Cul De Sac Kids

One of my pastors turned me on to this syndrome: "cul de sac kids."
I'll quote an excerpt from a paper I found on Riverkeeper's website
entitled "Pave It or Save It":

The "cul-de-sac kids", isolated in their suburban communities, are
completely dependent upon their parents' driving, and thus suffer from
a loss of autonomy and become "frozen in a form of infancy." When
asked, children express this feeling of social isolation; when asked
about what they would like to see developed in their communities, the
answer is not often a mall, but rather places to "hang out" such as
parks with "people" in them. In suburban California, children watched
four times as much television as those in rural Vermont who had access
to recreational opportunities that did not require parental driving.
And, sociologists identify "teen isolation and boredom" as a
contributing factor to the high national rate of teenage suicides –
nearly nonexistent in before 1950 and the advent of the "suburbs," by
2000 suicide accounted for more than 12% of youth mortalities, and the
suicide rate is much higher in suburbs than in cities.

Wow. Where to start? My mind is racing with thoughts. Maybe you
should fear for lone teens from rich suburban neighborhoods, not big
groups of teens from poor urban neighborhoods. Maybe you could
replace the "kids" with "seniors" and have the some syndrome. Maybe
this becomes a significant enough population that we can trace its arc
through life like we can trace that of boomers. Maybe developers will
get wise and figure out how to build developments that lend themselves
to non-car mobility instead of slapping them next to highways and
making walking practically impossible (no sidewalks or trails,
spaghetti roads that make it difficult to leave the development by any
mode of transport besides driving, no easy access to public
transportation). Maybe cul-de-sac kids become the next group churches
mobilized themselves to reach out to.

And maybe cities are the safer place to raise kids, after all.