As an ex-Soviet immigrant, this is one of the things that was most striking about Americans to me, early on. Adults seem to make a very big deal about their children; they have an awful lot of displacement. From what I remember in Moscow, people just had children rather matter-of-factly, and generally stayed out of their way.

It's not an apples-to-oranges comparison, of course; in our culture there was a great deal of supporting infrastructure in the form of grandparents often in the same city, an effective network of neighbours, the environment was not suburban, there was a free state-sponsored daycare/kindergarten available from a very young age, etc. Still, it seems that there is a great deal of anxiety about having children here because of the self-fulfilling expectation is that children are going to be extremely disruptive to one's incumbent lifestyle.

I don't think that necessarily needs to be the case. Yes, children introduce changes, no doubt about it, especially when they're really young. But at the end of the day, you are still you. You still have your identity, you still have your individuality, you still have your profession, your passions, your interests, your friends, etc. I don't see why people have to resign themselves to "see you in 20 years".

The suburban pattern of development strikes me as being far more responsible for this than people give it credit for. A big part of the reason why "play dates" have to be arranged is because in these vast tracts of suburban expanse, children substantially rely on being driven to "activities" by their parents in order to do anything outside the house at all, immediate neighbours notwithstanding. From what I can see, exurban subdivisions are getting larger, with houses being spaced farther and farther apart. And of course, the inefficiencies that inhere in all this, the enormous drags on parents' time, in turn fulfills the prophecy: if you're going to be an "involved" parent, you really are up to your ears in obsessive logistics.

I was lucky enough to have avoided a lot of these pitfalls because I spent many of my formative years in an unusually communal setting in the US (a married graduate student housing complex), the likes of which I have not encountered since, even in nominally analogous parental career situations. It had a high population of children and many adults who were constantly around keeping watch in some way, making for a safe place for dozens of us to run around and play at all hours. It was a very practical nod to "it takes a village".

It was not until we moved on that I got to appreciate how much I had--the same stuff I took for granted as a little boy in Russia--that other middle-class kids here lacked. Chiefly, it was the ability to spontaneously organise my socialisation with other kids more or less as I wanted. I learned the overwhelming preponderance of what there was to learn about life on the playground, especially given my latchkey situation. If I wanted to go hang out with my friend, I'd walk over to his apartment and knock.

I turned out just fine (cue for laughter). More importantly, I don't get the impression that this kind of thing, which I take for practically a God-given human right, is a common option for the average suburbanite today. The entire locus of possibilities is described by unconscienable distances of freeway, mediated by the cursed automobile. You can't really run around anymore. Where? With whom?

And for all this wondrous hospitality, which was so instrumental in my formative years and my coming of age, so inextricably bound up in who I am today, with so many friendships and experiences that continue to endure, to forever be fixtures of my fond reminiscing and my imagination, my parents and their peers routinely got harassment from the state department of family and children's services. Supposedly we were being "neglected". Bollocks to that; we were being allowed to actually live, not to suffocate silently in the cul-de-sac at the end of the driveway in that neighbourhood that's a "nice place to raise kids", and with all the soul of a funeral parlour. Damn them all to hell! As you say, a little neglect never hurt anybody. Quite the contrary!

The other syndromes are more widely understood and don't bear extensive repetition here: (1) culture of obsessive "safety"--the intense, burning conviction that being out and about physically exploring the world is innately in conflict with almighty "safety"; (2) the Baby Einstein pathology, which postulates that your child is a budding musical/artistic/athletic/etc. genius, but this genius will go unrealised unless s/he is shuttled all over creation in a dizzying itinerary of (possibly extracurricular) "activities" and "programs" that leave them little to no time to spontaneously indulge their curiosities or whims.