Archinect - News

Turning America's suburbs into 'playborhoods' for kids to cope with fear

2016-10-25T13:31:00-04:00

They were living in San Francisco, but they wanted to move out of the city to a playborhood — a version of American kid life featured in shows like “The Little Rascals” and “Leave It to Beaver,” in which kids build forts and ride bikes outside, unsupervised — free, skirting danger, but ultimately always lucky. [...] Dangerous play is how kids learn how to titrate fear. [...] “If the instinct wasn’t of evolutionary benefit, the behavior would have been rooted out.”

This piece is ostensibly about parenting, and one Silicon Valley-dad who is trying to teach (and trust) his kids to take physical risks. But in defiance of the "helicopter parent" method, Mark Laska, the piece's subject dad, elects to modify his own environment rather than coaching his individual kids. He changes his home, yard and (he hopes) his city to create environments that all kids can learn test their own limits in—without parents presence, but with their parents' trust.

These super-rich parents are building bespoke houses to homeschool their children

2016-02-19T17:46:00-05:00

The [Taylor] family is part of a small subset of affluent homeowners who home-school their kids—but not for typical reasons of wanting to provide religious instruction or because they don’t like the public schools nearby. Instead, they say they can create their own optimal learning environments by buying or building homes in which almost every room is a classroom. [...] “When you do a house from the ground up, you do it for how your family lives. Home schooling for us is a lifestyle”

More at the intersection of space and education:

Architecture + motherhood

2012-10-10T11:38:00-04:00

Parenting is not the only factor affecting women’s engagement in architecture, but for many it is a big challenge. Samara Greenwood tells her story of negotiating architecture and motherhood so far – interspersed with thoughts from friends and colleagues.