One of my biggest disappointments as a parent was choosing the wrong neighborhood for our son. We picked one that we thought was going to have lots of kids, but

One of my biggest disappointments as a parent was choosing the wrong neighborhood for our son. We picked one that we thought was going to have lots of kids, but it ended up not happening. It has some kids, but the problem these days is that a minority of neighborhoods have the critical mass combination of number of kids X number of free range parents. We can kick our son out of the house, but there is really no one else to play with. We've tried it, and the only kids regularly outside are 3-4 years younger, and he tried to play with them but got bored quickly. It's really depressing as I am all for the free range parenting. But our location is just the wrong match of things to do around and number of kids :( In hindsight I would've moved elsewhere, although my wife moved when she as a kid and she is still scarred by that experience. Our son is 13 now and we need to keep him in camps because the only other option is for him to sit at home and screens all day - last summer he had almost no camps, and we tried to get him outside, but he'd go house-to-house and see if he could get friends to go do anything, and it basically never worked. And if it did, they'd go sit on some swings at the school, chat for 30 minutes, and then the friends would leave. Depressing as all hell. Pandemic didn't help the situation. When I was a kid, it was "out of the house" after breakfast, and then maybe stop by for lunch, and then "be home when the streetlights come on or if Dad whistles".