In the River Arts District in Asheville, New Belgium Brewery bustles. I do not like beer, but there are few places I would rather spend an afternoon than on the large lawn beside the brewery. Day in and day out, the place is full of children roaming in loose packs, tackling each other, wobbling along on tiny bikes, and dancing to music only they can hear. I call them free-range kids, and being around them is an instant serotonin boost.
They also change the atmosphere of the place in a way that is hard to miss. Adults talk to one another more easily when kids are around. Someone retrieves a runaway soccer ball, another steadies a small child, and before long strangers are chatting. (It helps that, at New Belgium, the adults are often drinking a beer.) Adults often spend years trying to engineer community. Children create it in an afternoon.
Where I live, children are increasingly thin on the ground. Schools here are closing because enrollment has dropped sharply over the past decade. More and more spaces are deliberately child-free, and the places that were built for children in a more family-centered era often sit empty. When children disappear from public life, something else often disappears as well: community. Many people still want children. What is increasingly missing is a society that makes having them feasible.
Loneliness has become one of the defining complaints of modern life, and one reason for this is that many of the structures that once gave our lives depth have weakened or disappeared. The no-kid thing is a big piece of that. A society that sidelines children and families is quietly dismantling one of the most reliable ways humans have ever built community.
Historically, everyday life made people show up for one another. People prayed together, sang together, buried their dead together, and sat together through dull sermons and way too long baseball games. Adulthood had a recognizable structure. People fell in love, formed partnerships, and raised children while surrounded by relatives of various ages. The arrangement had its profound challenges, but it created an environment in which loneliness was comparatively rare.
Modern life has weakened the earlier stages of that chain. Stable partnerships are harder to form, and many people who would like families find the path increasingly difficult. Economic barriers are real, and the culture itself often sends mixed signals about whether children belong in public life at all.
If we want a less lonely society, we have to be willing to say something that has become oddly controversial: children are good not only for their families but for the communities around them. They draw adults into relationships they would otherwise never form. They create communities. A culture that quietly discourages family life should not be surprised when loneliness spreads. Instead of treating children as a private lifestyle choice, we should be doing far more to make it possible for the people who want them to actually have them.
