We live on a postage stamp sized lot. Our backyard backs up to our neighbors and looking east and west you can see the backyards of our neighbors. After nearly seven years of living in this house, we have a comparable forest in our backyard. We are among the only ones who have planted trees or shrubs in their backyards...it makes a wide open landscape. And free roaming for the neighborhood kids.
Which is apparently how many people like it. I haven't read the book Free Range Kids nor am I frequent visitor to her blog, but I am familiar with her basic theory: that we micromanage our children too much and that the world isn't nearly as dangerous as our culture likes to think it is.
While I can't visualize a day where I would just let my kids out the door in the morning and tell them to be home by super time, the problems over our back fence are more related to basic civility and common sense manners.
Last summer two new sets of neighbors moved into to the houses to our west and south. One set is a great match for our kids and everyone has a grand time playing together. The family is beyond kind and generous. Their generosity is actually the problem. They have a play set in their yard. A smallish one with a few swings and a rock wall with a fort on top and a slide down. It is a novelty in our neighborhood. I don't know what invitations they made to the neighbors around us or if they meant to open up their backyard to the entire subdivision...but as time has gone on, that is what has happened.
Especially since we have new neighbors catty corner and next to the play ground. The yards are small and with no fences to distinguish between lot lines, I understand how kids don't know the difference between one space and the another...especially when one space has a fort. It is also obvious that their parents aren't interested in pointing out these imaginary property lines to them.
On any given hour you will find the 'other' kids playing on the equipment. They even bring friends over. Some of the kids in the family are older and thus the conversations aren't appropriate (or understood) by the children whose yard it is (or my kids, their friends who would like to play with them.)
As time has gone on, the neighbor has opened up to me about her frustrations. The garbage left in her yard, the shoes, headbands, clothing, books, toys and miscellaneous other 'stuff' left behind from the neighborhood kids. My own kids express their frustration many days--mostly because I won't invite the whole gaggle of the kids over to our yard and I won't let them play with their friends if this older family is playing there. (and, they are always there.) But also because BB has a sense of "that's not their yard." He has, of course, heard me talk about these kids and their behavior. He also knows he needs to ask to leave his yard, he needs to check with me before inviting friend over, he hears us tell him to 'let Adam and Dave play with their parents.' He has heard Adam and Dave say that they can't come over because it is family time...etc. etc. etc.
There is no major theme or great thought going on here...except the questions that came out of my conversation with my neighbor the other day.
She was stating the parenting challenges of this situation..."I can share my things" she said. "Why does this bother me so much?" Neither of us really 'like' the kids that come over, but we both recognize that they aren't "bad" kids or doing horrible destructive things to the property. They aren't exactly who we would want our kids to hand around with, but again, they aren't a horrible influence. (I have the added pleasure of their father working with my husband--loosely--so I feel that social connection.)
I was having the same thoughts about what is the more important lesson to teach my kids...Sharing the communal nature and lost art of neighbors/neighborhood or modeling manners and care and respect of other's property. I know there's some middle ground in there...it is just so flipping flapping much work to find it, and communicate it and model it....
In my next house, I will gladly look for neighbors in their 70's or 80's...surely they'd be easy to get along with, right?
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