Why Aren't American Kids Old Enough?

What Japan's Got That We Don't

Kids don’t play outside anymore. Instead, they sit inside, glued to their screens. What happened? In 2007, The Daily Mail detailed how children have lost the right to go places on their own in only a few generations. The same pattern has played out in the US and Canada as well. A woman in Austin had CPS called on her for letting her child play just outside her home unsupervised. Ridiculous, and yet quiet suburban neighborhoods also present the most danger to children. More than drugs, violence, or kidnappings, children are most likely to be hurt by cars. The irony is, the more parents drive their kids around, the more dangerous it becomes to let kids walk on their own in a vicious cycle of ever decreasing freedom. It used to be that kids would explore their neighborhoods, meet up with their friends, or run errands for mom and dad all on their own. But suburbanization and automobility have robbed them of that (and robbed parents too!).

Yet that isn’t the world we see in “Old Enough”. “Old Enough” was one of those COVID lockdown fads like “Tiger King,” baking sourdough, or Dalgona coffee. The Japanese show follows different toddlers in various parts of Japan as they set off on their very first errands away from home without the help of their adults. After its success, Netflix released a second season, but it didn’t revive the popularity of its first appearance. The fad has come and gone, but I still can’t get the show out of my head. I cheered on those little ones as they dashed across town, cried with their parents and witnessed alongside them this important moment in their child's growth. I held my breath whenever a child stumbled and fell, or while waiting to see if they would remember all of their errands! I laughed at the silly childhood antics that are clearly universal across cultures.

But I couldn’t get the question out of my head: why do Japanese children get to enjoy more freedom than their American counterparts? (And why do Japanese parents get to enjoy more helpful and independent kids?!) What decisions have the Japanese made that young children can move about freely while such a thing would be unthinkable in almost all of the United States? And could we do the same?

I’ve seen people offer explanations like “Japan is smaller and everything is closer together,” or “Japan is culturally homogeneous”, but I don’t think either of those cuts it. They act as excuses for why our children don’t have the same level of freedom. It doesn’t have to be this way! Our kids could be just as free! But they aren’t.

Japan’s size doesn’t really matter. Japan may have over 90% of its population in urban areas, but the US also has 85% of its population in urban areas. Both nations are comparably urbanized. That cities are further apart from one another in the US than Japan doesn’t really have anything to do with whether a kid can navigate their neighborhood on their own. Moreover, the show follows children living in all kinds of situations in Japan, from Tokyo to suburbs to a farm area so rural they rely on a state sponsored grocery bus to buy basic goods. Something more than mere proximity is going on here.

Nor is cultural homogeneity a good explanation. Even though Japan is very culturally homogeneous, it doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on childhood safety. Despite perceptions of “stranger danger,” only about 350 children/year are kidnapped by strangers in the United States, a rate of about 0.14/100k people. Japan’s rate of 0.2 is comparable, even slightly higher. American children aren’t at any more risk of kidnappings or shady neighborhood interlopers than Japanese children.

But American children do face challenges from how we have chosen to design the places where we live. What is different about all of the places shown in “Old Enough”? What do they have in common? They are all shaped in similar ways by the choices that Japanese people have made about how to design and maintain their communities. In many communities in the US, people are segmented, live independently, and lack substantial and multiplex interconnections. Many Japanese communities, on the other hand, consist of people that are thoroughly intertwined in a multitude of ways. First, people have connections with a greater number of people in their communities and those connections vary in their depth. Second, those relationships are mutual; they are based on reciprocity of support for one another. Third, those relationships require less effort to maintain, as neighborhoods are designed to facilitate impromptu interactions. Japanese communities also have sustained bonds of economic interdependence, and shared governing mechanisms that bring people together in common cause. It is these aspects of Japanese neighborhood design that lend themselves to a shared sense of values and identification with their community–not ethnicity. These many facets come together to create the kinds of lives where parents can send their toddlers off to run errands without fear. 

These facets of community are not accidental. In fact, “Old Enough!” gives us a glimpse into what the Japanese have done to engender this kind of lifestyle. In nearly every episode, the toddler and the shopkeepers where they run their errands already know each other. For instance, in Episode Six the young son of a local sushi chef has to take his father’s work uniform to the local cleaners. Because the cleaner does business with the father every day, he is trusted to help the boy and the parents coordinate with him beforehand. In episode four, a three year old girl goes to the local shotengai (shopping street) to buy fish. She and her mother go every week so all of the shop owners know her and help her.

The Shotengai from Episode 4 of “Old Enough”

Other neighbors and local shopkeepers also often personally know the child, look out for them, and provide them with direction and moral support when needed. In Episode 10 the little girl delivering lunch to her father has an older brother who went through the same rite of passage. It is likely that many of the adults in the community had their own children who had the same experience. The first errand is therefore not just a personal journey, but a community event.

A major part of why such practices are possible is how neighborhoods are built. Neighborhoods are designed to allow anyone to walk safely. Speed limits are low, blocks are short, and intersections are frequent. Thus drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists are quite used to safely coexisting. On street parking is rare and views are unobstructed. Drivers are trained in “omoiyari unten” (generous driving) and very used to putting it into practice, looking out for cyclists, pedestrians, and children. Children are also taught to say hello to strangers, rather than treat them as dangerous, as we see in Episode Seven. When the little girl’s mother asks what she should say to people while on her errand, the girl responds “Hello!” This way children get to know their neighbors more easily. Thus the way that communities are built combine with the practices of living in them to make walking and interacting safer.

This is all possible because of the rules for building neighborhoods in Japan. First, Japan has a set of centralized planning codes that allows for a huge diversity of development. The U.S. and Canada use what is called Euclidean zoning, or single-use zoning, something similar to games like SimCity where each zone allows developers to build only one type of construction, single-family housing, commercial buildings, industrial buildings, etc. Japan uses a very different approach. With only 12 different zones, Japan’s approach is to exclude certain types of construction in each zone. Exclusions are typically focused around the type of environment Japanese people desire to live in. Industrial facilities that present a harm to the environment or to health are excluded from all but one type of zone (which is also one of the few that doesn’t allow housing), and all construction must adhere to nisshouken, or right to sunshine, laws. Zoning focuses on direct impacts like airflow, roofs for pedestrians, and limits to height and use of space in buildings rather than limiting use in zones at large.

Japanese land use zones. They are both simple and flexible, allowing for diverse land use, abundant housing, and thicker communities.

Registering a car requires that the owner prove they own a parking space where it can fit. The police may personally come and measure the size of the spot! This means that the cost of car ownership is the responsibility of the owner rather than paid for through public subsidies to parking. Even the most restrictive residential zone allows for live-work businesses and multi-unit housing. The system also maintains its flexibility by allowing municipalities to waive or add certain rules if they can demonstrate that local circumstances would benefit from doing so. The central rules are supported by a system of local councils that give neighborhoods a say over how those common rules are enacted and gives residents a stake in their neighborhood. For example, developers can ignore right to sunshine laws if they don’t intend on building any housing, a rule that lets commercial streets build dense enough to be shotengai (shopping street) like the one featured in episode four. Such streets are common and are an important site of community building.

The result is a built environment that focuses on community. People, whether they live in a suburb, urban core, or rural village, live among one another. Zones like the neighborhood commercial zone encourage local businesses, which in turn creates a higher degree of economic interdependence between community members. The need to locally decide on waivers to zoning rules brings community members together politically to decide how they want to live. Communities also frequently have groups that perform activities like managing trash collection, monitoring childrens’ commute to school, or managing rotating neighborhood news bulletin boards (kairanban) in which participation is mandatory. Neighborhood residents see each other frequently through these activities. They also run into each other just because they often walk or bike to get around and most of their needs are met locally. So people know each other, and feel a sense of connection and belonging that is often lacking in American neighborhoods.

Kids going to or from school, assisted by retiree volunteers (silver jinzai) who conduct traffic at intersections in the morning and when school gets out.

Another important benefit of this style of planning is cost of living. Housing prices in Japan have been fairly stable over the past 20 years. In part this is because of affordable housing policies. Japan has what most Americans would think of as affordable housing: government provided or subsidized housing for poor people. But in addition, they have something called Danchi. These are communities (they often include parks, shops, daycares, and other amenities besides housing) operated by the semi-public entity, the Urban Renaissance Agency (UR), which provides affordable housing for the middle class.

An example of a Danchi provided by UR in Yokohama, a suburb south of Tokyo.

The less restrictive zoning practices also help keep market prices for housing affordable, even in Tokyo, the most populous city in the world! By allowing developers to build a wider variety of types of construction on a wider variety of types of plots, they can respond more directly to market needs. For example, even in the most restrictive residential zone, developers can build multi-family units. This means that if prices are high, developers can increase density anywhere. Or if demand for housing is greater than demand for commercial or industrial buildings, housing can also be built in either of those zones. A typical working professional can afford to live anywhere in Tokyo; the choice depends more on which trade-offs they are willing to accept than general affordability. This stands in stark contrast to most American cities, where neighborhoods are highly differentiated by wealth. Thus, while American city dwellers, and even many rural towns, have seen housing prices skyrocket, forcing them to live further and further from work, friends, and family, the Japanese are able to do things like live close to parents or other relatives. The strength of familial ties and other long standing relationships can be maintained and marshaled to further strengthen their communities when young adults don’t get priced out of the places where they grew up.

“Old Enough” is more than just an entertaining Japanese TV show with cute toddlers doing cute things. To me it represents an ideal. It harkens back to childhoods of free-range kids that have been seemingly lost to time. But this is not inevitable. Japan has clearly chosen to set policies to build neighborhoods and villages that foster the kinds of communities where even a 2 year-old can safely run errands alone. We could start making similar choices in our own communities today. Perhaps we just needed to see that another way of living–a richer, more fulfilling one–is possible first.