Silent Streets
Public space is impoverished by the absence of children
I am jetlagged and scarcely functional. So I’ve hammered out today’s post rather hastily. Having very recently returned from a family holiday in France, I have a few reflections I want to share before the motivating, emotional impulse that drove me to write this dissipates. On the long plane journey back from Paris, I re-watched the 2006 film, Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. It made me think about the space that children occupy, or don’t occupy, in our world.
One of the first things we noticed upon arriving in France is that a lot of things have been set up extremely well for children. Our hotel had an entire play room with cushions to romp on, and in the main lobby area, the hotel room key card provided access to old-style video games, which were popular with the older kids. Almost as soon as we left the hotel, we came across a very large playground. Because our young kids were tired and cranky, we decided we should interrupt any further plans for sightseeing or coffee drinking or eating, and simply let them play. The playground had attracted about 40 to 50 kids, which is well beyond what even the busiest of our local playgrounds here in Edmonton hosts. It was a very international crowd. I overheard at least three languages spoken—French, English and Japanese. Some of the kids were in wheelchairs, being cared for by their préposés. On the periphery of the playground were concrete tables for table tennis, allowing adults to engage in their own version of playtime. It was, in short, an urbanist’s paradise: very social, welcoming and diverse. (Although I have almost no doubt that the demographics skewed toward a higher level of affluence compared to the Paris average.) We left the playground in a decidedly better mood than we had entered it and I was reminded that children make public space better—simply by being there.
Children of Men opens with the death of Baby Diego, who is, in this dystopian vision of the year 2027, the last child to have been born before the fertility rate plummeted to zero. There are almost no establishing shots of place or of the main character, Theo (played by Clive Owen). The film gets right into it. Theo is one of many Londoners gathering in a cafe to watch the news of Baby Diego’s stabbing death. Later, we see Theo arrive at his job at the Ministry of Energy, and every single one of his coworkers is watching the same news on their computers, and all of them are sobbing—quietly but inconsolably.
It’s the sadness of Children of Men that sets it apart from most other dystopian films. During one of the film’s rare quiet moments, Miriam, a former midwife by occupation, describes how she slowly discovered the disturbing plummet in human fertility that occurred in the opening decade of the 21st century. She says, “As the sound of the playgrounds faded, the despair set in.”
I’ve developed a growing fascination with playgrounds ever since becoming a father. Wherever there are many unused or underused playgrounds or playgrounds that fail to bring children and parents together socially, I believe a city is failing at an essential function. By this measure, most of Edmonton—a pathologically suburban and sparsely populated city—is failing badly. But the playground approximately 15 blocks from where we live is one of the liveliest anywhere in town, and so we feel very lucky for that. It is well worth the extra time spent walking (or cycling, or scootering, or driving) to get there.
Not so long ago, children could play almost anywhere, not just in playgrounds. As documented in many places, including The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, those days have almost completely come to an end. My wife and I, even though there are nine years between us, are both of a generation raised with the relative freedom to simply wander our local environs. That is a freedom our own children will never know, and there are several reasons for this. There’s the fact that increasingly heavy and big cars and trucks have made the streets more dangerous. There’s also the fact that—whether it’s socially acceptable to say so or not—there are now large numbers of rough-living people for whom the government has totally abandoned responsibility, and the sidewalks mostly belong to them. Lastly, there’s the fact that the general social consensus is that a child is the responsibility of no one but the parents. The mantra “it takes a village” was a nice proverb that Hillary Clinton once repurposed from the Yoruba people in Nigeria—and almost no one intends to live by it. If you let your kids wander unattended, someone is going to call Children’s Services. Cities reinvented themselves to make children all but irrelevant to anyone except those with direct responsibility for them.
Yet in France, I caught a glimpse of a slightly different culture in which other responsible adults make accommodations for children. At Auchan near Chateauroux, a very generic supermarket on par with the Canadian Loblaws chain, there was a small play area for children right in front of the entrance. A terrific idea for stressed-out parents who have had to drive through the busy streets and across the soulless car park to get there! At Centre Leclerc, a supermarket in Guéret, I had to take my elder daughter to the washroom. We went to the women’s washroom, having found the men’s room out of service, but I was very unsure about the accepted gender protocol. We hovered at the doorway for several seconds before a middle-aged lady offered to take my daughter into a stall. Without that kind lady’s intervention, my daughter might well have abandoned her washroom trip out of fear for being in a strange and unfamiliar place.
There were several other instances of adults taking a lively interest in our children—blowing kisses and joking about wanting to adopt them. It was very uplifting. When I re-watched Children of Men, the general air of misery made even more sense to me than it had when I watched the film in my childless days. Part of Theo’s backstory is that he lost his one and only child to a flu pandemic that struck in 2008. He wanders around much of this film in a traumatized daze, clearly not wanting to be dragged back into any kind of active participation in society. When he finally invests himself in trying to protect the character of Kee, a refugee who, by some miracle, has suddenly appeared in the world heavily pregnant, it’s as if he is saying to himself: I was powerless to save my own child but I’ll do everything in my power to save this one. From my tight economy airplane seat, I nearly cried. Clive Owen carries much of the emotion of this film with the most subtle of movements and expressions—very English. He has the kind of reserve that believes in hurriedly crying in private before getting on with one’s duty.
Children of Men provides no explanatory reason for the sudden halt to humans’ ability to reproduce. The story is better for that, remaining at the level of allegory and opening itself up to various interpretations. Theo asks Kee if she knows the father of her baby and she says, “I am a virgin,” and then gives him just enough time to become truly mystified by the potential import of what she’s saying. Then her raucous laughter breaks the spell. “Fuck knows,” she confesses. “I don't know half the wankers' names.” This removes the obvious and direct Christian parallel without unveiling the aura of the miracle. In fact, it arguably retains a sense of Christian awe and faith in the power of the miraculous, which is an extraordinary accomplishment in these dark times.
The profound sadness and unease about the future that informs Children of Men comes from the lived global experience of recent decades. It’s not just that fewer couples choose to have babies. It’s that many of them cannot.
“Sperm counts have been falling for decades. Scientists are not clear why, and amid signs the decline is accelerating, have warned a fertility crisis is looming on the horizon. One study estimates total sperm counts, which affect the chances of conception, have fallen as much as 62% between 1973 and 2018.” Forbes.
There is an unfortunate feedback loop that we might be witnessing as children become less and less visible in public space, and so fewer people have direct experience with children, whether through their own parenting or by growing up as one of many siblings. Certain basic skills are waning, and many adults lack even baseline levels of confidence to intervene when they see a kid in trouble. When I was a boy, I walked right into the middle of the local main road and almost got myself killed by a speeding car. The driver slammed on the brakes and then, after he had finished berating me, did something that’s all but unimaginable in today’s world. He asked me where I lived and walked with me to my parents’ house and told my father about the recklessness I had just displayed. I never forgot the lesson I learned that day.
I have been trying to impart lessons to my own children, even though the world is very different for them from what it was for me. Even though there are other local parents who think I am crazy for doing so, I regularly take my children—especially the eldest, who is school age—on to Edmonton’s much maligned public transit system. This routine started in kindergarten. In month two of the experiment, we had an unpleasant encounter. We boarded the bus at our usual stop and a woman, who was slumped in her window seat but nevertheless alert, glared at us. “Do you think I give a fuck about children? I don’t give a fuck about children!” she hollered. We sat down several rows back, but the woman wasn’t finished. She turned and yelled at us: “You can fuck my ass!” In this moment, my experiment with public transport seemed to be imploding and I felt furious with myself but also with the entire fraying social fabric of this northern city. Each new person that boarded the bus received the same earful of insults and rage that we had endured. Eventually the bus driver told the woman to be quiet, and her anger escalated even further. I rang the bell. We were still many blocks away from our stop. I told my daughter we would be getting off and would wait for the next bus. From the calm of the sidewalk, I tried to explain what had happened. “That lady clearly isn’t feeling well,” I said. “But it’s not OK for her to swear and shout at people like that.” My daughter started to swell with her own righteousness, agreeing with me. “That lady wasn’t nice,” she said.
Yet there are other lessons to be learned on public transport. The instances of swearing and abuse are exceptionally rare. What is far more common: people getting up and giving their seats to the elderly or to pregnant women. What is very common is people folding up their seats to make way for people in wheelchairs. What is very common is passengers cheerfully calling out “Thank you!” to the driver when they arrive at their stop, a habit that my daughter insists on us following, each and every time.
I think the parents who have given up on public transport are the crazy ones—especially given the stupendous costs of owning and maintaining private vehicles. Transit is our public space. Ridership levels have completely rebounded from pandemic lows. This is our shared infrastructure. It’s one of the few places left where children can learn lessons about courtesy and safety and how to interact respectfully with strangers; it’s where they can learn about their responsibilities toward others and about others’ responsibilities toward them.
I insist on making my children visible in public space. We don’t live in the world of Children of Men. Children are still being born and they matter. It’s not necessary to go all the way to France to see how to live differently. We can do so wherever we live, here and now.
NOTES
I have another feature story in Alberta Views in the September issue: it’s about what children are taught in school. It follows the arduous journey, over a decade long, to implement a new social studies curriculum in K-6 classrooms and the intense political nature of the process. Albertans will find it on newsstands now. Pick up a copy for yourself! In a subsequent post, I’ll share a link to the online version.
Articles / news stories
“It Takes a Village,” Hillary Clinton
“Sperm counts are down worldwide and researchers are discovering why.” New Scientist, January 2024
“Sperm Counts Have Been Falling For Decades—Researchers Think Cell Phones Could Help Explain Why,” Forbes, November 1, 2023
Photos
Empty streets
https://dailyhive.com/montreal/montreal-empty-inspiration-video
Film still from Children of Men
https://www.scifimoviezone.com/childrenmen01.shtml
Our church is filled with young children, and their chatter, giggles and cries can be a distraction during the most solemn parts of the service. But I have had occasional to supply preach in a couple of churches where there are no such distractions, and the silence is deafening. A church, like any other community without children is in a death spiral. And sadly, the average age of the congregations of many churches, in city centres in particular, are into the senior years. Who knew that a death rattle was no sound at all.