Many houses were party centers.  One served cocktails to parents, another played movies on a large screen (so did I on Yale, but to a more discriminating audience), and another played dance music on big speakers after most trick-or-treaters had gone to bed.

Yes, I admit it, I was a bit jealous of Princeton Road, but we’ll be rocking more on our block on Yale in the next few years as our dozen or so kids, all six and under, get a few years older. 
In a recent post on Playborhood.com I wrote about the “Trick-or-Treater” index, a measure of a neighborhood’s child-friendliness based on the number of trick-or-treaters visiting a house on Halloween.

Well, my street’s results are in:  Yale Road in the Allied Arts neighborhood of Menlo Park scored 200.  That’s very good.  However, just one block away, our friends and rivals on Princeton Road had a world-class sort of night.  One family reported giving out 500 pieces of candy to trick-or-treaters! 

An organization called Rescuing Recess has recently been formed to bring recess back to schools, and it is sponsored by such organizations as the Cartoon Network, the National Parent Teacher Association, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Education Association.  That’s quite an impressive set of supporters. 

A National Parent Teacher Association press release announcing the formation of Rescuing Recess states that 40 percent of American elementary schools have either eliminated or are considering eliminating recess.

In addition, many schools like Palo Alto’s Addison Elementary, are re-engineering recess to take all the fun out of it.  For instance, children at Addison can’t touch each other in any way, so playing tag or even high-fiving could result in a suspension.

According to a New York Times article, children at Oakdale School in Connecticut can’t play competitive games, and were prohibited from playing with a ball until parents protested and were able to get a non-competitive, supervised form of kickball instituted twice a week.

Children are still encouraged to be active, according to the principal, and are “free to walk the grounds with the school nurse, or depending on the day, sing in the chorus, play chess or pick up litter.”

Homework:  Schools Eat Away at Play at Home
In a previous article on Playborhood.com, Sandra Hofferth notes that 6-12 year-olds spent 25% more time doing homework in 2003 than they did in 1997.  That’s on top of increases of 144% for 6-8 year-olds and 9% for 9-12 year-olds between 1981 and 1997.  The actual averages in 2003 are just over 30 minutes a day for 6-8 year-olds and just over 50 minutes for 9-12 year-olds.

Despite this trend, no one can point to research that says that homework actually helps elementary school kids perform better academically.  No correlation between homework and performance has been found.  (See this article for a great overview of the evidence, or lack thereof.) Nada.  Zilch.

You may have heard the commonly cited rule of thumb about how much homework is “appropriate” for students - 10 minutes per night per grade, so that a first grader should get 10 minutes per night, a second grader should get 20 minutes per night, and so on. 

The person responsible for this rule is Duke University psychology professor Harris Cooper, who is perhaps the most famous academic researcher on the benefits of homework.  Ironically, in his popular book on the subject, The Battle Over Homework, he states that there is no evidence that homework improves academic performance for elementary school students.  His recommendation for homework every night for elementary school students is based not on research evidence but on his intuition that it helps them develop time management skills.  Intuition.  He has no evidence.  Thanks, but no thanks, Professor Cooper.

We Can Work to Reverse This Trend
So, schools are robbing children of their childhoods.  They play less and suffer the effects of this, but according to the research, they get no benefit from playing less.  What can we do to fight this trend?

Fortunately, there are many examples of schools and parents fighting back successfully.  For instance, Denise Clark Pope of Stanford University’s School of Education has started a movement called ”Stressed Out Students” (SOS) that puts reduced homework at the centerpiece of its recommendations.  Many schools have recently announced reduced homework policies, citing SOS as their guide.  SOS runs an annual conference for principals to show them how to implement their recommendations.

Oak Knoll Elementary School of Menlo Park is surrounded on all sides by some of the most competitive, homework-heavy elementary schools in America, but it has a very well-articulated “reduced homework” policy.  Principal David Ackerman has the full support of parents in his community, and Oak Knoll’s test scores indicate that it’s keeping up with its neighbors academically.

In the final analysis, vocal parents get the school policies they want.  Addison and Oak Knoll, two schools within a couple of miles of each other, have taken the very different paths they have on this issue because they’re doing what their parents have requested.  So, if you believe your elementary school should have real recess and a no homework or reduced homework policy, you need to fight for these things or move to a school that already has them, as I just did.

Young children have always had to deal with a sharp decrease in their free play time as they transitioned over a couple of years from no school to elementary school, which they attend about seven hours a day. 

However, in decades past, schools recognized that children of that age need a lot of play to develop appropriately.  They had ample recess breaks with free play every day during the school day, and they let ...

So, my wife and I are going to try something pretty radical - we’re in the process of redesigning our front yard on Yale Road in the Allied Arts neighborhood of Menlo Park to be like an outdoor family room.  Our goal is for multiple neighbors to be hanging out in our front yard everyday.  We want to provide kids with a place to play and learn, and we want to provide parents with a place to socialize with each other and with their kids.

So, how do we do this?  Because the whole idea of inviting social interaction in a front yard is so foreign in our society, this requires an awful lot of thought and planning.  What will attract kids initially to check our outdoor family room out?  What will attract parents initially?  What will keep them coming back?  How do we indicate to neighbors that it’s OK to hang out there on their own, without asking us?  How do we empower them to make their own impact on it? 

I definitely have lots of concrete ideas about this, but I want to hold them close to my vest for now until they’re closer to being realized.  Trust me, though - we’re on the verge of doing something very exciting for neighborhood life here at Yale Road!  Stay tuned…

We don’t have a family neighborhood hangout where we live.  Chances are, you don’t either.

What do I mean by a “family neighborhood hangout?” I long for a place in our neighborhood where parents and kids can go to hang out with other parents and kids - a place for spontaneous, casual socializing.  Sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls these “Third Places,” (see his book, The Great Good Place) behind the First Place, home, and the Second Place, work.

If you live in a city or a small town, you might have a “Cheers” type of local bar or cafe close to your house.  However, today, most local bars and cafes have very little spontaneous social interaction.  Recall the words from the TV show’s theme song, “You wanna go where everyone knows your name.” Do you know of any public place where you can just drop in and be fairly sure you’ll have a conversation with someone you know and like? 

The upside of all this traffic restriction here is that we usually go tens of minutes without seeing a car drive down the road.  On my block, in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a car pass by that didn’t start or stop someplace in the block.  In other words, it’s as if we live in a cul-de-sac - we have no pass-through traffic.  However, unlike living in a cul-de-sac, we can easily access destinations in either direction from our house.

Because of the meager traffic we have here, my four-year-old son Marco and I go bicycling an awful lot in our neighborhood.  In this last month, he has gained a tremendous amount of confidence in handling his bike and navigating the roads.  We usually ride to downtown Menlo Park now rather than drive, even though we live more than a mile away.

In addition, in biking around, Marco and I have gotten to know many families here.  Almost every night, we run into someone we know and hang out with them for a bit.

I’ve always hated traffic restriction practices in Menlo Park.  Examples are:

Sand Hill Road Extension:  This seemed like an obvious need to me from the moment I moved here in 1981, but it took 20 more years.  And, what they finally built doesn’t connect Sand Hill to Alma, which drives me nuts every time I’m on Sand Hill heading toward El Camino.
Willow Road Extension:  This (extending to El Camino), too, has always seemed obvious to me, but we’ll probably never get this one.

Now, though, I’m living in a traffic restriction mecca of Menlo Park, and I’m seeing this from a different perspective.  In fact, I’m loving it!  I live in Allied Arts, where getting to points on adjacent Sand Hill Road, such as Stanford Shopping Center, is way more difficult than one might assume.

In this article, I want to tell the story of how we found this house and how we came to a decision to buy it.

In my Guerilla Playborhood Hunting Techniques article series, I describe three steps that we’ve been using to search for a Playborhood around a home for sale:  1) research neighborhood reputations, 2) research neighbors of promising homes for sale online, and 3) visit the neighborhood and talk to neighbors.  I discuss each of these steps below for this house.

Research Neighborhood Reputations
Yale Road is in the Allied Arts neighborhood of Menlo Park.  We’re friends with two families there: one on College Avenue by Blake (about three blocks away), and another on Princeton Road (about a block and a half away).  So a great deal of what we know of Allied Arts we know from them.  Both families love their immediate blocks, where there are lots of kids playing, particularly on Princeton, which is just one block away from Yale.  Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean Yale Road has lots of kids playing, but it does indicate that the neighborhood has a certain tendency to have this. 

In both places, our friends tell us that Halloweens are very, very active.

Also, they and others told us that people often walk to the retail shops in downtown Menlo Park from there, and indeed, it’s less than a mile away - about a 10 minute walk.  On walkscore.com, the Yale house gets a score of 71, which is very good for a suburban residence.

Finally, and perhaps most important from a neighborhood perspective, we’ve been very impressed by what we’ve heard about Oak Knoll Elementary School, which is the public elementary school our kids would go to (unless over-enrollment problems in Menlo Park force us to go elsewhere).  Like all schools in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, it has great test scores, but what makes it stand out is that it has a reduced homework policy thanks to its visionary principal, David Ackerman.  I’ll be writing about this topic in a separate article soon, but here I’ll just say that educational researchers have not been able to identify any correlation between homework in the elementary years and student achievement, so homework in those years seems to be a waste of time that cuts into children’s playtime. 

Research Neighbors of Promising Homes for Sale Online
I received frequent email alerts of homes that I might be interested in from my brokers and from Movoto.com.  When I received these, I would scan the prices, bedrooms, baths, square footage, and location (which from my local knowledge I could usually map to a neighborhood).  Whenever I saw a promising house in a neighborhood I liked, I would research next-door neighbors of the house as I describe in an article on this topic.  In our case, I was looking for preschoolers and parents likely to have kids in the future, since our kids are 3-1/2 and 6 months, and we plan to have more.

In this case, when I saw the alert for the Yale house, I found it appealing enough to do next-door neighbor research on Zillow.com and Intelius.com.  For the neighbor on one side I Googled the parents and found a birth announcement in 2006 in which an older brother was mentioned.  Great news!!!  Then, I Googled the neighbors on the other side and found the personal home page of the owner, in which he showed wedding pictures from the summer of last year.  I guessed that a newly married couple buying a nice 3+ bedroom house in Menlo Park would be having children soon.

So, my online neighbor research was a home run - it was likely that both next-door neighbors would have kids our kids’ ages.  This was definitely enough good information to warrant my taking the next step, a neighborhood visit.

Visit the Neighborhood and Talk to Neighbors
When I visited the immediate neighborhood around the Yale house for the first time, the first thing I saw was two neighbors and a toddler girl hanging out talking.  Good.  I joined their conversation, telling them that my wife and I were interested in buying the house for sale, and because I have two preschoolers, I wanted to know about others who lived around there. 

Since I was talking to a mother of a toddler, I got a rundown on the feeling of the neighborhood and the kid population of houses close to her.  I was impressed, both by her friendliness and by what she told me about preschoolers there.  After that, I knocked on the doors of the next door neighbors of the house for sale.  I spoke to the father whose child had a birth announcement two years ago, and indeed he spoke ...