Post Author
Michael Cooper
Senior Director of Advocacy
Before and after the State of the Child Summit on April 15th NC Child will be highlighting some of interesting ideas and innovative thinkers working on issues affecting our youth. We begin by interviewing professor and author Seth Kaplan.
At NC Child we’re interested in all the issues affecting our youth and we go where the data takes us. In recent years that has meant paying more attention to youth mental health.
Through our research we have tracked rising rates of anxiety and depression amongst our youth, and we are learning how that’s tied to social pressures and to new technologies. We’re also learning about the importance of community and social capital, or lack thereof.
According to The Survey Center on American Life, today’s youth have fewer friends, are less likely to date, and less likely to work a part-time job than previous generations. They’re missing out on essential parts of life and that’s unsustainable. Today’s young people deserve the same opportunities that adults had to find friends and make connections. So how do we address this?
According to Seth Kaplan, we should be thinking about place.
Kaplan is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, a leading expert on fragile states, and a consultant for organizations including the World Bank and the U.S State Department. He is also the author of the recent book, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time.
In the book Kaplan argues that by revitalizing local institutions, “and the social ties that knit them together”, we can turn our neighborhoods into places where people and families can thrive. That sounded interesting to us, so we had a conversation with Kaplan about Fragile Neighborhoods, social networks, and the importance of place in the lives of our youth. The interview has been condensed for brevity and clarity. But the ideas remain fascinating, and we hope you enjoy.
MICHAEL: There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the epidemic of loneliness and isolation. But you think we should be paying more attention to how place impacts our lives. How did you come to be interested in this issue?
SETH: People started asking me, “Is the United States fragile?”. I’m the fragile states guy. I would go to coffee and people would ask, “What happened to the United States?”. They were very nervous about the election and what was going on at the time. But it was something deeper than that, that was concerning people. And I didn’t start with a focus on place. I start with a focus on relationships.
The thing that I’ve learned is that the success of a country depends upon the health of its relationships. So, a country with strong social cohesion is much more likely to get the politics and economics right.
And when you ask what is wrong with America, you have to say well, we had problems two generations ago, but there weren’t these kinds of problems. We had different problems, and now we have all these problems related to relationships. And the question is, what changed?
And part of that is that a lot of places have been left behind. There’s just an emptiness where there used to be lots of activity and institutions. And so, whether you’re economically and socially left behind or just isolated, something about the loss of the local, the loss of place, that, to me, was the key issue.
MICHAEL: There’s a statistic in the book: the average homeowner lives in the same place for 13.2 years. That’s basically a childhood. Which means place matters for the development of a child. We talk about other factors, income, education, the family, but not much about place.
SETH: It’s shocking when you think about it actually, first of all, the data on the difference in life outcomes based upon where you grew up is enormous in this country.
Places that have stronger families, stronger interfamily networks, an abundance of local institutions, bonding and bridging, that whole combination [matters].
Yes, you want good schools. Yes, you want access to services. But we don’t think hard enough about how the social context affects children. The population group in which neighborhood matters more than just about anyone else [is children] and yet we spend almost no time thinking about that.
MICHAEL: You write about in the book how children are growing up online and not as much in the real world. And how that is not necessarily because young people are lazy, but because they are being raised this way.
SETH: If you think that every child is socialized in some form, I would say that if they’re not socialized to know and value the practice of building relationships, they’re being socialized for something else. My oldest is 12, she doesn’t have a phone. Many of her peers don’t have phones. We’re still in a place in which the phones come later and the relationships matter, and the impact is enormous.
I look at a lot of kids, they’re being socialized to think the norm is they communicate through the phone. Their life is virtual.
And you see a lot of problems kids have when they’re older, not being able to get started with their lives, or not having a certain amount of confidence, or being highly risk adverse. It’s all starting with how people are growing up and what they’re being socialized as the norm.
Part of growing up is learning how to have relationships with other people, learning how to compromise, learning how to navigate, learning how to take flak. I would just say one more thing, we expose [young people] to content online and we treat them as if they can be an adult online, and we treat them as if they can’t be an adult offline. I think most places they’re doing that backwards.
MICHAEL: One of the oldest adages of parenting is “Don’t talk to strangers.” Adults emphasize that in the real world but then children can access almost anything online.
SETH: I find it odd, actually. What often happens is that technology evolves, and we just accept the technology, we don’t think hard about it, and it has an enormous impact on our society. Technology brings many benefits. But I would say that when it comes to our kids, we should be very intentional about the type of social context. Think how much [time] we spend thinking about what school our kids go to and actually they’re being schooled outside of school. They’re being schooled by where they live.
We can be very intentional about school. We’re not very intentional about technology, and we’re often not very intentional about social interactions and friendships and relationships outside of school.
MICHAEL: You write about attachment theory, how face-to-face interactions, particularly positive interactions matter for child development. So, we want young people to have relationships in person. And where that happens matters. The quality of the environment.
SETH: Phones are attractive for several reasons. One is the decline of place-based community, which meant that before there were phones, we were already were in the house, whether it was the TV or whatever. It’s not like we went from play to phone. We went from decline of community and play. People get obsessed about the phones and I see this as about a roughly 60-year pattern of change in our broader society.
And I would say what we need to do if we’re going to get kids off of phones? What we need are compelling activities, compelling opportunities for kids to do things with each other, and we have that to some extent with sports for some people, but I think we could be much more creative, whether it’s after school, whether it’s some sort of organized activities, in terms of doing things in the community, giving kids leadership roles.
Without those alternatives we’re just using sticks. We need carrots as well.
It used to be that normal life gave kids all these opportunities. My broad argument is that what used to happen organically, now must happen intentionally. Part of that is how we build the environment. Part of that is how we think about institutions.
You need to be much more intentional about bringing people together and encouraging kids to spend time socializing, practicing what it means to be in relationships, to gain responsibility, and to gradually become more of an adult. And being an adult is not just your vocational learning in a school. It’s being a part of a community. It’s been a leader in society or having a role. A lot of schools are just focused on the vocational, and we think of success by how well they do on test scores, and we don’t think about the social part. And I think they’re equally important.
Young people having roles, getting involved, volunteering, is important for their development to be active citizens and participants in the community. It’s up to us as society to give these opportunities. You want to give kids a greater sense of agency.
MICHAEL: Before coming to NC Child, I worked as a defense attorney in western North Carolina on the frontlines of many of these issues. It seemed like we did a decent job of investing in the highest achieving students, but we weren’t paying enough attention to the students who would end up staying in town after graduation, and who would become the future of the community.
SETH: This is true about so many programs in our country. We look for the best achievers, and we basically extract them from many of our communities and neighborhoods, and then we funnel them to some top schools and into some jobs. There are benefits. We get many of the best talent into these national roles. But what it means is that we leave many places behind.
I talk about two organizations in my book, Partners for Education in Eastern Kentucky, and Thread in Baltimore. They work with [young people from] those other percentiles. In the Thread case, it’s about relationships, it’s about creating the social love and relational support, the idea that you’re important and that somebody has your back. But the key part is that they started with the worst performers.
It’s a relationship commitment to try to fill gaps in those lives. All levels of our society need to have support. And it’s easy to see that we are failing lots of places and lots of people, and part of that is because we tend to be exclusively focused on the top, and we don’t spend enough thinking about everybody else. When you take a place approach, you’re far more inclusive because you’re considering everybody in a place.
MICHAEL: Growing up I was very lucky. It was a close-knit neighborhood. Everybody knew everybody. All my friends lived down the street. We rode bikes to each other’s houses and played in the woods. But these days it feels like neighborhoods are built for convenience and not for families in mind.
SETH: They’re built for automobiles. If you want to go back 60 years to the start of all the changes that atomized society, you’re talking about automobiles and television, and changes in careers.
I live in a suburban area. About three quarters of my kids’ classmates are a walking distance away. My oldest is 12. She can meet them in the local pizza place. She can do anything on foot. But the point is, I mean, you live with a community, and you have relationships, and relationship abundance makes your own life more joyful. It provides more opportunities for kids just to be out there and it changes everything.
Part of the reason parents will keep their kids at home is because they’re afraid to let their kids out of the house. They don’t know their neighbors. We need to trust people. And we need to let our kids roam and grow up or naturally, and it’s hard to do if you don’t know your neighbors and trust them. This is why I mentioned before that the interfamily ties are one of the most underrated elements in the wellbeing of families and kids.
MICHAEL: You write that neighborhoods and local institutions are our first and foremost incubator because they embed us in these relationships in life. And you give examples of organizations that improved school facilities and did the same thing in the neighborhood. They became hubs.
SETH: I’m a big believer in neighborhood schools. We don’t think of schools and local institutions as incubator of relationships. But to the extent that there are small libraries, relatively small primary schools, relatively local churches, you know, all these things, relatively local shops [it all matters]. When you live in an area with a bunch of those things, odds are people are meeting. Odds are that you have some ties to your neighbors.
MICHAEL: It seems like there is no single answer for issues like this. It’s kind of all of the above. You want parent groups, peer networks, family support systems, and after-school programming.
SETH: Yes. Those are all great. The more the merrier. Some of the most important interfamily groups that I see are not formal. There’s the carpool group. There’re families on a WhatsApp group. To the extent that they’re placed based, they’re much better incubators. They tend to overlap. When you have a lot of things overlapping, it creates a completely different dynamic. They’re community building networks. It’s a multiplier effect. It’s a cascading effect.
MICHAEL: What advice to you have for a state like North Carolina? For policymakers and decision-makers to set a foundation for good places that make for good childhoods.
SETH: If I’m a policymaker at a state, municipal, or county level, can we think about our physical landscape more in terms of neighborhoods? A lot of what we build is placeless (house, house, house). There’s no neighborhood identity. There’s no commercial corridor. There’s no neighborhood school.
Think about what brings people together. Specific places thrive when they have lots and lots of place specific institutions. So how do we ensure every neighborhood has a place where people can meet? Is there a way to lean into town history that would give every place more of an identity? Are there small grant programs that encourage neighbors to know each other?
Think about the role that we can all play. Do you know your neighbors? Is there a local nonprofit where you can be volunteer? I would say the way to be the best neighbor possible is you’re just there for each other, and no one’s calling it volunteering, that’s part of what we’re missing.
My neighborhood we had a music class. It wasn’t free. We spent some money. But it was kids in the neighborhood coming together to learn strings and winds and it’s just the things you do locally with each other, they have many positive side effects that we don’t see at the beginning.
MICHAEL: And kids are the ones who benefit the most.
SETH: Yes, for sure, kids need an opportunity to do things in real life, “IRL”, as we say, and the best way to do that is in your neighborhood.