Can the Information Highway Lead Back to the Good Old Days?

When I was four, my parents moved into a brand new subdivision near Philadelphia. Most of the families on our street were like us: buying their first houses, raising young children. The parents along our side of the street made an interesting choice: They decided not to put up fences between their backyards. So for a stretch of six or seven houses, those contiguous backyards created a kind of a park where we played an endless series of games.

Back then, in the 1960s, you could count on one or more moms being home, keeping an eye and an ear open to what was happening. It's not just nostalgic to say things were safer back then. Thanks to this benign surveillance, things really were safer.

Nowadays, neighborhoods are mostly uninhabited during the day. Parents are away at work. Kids are making their scheduled rounds of day care and play dates and after-school activities. The unstructured play that we all took for granted just isn't a safe or sensible option.

We can't wind the clock back, but there is an opportunity to recolonize our neighborhoods and recreate the possibility of safe unstructured play. There aren't many moms at home being moms. But there are growing numbers of moms and dads who work in home offices at least part of the time.

Studies suggest that officially sanctioned telecommuting may not be growing, or may even be declining somewhat. But it's clear to me that an unofficial "Don't ask, don't tell" policy is widely in effect. I often hear someone say: "I'm working from home today." That's not happening because the company's telecommuting policy grants a day a week, or three. It's happening because employers know that a lot of the best work gets done away from the office.

My wife and I are among the fortunate few who can work fulltime in our home. I'm in my office at the front of our house, and she's in her studio at the back. As a result, we've been able to make our home a social nexus for our kids and their friends. We see and hear what's going on. Our kids know that. So do their friends, and so do their friends' parents.

Does watching and listening distract us from our work? I'd be lying if I said it never does. But I doubt you can say truthfully that you're never distracted at the office by non-work-related interruptions. And like those 1960s moms, we don't need to be actively engaged with kids most of the time. In a safe environment governed by benign surveillance, kids can and will occupy themselves.

Telecommuting isn't available to everyone, of course. If you're a police officer or a physical therapist or a roofer, you can't phone it in. But if you're an office worker, and if the tools of your trade are the telephone, the computer, and the Internet, you really can work effectively from any location. When that location is your home, telecommuting doesn't just reduce the time, the stress, the expense, and the environmental impact of driving to work. It can restore to your neighborhood some of the qualities of a life we thought was gone forever.