Kathy Bachman felt like an oddity when her family moved to Cherry Lane in the Crabtree section of Levittown [Pennsylvania] when she was 5. She was an only child, and “everybody had five or six kids in every house.”
Fast-forward to 2011.
Bachman, now 64, still lives in her childhood home. She brought up her kids there, but they’re grown and gone. The house next door is vacant. Few driveways are cluttered with scooters and tricycles.
“Out of 75 houses on the street, I’d say maybe 15 might have kids,” Bachman says.
I was born and raised in Pennsylvania in the mid-60s. Our neighborhood wasn’t “teeming” with children but there were quite a few. It was a neighborhood where everyone visited, sat outside and talked and had big neighborhood barbecues on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.
It’s so sad to see what it’s become — a neighborhood of rental homes. The few elderly still there feel bewildered and alone — they watch as renters come and go and as crime increases. All of us kids did go off to college and move away. There are precious few good jobs in a dead steel town that never reinvented itself and is surrounded by other dead steel towns or sparsely populated farming communities. (The Amish always seem to thrive, though!)
It was painful to sell the family home after mum died but we were hopeful because a young man bought it and intended to stay put there for a while. Unfortunately, that didn’t last. I believe his father, who co-signed his mortgage loan, has taken it over and is renting it now. I try not to think about it, and I had to tell the elderly folks behind it not to call me with every bit of news on who’s living there. It’s too depressing and there’s nothing I can do about it.
I doubt that the neighborhood will come back. The lovely neighborhood school we all attended has long been closed down as the city did with almost all of the neighborhood schools. They opened one large, consolidated elementary school, instead, in the center of the city.
But things change and the culture changes. It just does. We no longer live in tribes, we’re no longer bedouins.
New suburbs, particularly in the 1950s-’60s, are anomalous in their child density. My parents were the first people to buy a house in Hammond Village (Md, outside Laurel) in 1960, and they, like nearly everyone to move in for the first time over the next decade, had at least one kid. Offhand I can only think of two exceptions. Fast forward thirty years: now all of those kids had grown up, and while there had been a fair degree of turnover, none of the original residents had small kids living at home. A lot of the people who moved in later had their kids grow up too, and these days it seems that a lot of the purchasers are people whose kids have grown. I think the lowest point of children was maybe fifteen years ago, but there will never be as many kids as there were in the mid-1960s, because there will never be such a uniformity of age.
A sad comment on the times. I’d love to live in the neighborhood where I was raised(of course, along with my spouse and kids), but the public schools there have pretty much gone to hell in a handbasket and no way can we afford the average ~ $450,000 house price. When my parents bought their house in 1970, it was $35,000.
Increasingly, I come across college educated couples who simply don’t want children. It seems to be Bacon, giving “hostages to fortune.” They want their own lives uninterrupted by risks. These are DINKS with a vengeance. Larry