neighborhood’s streets have a clear rhythm and cadence, a direction and a telos. Smaller streets connect back to larger thoroughfares. Side streets are easy to identify, and are punctuated with shops and markets where you might ask for directions. When you start walking in the wrong direction, it is relatively easy to turn yourself back around within a block or two, because streets rarely terminate except back into each other.

Some United States neighborhoods are similar—especially the old ones. As a young journalist, I explored Washington, D.C. on a regular basis. This was pre-smartphone (at least for me), and so I often would look at Google Maps prior to leaving my office. I would pick a direction, identify the main streets I needed to follow, and then go on an adventure for an hour or two. On weekends, my then-fiancé (now husband) and I would embark on daylong walking quests, starting on one side of the city and walking to the other. These remain some of my favorite memories of D.C. I learned to know the city by foot, and grew an affection for its streets and neighborhoods that I never would have if I had only navigated by car. There’s an intuitive sense of a borough or street grid built in this way, when you proceed district-by-district and block-by-block.

But then there’s suburbia. And with suburbia, that intuitive sense of place and direction drastically changes. I share these screenshots because I feel it is very easy to identify the problem from above. These are randomly selected screenshots from Idaho and northern Virginia.

I will admit, the way the streets thread along like veins or root tendrils is decidedly pretty. It often creates pretty neighborhoods. But what does it mean to walk these streets without a phone? How does one explore these neighborhoods, or use them to get from point A to point D? As soon as we begin to walk—and to specifically walk with the aim of getting somewhere—things get difficult. Many streets terminate in a cul-de-sac, leaving the walker stranded and having to retrace their steps. Many other neighborhoods form an unexpected loop, which means the walker often assumes they will be able to proceed in an easterly direction only to get looped all the way back to their starting point.

As my kiddos and I walked back from the park recently, I picked a different exit to navigate from. I had no idea which streets exactly would lead us home, but that was half the fun. I told them we needed to proceed south, and so we specifically picked streets that would take us south. But alas, this does not work in the suburbs. One street led us around in a circle. Two others were cul-de-sacs. We eventually made it back, and did so without consulting my smartphone, but the process was rather frustrating, even for me. The intuitive savvy of streetwalking changes when you are living in suburbia. Main streets and “side streets” all meld in a grid that often feels incomprehensible. Suburbia has its own language, and I am still learning it.

To an extent, I think this is a flaw in suburbia itself, one that makes children less safe and independent in these neighborhoods. The easier it is to learn the language and pattern of the streets, the more confidence parents and children can have in navigating them. The instant we complexify that language, we are requiring greater expertise and maturity in order to navigate. I would argue that there is a pro-family and pro-child reason to build street grids in a more simple, traditional style, and it has to do with the children and their comfortability in these spaces.

This said, I don’t want to be too biased against the suburbs. I grew up in a small rural town, and since then, have lived in cities. This means I am unversed in the language and pattern of suburban streets. It could be that, when it comes to learning to navigate suburbia, I will have to learn alongside my children, rather than being able to teach them.

If you have lived in the suburbs for a length of time, I would love to hear your thoughts:

• Do you find that certain cities or neighborhoods have their own language of street design? Do they, as Christopher Alexander might put it, have a pattern of sidewalks and intersections? How have you gone about learning that language?

• What disadvantages—or advantages—have you encountered in your town or city’s layout? What might be learned from both?

Here’s to more walking adventures in the days ahead,

Gracy