We Thought We Were Providing Our Children With Paradise, and They Found It To Be Hell

Mine was not always a happy childhood, and I sometimes blamed my parents for selecting our family home in the bland, sterile neighborhoods of Casa View. If I were asked, “What would have been the right and best place to grow up?,” I would have stumbled in confusion. Perhaps an extended rather than a nuclear family, in neighborhoods reflecting the range of diversity in races, ethnicity, and income levels. Where everything was not new—such as in a dense city with a history of place and with a long development of commercial and social systems. Or perhaps on a farm, close to nature and exempt from consumer shopping and materialist concerns. Or in a place where there were not so many kids banging up against one another in overcrowded schools.

Herbert Gans, in The Levittowners,(1967) points out that nonsuburban types of homeplaces had their owns sorts of unpleasantness.

Yet even though Levittowners and other lower middle class Americans continue to be home-centered, they are much more “in the world” than their parents and grandparents were. Those coming out of ethnic working class backgrounds have rejected the “amoral familism” which pits every family against every other in the struggle to survive and the ethnocentrism which made other cultures and even neighborhoods bitter enemies. This generation trusts its neighbors, participates with them in social and civic activities, and no longer sees government as inevitably corrupt. Even working class Levittowners have begun to give up the suspicion that isolated their ancestors from all but family and childhood friends. Similarly, the descendants of rural Protestant America have given up the xenophobia that turned previous generations against the Catholic and Jewish immigrants, they have almost forgotten the intolerant Puritanism which triggered attacks against pleasure and enjoyment, and they no longer fully accept the doctrine of laissez faire that justifies the defense of individual rights and privileges against others’ needs. . . . These and other changes have come about not because people are not better or more tolerant human beings, but because they are affluent. For the Levittowners, life is not a fight for survival anymore.

When it came time to find a homeplace for my own brood of four children, my wife and I picked a small, college town. For many years, we lived within a block of the downtown courthouse square. Residents in our neighborhoods were of diverse backgrounds. The smalltown community, and the nearby large cities, provided abundant social and cultural capital. We later moved a bit out of town to a 1912 farmhouse, with farm animals, and thousands of acres of parkland. All proved boring to my brood.

So it goes that, according to my kids, I failed them just as my parents failed me. By the age of 18, my daughter was dead set that she was going to get out of her boring hometown and never come back. My son, attending his tenth year high school reunion recently, remarked on the general contempt many of the graduates (those who had moved to other parts of the country) felt toward their hometown.