Playing in the Street

Urban planner Angie Schmitt on raising kids in car-dependent America

Substack Notes has gotten good at knowing what I like: takes from people who aren’t consumed with politics about what constitutes a good civic life. That’s how I found Angie Schmitt’s work. I was excited to talk to her today about designing communities that include and engage kids and families.

We also talk about taking the news in with a little more removal in the summer, which feels hard and complicated and privileged and necessary. And outside of politics, Angie talks about the book Shiloh, and I share (truly just a fraction) of my love for The Sheep Detectives.

Topics Discussed

• Taking an emotional break from the news without checking out entirely

• ICE shootings, cabinet confirmation hearings, and the Iran war

• Why car-dependent neighborhoods limit kids’ independence

• The nationwide school bus driver shortage

• Disappearing teen hangouts and rules around unsupervised kids

• How lawsuit-aversion backfires on children’s wellbeing

• Rebuilding civic infrastructure — rec leagues, public pools, community schools

• Book recommendations: Shiloh and The Sheep Detectives

Want more Pantsuit Politics? Subscribe to ensure you never miss an episode and get access to our premium shows and community.

Episode Resources

• Angie’s book on the rise in pedestrian deaths, Right of Way (Princeton University Press)

• Angie’s Substack, Love of Place

• The Substack essay on how young adults are poor despite doing everything right (Becoming Noble)

• USDOT’s Safe Streets and Roads for All program

• Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (Simon & Schuster)

• The Sheep Detectives (IMDb)

• Join us in Minneapolis, August 29th (Pantsuit Politics)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Beth: This is Beth Silvers; you’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Sarah is out on summer break, and my guest host today is Angie Schmitt, a writer and urban planner. I’m excited for you to hear from Angie. I wanted to talk with her principally about two things. We start with how important it is to have a different vibe in the summer about the news. I am sick about ICE killing Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas. I watched enough of the Jay Clayton and Todd Blanche confirmation hearings to get good and mad about how unimpressive and just unhinged people seeking and occupying the highest offices in our government are. The Iran war is so deeply depressing and senseless and maddening. I can’t even think about the produce diarrhea and all that represents. And I am really trying to flush some of that emotion from my body this summer so that I can come back in the fall and be ready to tell important stories, analyze information thoughtfully, and share good advice as we head into the midterm elections when we have real power to exercise.

[00:01:28] Angie and I talk a little bit about that lightness around the news. I love what she says in this conversation about not giving Donald Trump some of the best eight years of her life, and I’m going to adopt that as a motto. Our thesis here at Pantsuit Politics is that you can pay attention to the world and care about it and still find a happy, grounded, connected life, and that is the spirit of the first part of the conversation with Angie. But most of this episode is about building cities and neighborhoods that provide us with the infrastructure of a meaningful life. Being able to walk around our cities safely, having places for kids to hang out without their parents. I really enjoyed hearing Angie’s perspective and expertise, and hope that you will, too. Before we begin, I want to remind you of our opportunity as a podcast community to get together in person for fun and friendship in Minneapolis on August 29th. And I want to give a special thanks and shout-out to Fearless Finance and Substack for sponsoring that gathering. We could not do it without you. We’d love to see you there for the live show and the after party. All the information that you need to snag your tickets is in the show notes. And now, meet Angie Schmitt. Angie, thank you so much for joining me for today’s episode. Can you just take a second and introduce yourself to the audience?

[00:02:53] Angie Schmitt: So my name is Angie Schmitt. I have a background as a journalist, but I work as an urban planner, and so my work is it kind of spans those two realms a little bit. I have a Substack blog called Love of Place, and I’m working on a book right now. I’m the author of a book that was published about six years ago about the rise in pedestrian deaths in the US, so I have a little bit of a expertise in traffic safety. But my new book that’s going to be coming out probably in 2028 from North Point Press, is about how to make cities and neighborhoods more family-friendly, and it talks a little bit about how raising children has changed. And it goes into not just what’s happening in our streets and playgrounds, but also gets into some issues about rec sports and travel sports and the availability of public pools and swim lessons. So just looking at the economy of choices parents today are operating under and how that’s changed in some ways for the worse from when I grew up.

[00:03:54] Beth: I’m really excited to talk to you about all that. I found you on Substack. Sometimes I talk about Substack like a mall, where we have our store, and you can browse the whole mall if you want to or you can just come to our store if you want. That’s what I really like about it. But I like browsing the whole mall sometimes because I come across someone like you, or I was just watching your notes thinking, “She sounds really normal. Like really smart, but also really normal.” And that’s where I wanted to start today because it has been such a weird week in the news. We’ve had ICE kill two more people in vehicle stops. The Iran war was off and now it’s on, and off and on again. It seems really on right now. We’ve had congressional testimony for people trying to be confirmed to offices that they seem wholly unqualified for to me. I just want to talk about what is this like for a person trying to have a normal July with kids at home and limited time to take off work and just trying to really enjoy every minute? How do we do this?

[00:04:51] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. I don’t know. I was a lot more engaged with following the news and, I worked in the news. So for a while I was just constantly, it was like a IV drip of Twitter, and it was really making me insane. And I just thought at a certain point once Trump got reelected, I just decided Trump’s going to be in office for eight years of my life, some of the best eight years of my life. I’m not going to let him ruin eight years of my life. That’s really letting him win. I try to devote as little attention to thinking about him as I can. I don’t feel very empowered right now. Hopefully the midterms, right? I feel like we’re always have our fingers crossed and are praying for the midterms. But I just feel like at this point I’m looking forward to the midterms, but I don’t feel like I have a lot of power over national politics. And I think that a good project for a lot of us is rebuilding some of our local civic infrastructure. There’s been a lot of damage done there that I think feeds up into some of our political problems, and that’s where we can get more satisfaction out of what we contribute and benefit people more maybe.

[00:05:54] Beth: That’s the posture that I’ve been trying to take too, even with my work as a political podcaster, to just realize, we have the summer, and then we will have the midterms. We will dial back in when there’s something for us to do. Right now I just can’t get wrapped up in Pete Hegseth talking about testosterone testing kits. Yeah. It’s beyond parody to me. It is so bizarre. And so on one hand, I find it easy to put that stuff aside. The ICE of it all is extremely enraging to me. And I don’t feel that I have much power over that, like you said. I’ve contacted my members of Congress. I’ve said this is unacceptable to me. I don’t know what else to do, and I don’t know how to demonstrate for my kids a life where you sustainably care about the world if I feel that fully all day, every day.

[00:06:53] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. And one of my things, and I get in in trouble online for saying this, but I feel like our role right now is to get our own house in order. And I think Trump is gift wrapping this for us on a plate, right? Like he doubled gas prices. He got us into a war with Iran that we lost. He’s insider trading. Like people are unhappy with this administration, and rightly so. But Democrats need to be careful that they don’t... And I think that they’ve made some decisions in the past that have alienated certain people who are more, I don’t know, in the middle or... just they’ve made some unforced errors in the past that have kept Trump sort of competitive. So I think that’s an important project right now is what mistakes have we made? How can we strengthen our standing vis-a-vis Trump so that we can vanquish this whole thing. And I think hopefully that time is coming just based on how disastrous everything has been. But I do think that’s an important project also.

[00:07:58] Beth: I can understand why that gets you in trouble online. We get in trouble for that too. I think it is maddening. Like people who say like there’s such a double standard are right. Yes, there is. There’s a double standard. Things are really tough when you pay attention to all the details of what this administration is doing. There is a certain amount of privilege in opting out. I don’t have any argument with all of that. I just think how do I channel my life and my energy in a way that makes a difference in the long term? And I don’t think I can make a difference If every single day I am dedicated to the project of being enraged

[00:08:35] Angie Schmitt: We also have to convert people too, I think. And sometimes being enraged, especially when it manifests as like yelling at people or scolding people or not listening to different perspectives could alienate people that we really need to win over to our side to have an impact on these issues. So I think that it’s important to be conscious of that as well.

[00:08:57] Beth: Yeah. I think about this too like what is attractive? What is an attractive political movement to be part of? Or not even a movement, but just a political project. What kind of person do I want to associate with? And it’s someone who cares for sure and is informed, yes, but who also can take a vacation and who can look around and say, “Some of this is really unacceptable to me, and there’s work for me to do and I’m going to focus on my work.” I know that you were just on vacation. I’m wondering like what bubbled up for you while you were out?

[00:09:28] Angie Schmitt: So I was in Canada. It was really cool. My family, we took our minivan all the way up to Quebec, which is about 13 hours from where I live in Cleveland, and it was just-- My kids are nine and 11. They’re at such a fun age. It was just a dream come true. Quebec is insanely beautiful. It was so walkable. Of course, what came up for me, I’m in urban planning, and I’m thinking a lot about cities and transportation all the time. To be in this walkable city with this really healthy public realm, it was incredible. In Quebec, there’s blocks and it was built in the 1600s, it’s to medieval proportions. But these gorgeous really charming stone houses, cobblestone, real narrow streets. A lot of them, they had pedestrianized. People were out enjoying the World Cup. They were having a huge music festival. It was so cool to be a part of that and see that, and it made me a little bit sad, honestly, about we have this kind of poverty, I think, in our public realm in the US by comparison, and a lot of problems related to that. And a retreat. There’s been a retreat from the public realm to the point where I think a lot of people are really isolated. They’re spending so all their time scrolling and ordering DoorDash and crazy things. People aren’t even going to restaurants anymore. So I’m really concerned about those kinds of things, and it was refreshing to be there, and it just got me interested in, okay, what is Canada doing? It seems like they have a couple things figured out that we don’t. And obviously, it depends in where you are, and Quebec was a lot different than Niagara Falls, and it’s obviously this beautiful tourist spot. But it did seem to be healthy and functioning city in a way that is a little rarer here.

[00:11:07] Beth: That’s a great transition to your research. I know that you’re looking at how we can make the public square public again, and especially public to include children. So tell me about the book that you’re working on.

[00:11:21] Angie Schmitt: Yeah, I’m so excited about it. It’s almost done, but it’s going to take a long time to go through editing and get to print. I think it’s going to be called Playing in the Street. So it begins talking sort of about Jonathan Haidt has done a great job sort of bringing up the problems children are having with their mental health. I have seen it firsthand. My oldest was in kindergarten when COVID hit and everything closed. School was closed for a really long time. I saw a lot of kids, their mental health just declines rapidly, and it took a long time after that for things to get back to normal. Play time at the library, our public pools in Cleveland to get back open. In some ways maybe they haven’t recovered totally. So I think that’s having a real impact on children. And in addition, they’re getting messages that they’re maybe not welcome in certain places like restaurants, right? Some restaurants have started banning children. For example, I was in Quebec. There’s a beautiful city center. Teenagers out in the evening hanging out, and they just blend in with the rest of the society.

[00:12:18] Whereas here, teenage behavior might be forced underground. They’re not welcome. Maybe the closest thing is a suburban strip center, and there’s a sign that says, “No skateboarding. No biking.” They’re getting messages that they’re not welcome. And they need that adult support and a little bit of mentorship, and they need opportunities to interact with people and take healthy risks in order to really develop the skills they need to succeed in life. And my book looks at a variety of those things, including it’s going to get into a lot of detail about neighborhood design and sort of traffic patterns and the way that contributes to kids being dependent on their parents instead of independently mobile like they were even back when I was a kid, and I’m in my early to mid-40s. So I grew up in the ‘80s and the ‘90s and, was out on my bike all the time, walked to school. You see that kind of thing kind of disappearing.

[00:13:07] Beth: Let’s talk about the design aspect first. I know that you live in Cleveland. I’m in a suburb in Northern Kentucky, right outside of Cincinnati. There are wonderful things about it, but one of the tough things about where I live is that it’s all cars. We are so car-dependent, and everything is designed for cars. And a ton of our kids now have e-bikes and electric scooters, and we have this really cool new development near me that is a great place for kids to hang out. There are just some great opportunities for kids to just go to UDF together and sit outside and eat ice cream without parents, right? It is so terrifying to me to watch kids navigate roads that are built for large SUVs and trucks on these e-bikes and scooters. And I just keep thinking what can we be doing here? How can we be more creative and make it a priority to get our suburban kids able to have some independence in moving themselves about

[00:14:04] Angie Schmitt: I know. It’s really a tragedy. We’ve done such a bad job, and I talk about that a lot in my last book. My last book was about how we’ve had this huge increase in pedestrian deaths in the United States, and I was taking like the engineering profession, some of our government agencies to task a little bit about it. So we’ve got to do some kind of wonky reforms in that field, and I think that my first book was actually a little bit successful in moving the needle around that kind of thing. I’ve traveled a lot doing keynote speaking within my industry. I did a lot of media interviews. Trump’s election was very bad for the kind of reforms that were happening because USDOT was doing a lot prior to Trump’s election to reform some of that. But the built environment is so hostile to children, especially in suburbs, which is where most people live. It’s really a tragedy, and I talk about that in the book. There is a need, especially once... it’s almost like a primal need, I think, when you are a teenager to access retail. So I talk about this a lot in the book. I grew up in a suburban area outside of Columbus where there really wasn’t-- a very typical, it’s thrown up on a cornfield. There were no public spaces. And it was very frustrating for me when I aged into being a teenager, and eventually I figured out like if I cut through a yard and walk along this highway in a ditch, I can access like a Kmart. So we started doing that, and eventually I just hopped on a bus and took it downtown. I was like 12 or 13. I was very adventurous. But at one point a friend told me years later, I convinced her when we were like 12 to run across an interstate highway because it was like separating our neighborhood from a McDonald’s, and it was right across there, and we just wanted that ice cream so badly. That was so important to us. So we’ve done a really bad job. Our commercial streets especially are very dangerous. I talk about that in the first book. In my industry we call those suburban arterial roads. So if they have big box stores, if they have drive-through restaurants, those tend to be really dangerous places for pedestrians.

[00:15:55] They’re not at all designed with kids’ needs in mind, and that’s a huge oversight that I think is having important implications for their health. Now, children are not being run over by cars nearly as often as they were in the ‘70s. But it’s been reduced by 10 times how many kids are killed while biking and walking in the United States every year. But and we’re not able to say for certain because we don’t have very good information about how much kids are walking and biking. But my impression, and a lot of the other experts that I’ve talked to, is that kids are just walking way, way less than they used to, to the point where they’re hardly getting any physical activity. Only one in I think it’s three kids is getting 60 minutes of vigorous physical activity a day, which is a minimum of what they need to be healthy. They need that not just to be physically healthy, which too many of them aren’t physically healthy, but secondly emotionally healthy. I think that’s underrated. Emotionally, social, I need it myself as an adult. I need a certain amount of exercise to not be insane. And you think about a 10, 11-year-old boy, it’s very critical. So and that 60 minutes a day that they’re not getting, the average kid’s getting only 20, that includes walking. They consider walking vigorous physical activity. So I think that’s a huge problem in that we really need a strong public response there because there’s only so much parents can do. Parents get blamed. Your kid has ADHD. He’s not able to walk to school. He doesn’t have a place to play. I’m working a double shift and don’t have the resources to send him to a fancy summer camp. So he’s spending eight hours a day in front of the television. Of course, he does. Of course, he’s struggling in other areas of his life. So that is a big problem, I think, and we really need Not just a government response, but a whole societal response to that problem.

[00:17:45] Beth: What were you seeing that gave you hope from the former Transportation Department? And I’m trying to think about, okay, what can we do? What are the things that work to change this?

[00:17:56] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. They introduced a huge program called Safe Streets and Roads for All, and that it was targeted at different communities can compete for the funding, I think billions of dollars. We spend very little money on sidewalks on bike lanes in the United States. Almost all the money goes into these big highway interchanges, right? Which doesn’t necessarily reflect public priorities, I don’t think, but that’s the way it’s been framed in the industry. So, anyway, they introduced this big new program, and they were awarding funds to repair some of the most dangerous streets. Those of us in urban planning know like if a road with very wide lanes, for example, very wide crossings, you know what, once you get to four or five lanes, even for an adult, it can be tricky to cross safely, to say nothing less of a child. But we can do things like add pedestrian refuge islands, so little concrete waiting areas at the center to help make that a little safer. Those are the kind of things we can change the signal timing. So there are all kinds of incremental changes we can make. Also, street lighting is important. That can be improved. So those kind of things we can fit. Suburban retrofit sometimes we call it. Some of our suburban areas to make them more walkable for kids. Another thing that I think is promising strategy for the suburbs is how in suburbs there’s a lot of cul-de-sacs, right? I grew up on a cul-de-sac. And cul-de-sacs are interesting because they do protect kids a little bit, right? That’s why parents love cul-de-sacs. Yep. Then you don’t have to pass-

[00:19:24] Beth: I live on one. Yep.

[00:19:24] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. It’s wonderful. Then you don’t have to pass through traffic. But the bad thing about it is then you can’t walk anywhere, right? Because the street doesn’t lead anywhere. I think we should, and this is very difficult to do because of property rights and NIMBYs, but we should have some more formalized cut-throughs. So if there is a dead-end street for cars, there should be a pedestrian path. That would do a lot to improve children’s mobility. And maybe I think it would really benefit parents a lot as well, and the whole of society because the one thing I talk about a ton in the book is this disaster of car lines and all the congestion that’s coming from parents chauffeuring their kids to school every day, and all the chauffeuring parents have to do to all kinds of activities. So if we could reduce the amount of effort parents had to put into that by making our communities a little more walkable, I think that would really pay huge dividends.

[00:20:18] Beth: There’s just like a cascade of problems here, right? I remember when my first daughter, she’s 15-- my girls are 15 and 11. My first daughter started kindergarten. The principal said to the parents in a meeting very plainly, “We have a big yellow limousine to come get your kids every day. Please let us do that. You will be so much happier if your kid gets on the bus and comes home on the bus every single day.” And that was true in kindergarten. It sold me. I probably would’ve gotten in the car line, too. But listening to her talk about it so passionately, I thought, “Okay, my kids are going to be bus riders,” and they have been. In the past couple of years, we have had such a shortage of bus drivers that the bus situation is madness. And our poor principal now spends it seems half her day dealing with what bus is a double run, and these kids are going to be late and these kids are going to have to sit in the gym for 30 minutes after school before they can get on their bus. And I just think, like, how do we prioritize this altogether, right? This is an issue of priorities, getting enough bus drivers and getting enough kids on the buses and getting the legislature to fund it appropriately.

[00:21:25] Angie Schmitt: A hundred percent. I talk about this in the book. There’s a nationwide bus driver shortage and I agree with you. There’s been a why are we just not raising bus drivers’ pay?

[00:21:34] Beth: Yes.

[00:21:34] Angie Schmitt: Solve this problem. And I feel like in the past when I was young, my parents didn’t even think about bus service. Or I actually walked to school, and I walked to school when I was in elementary school, and then I took the bus in middle school. But my parents did not have to give it much thought. I feel like I have to be much more-- Our institutions for supporting families and children have withered a little bit, in my opinion, since I was young. And this is a great example. And this is a national problem. It’s contributing to... it’s a mess. And I can’t understand, and this is another thing I... One thing I can do a little bit with a book like this, and that I did a little with my past book, is hold the industry accountable for some of these failures. But this is not even really registering, I don’t think, on the agendas of our state departments of transportation, which have thousands of employees, billions of dollars at their disposal, as a problem. And it’s a little bit of a blind spot for them. And I think maybe it’s a little bit related to sexism or some of the historical ways we’ve defined what are the important problems in transportation. But this is increasingly parents making the school run contribute a lot to rush hour congestion.

[00:22:44] We’ve got to get this yellow bus service working again. And the conditions of the workers and finding the will to support these essential services. And I think one thing I say in the book which I don’t want to give too many spoilers, but it’s contributing to a chronic absenteeism crisis for low-income students that’s going to have devastating consequences. Huge economic repercussions if children aren’t getting basic literacy and numeracy, which is increasingly the case. And so it’s a big problem it’s been under-discussed and we really deserve better, I think, from our leaders. And that’s another thing that’s frustrating. This kind of meat and potato stuff, and we don’t hear this debated on Capitol Hill, it’s not sexy enough, it’s not culture war enough. It would help too many people, universally. Sometimes I think all this culture war stuff is just part of a con to keep us satisfied with inadequate leadership and not solving problems and not helping people.

[00:23:40] Beth: I wonder as you were working on the book how often sort of chicken and egg kept happening. Cause when I think about the buses now and the job of being a bus driver, It is starting to feel countercultural to me to put a kid on the bus. There aren’t a lot of spaces where we say, “Five-year-old, independently go somewhere with one other adult and a ton of kids.” That’s very antithetical to the way a lot of people parent now. And as a consequence, a lot of those kids don’t know how to behave on the bus. Like it is wild what bus drivers have to put up with because so many kids lack the skills to just be on the bus for a few minutes. And so if I were a policy maker, I think I’d be considering we probably need to up bus driver pay. We probably just need more adults on the bus for a while. We probably don’t need to ask drivers to be alone with all these kids and have somebody who can help with behaviors while the driver’s focusing on safety and driving. There are so many places, especially as we talk about kids and school and independence, and developing our civic life, where I can’t tell which lever needs to be pulled first to try to address the problem, because the problems have so many ripple effects.

[00:24:54] Angie Schmitt: I agree that people are having a response to children’s behavior, and children don’t know how to behave in public quite the same way we did. But that’s, of course, one thing I argue in the book is they’re being a little bit excluded. And this is another thing that gets me in trouble, but during the pandemic my kid didn’t have kindergarten for a full year. That expectation was he was going to attend school on Zoom. All the children’s activities were canceled. Your social development is set back when you don’t leave the house for a year at a critical age. So that’s just right off the bat. I have fond memories of riding the bus when I was in middle school, and I don’t know that we were great behaved. That was the fun of it a little bit, in my opinion, that it was not a heavily supervised sort of place to be with friends. And that’s another thing things that concerns me. A, I’m concerned about the fact that kids are not walking or biking to school anymore. I talk about that a lot. Only 11% of kids do that anymore. So it’s a big problem. But secondly, this retreat, there is a reduction in kids that are riding the school bus, and now a majority just recently are driven to school.

[00:25:54] So not only are they sedentary when they’re being driven to school, they’re also isolated from their peers. And increasingly loneliness is a big concern for teenagers especially. Their kids are spending less time with friends. So that is a concern also, and I do think parents some of our norms around parenting are obviously an issue too. In the book, I try not to... I think the impulse for a lot of media figures is just to dunk on parents. I try not to do that quite so much, and I talk about all these pressures that are bearing on parents and leading them to be in these long car lines that many of them would prefer not to. And that’s one of the big factors, I think, is that we haven’t stabilized school busing and made it a reliable service the way we did in the past, and we’ve done a terrible job ensuring that kids have safe routes to school

[00:27:03] Beth: I want to talk about teenage hangouts in public too, beyond retail. Dropping a group of kids off to go to the movie theater or at a public pool, and how many places I’m seeing I feel like more and more signs like, “If they’re under 16, they have to be supervised.” And it makes me really sad because I think especially public pools are places where kids could really... my 11-year-old would be fine at the public pool with a group of friends without an adult and needs that experience.

[00:27:33] Angie Schmitt: Yes, absolutely. That should be treated as a little bit of an entitlement, I think. That’s something I talk about in the book and something I’ve been... Pool access, I think is very important. Access to swimming lessons. I grew up just camping at the pool all day, and then graduated, and without my parents, by the way. My mom worked at least part-time the whole summer when I was growing up, and we went around with a babysitter that was two or three years older than us all summer. But then I graduated to being a lifeguard. So anyway different municipalities now do have different policies that oftentimes are weirdly restrictive. And the idea is a lot of this stuff is couched as being like, oh, the responsible decision for safety or a choice that they had to make for liability reasons. But I think there needs to be more pushback against that kind of thing because real harms do result from this. Obviously, we don’t want anyone drowning, right? That’s why we have lifeguards. That’s why we have certain policies. But there is a harm done to children as well by them sitting in the house for eight to 10 hours a day playing Fortnite that needs to be weighed against these other risks and concerns and hasn’t been properly weighed.

[00:28:41] I haven’t even put this in the book yet, but I heard someone say that I thought was really interesting as a solution was there needs to be a little bit of a tort reform for schools because schools are so terrified of being sued now. One woman this was on Substack, was saying she had to sign a permission form for her kid to eat gelato, which is basically she was saying, or Italian ice, which is sugar and water. There’s not even any allergens in it. This is a tremendous imposition on schools and arguably, I would argue, harmful to children, directly harming children. Protecting children is supposed to be the point, not enriching lawyers or compliance, creating an army of paid compliance officers. So again, I think that the balance there is a little bit skewed and, I’m not a lawyer and not an expert on that, but I think that was an interesting proposal, this idea of some tort reform.

[00:29:32] Beth: I am a retired lawyer now, and I will tell you that our risk aversion just needs to change too. I understand being afraid of being sued, but the number of places that the risk of being sued is used as an excuse for inaction is absurd to me. I really appreciated the firm experience that I had. I did a few years of big law and a number of people I worked with would tell me “Make the right business decision, and if you get sued deal with it.” It’s no fun. It’s terrible. We need a million reforms in our justice system to make that process more sustainable. But also, live your life. Do things that are good. Do things that make the most sense for your organization. I lose my mind when I’m with a group and the hand-wringing about being sued comes up, especially groups that have no money. Go ahead and sue us. We have no money anyway. You know what I mean? Just keep trying to be out there doing good.

[00:30:27] Angie Schmitt: And what is actually best for children needs to be considered as well. I already made this point, but children can really be harmed, I think. Let’s say you have a boy. This is the way I’ve been thinking about it. Let’s say you have a boy who’s very athletic, and he’s a little bit of a natural risk-taker, okay? That could be a real asset, depending on the context, right? Maybe he’s an incredible athlete. Maybe he becomes I don’t know. In the past he worked as a sailor. I don’t know, if he’s constantly told he can’t, that part of him is bad and wrong, and he can’t... He has that energy that’s muffled. That is a harm to that child. And too often I think that’s disregarded, and the real harms are coming to the surface right now. And I think for people who don’t have kids, maybe they’re just reading about this. But I spend a lot of time with kids, and my kids are really pretty privileged and I’ve worked hard to facilitate a little bit of a free ranges arrangement for them. But still I notice things about kids these days that just worry me.

[00:31:32] Beth: You know what I think? You’ve just clicked into place for me we are so fixated on not getting sued for the harms that can be redressed in court. That we’re creating all kinds of harms that can’t. We can’t sue for the lost opportunities that our kids are having, for the lost ability to go to the movie theater with a big group of teenagers and have an independent experience. We can’t sue for that. But we won’t permit that experience because if they are there and someone slips and falls or whatever, we can sue for that. It’s like our balance has been skewed by what court will do and what it won’t do.

[00:32:10] Angie Schmitt: Another thing that’s crazy about all this to me, too, is on the other hand, I think that we’re very lax about serious risks to kids as well in certain weird contexts. For example, we know what are the top killers of children, right? We have way higher child mortality even though we’re much more litigious than a lot of European nations. They’re getting killed by cars guns, and drugs, okay? So we’re not doing a good job of protecting kids from the things that are the biggest threats to them. And by the way, one of those is suicide. So these threats to their mental health are very serious, and one of the top things parents should be concerned about. And another thing, even water safety, drowning is a top. So when we’re denying kids access to swimming lessons, access to safe water environments, we may increase the risk. There’s all kinds of weird risk aversion theater that gets translated into a more risky situation. Parents will drive their kids to school, right? Because they don’t want them to walk, which it may be a reasonable trade-off, but they underestimate the risk even being in the backseat of a car is to kids. That’s one of the number one killers of children, and most of them are killed as passengers. So it’s not a risk-free situation the way it’s framed by school districts sometimes or parents. And so there’s a lot of things that are mixed up and don’t make sense once you scrutinize them.

[00:33:32] Beth: I want to talk a little bit more about the point you started to make that we have to buy all of our social capital. There’s a great piece floating around Substack about this right now that I’ll link in the notes that talks about how by the things that we measure, it looks like millennials are doing great but it’s the things that we don’t measure that make a meaningful life. And I would love to tease that out with you around family-friendly culture.

[00:33:59] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. I really liked that article, and that is some of the same arguments I try to make in my book. So one thing I noticed, and hopefully this anecdotal sort of makes sense, but my kids play... I’m so lucky we have a rec youth sports league in the city where I live. That’s an example of some of the social infrastructure that’s withered a little bit. A lot of the rec leagues are dying out, and if parents are pushed or kids that want to play sports are pushed into these expensive travel leagues, and that leaves out kids who don’t have as much money, regardless of their athletic talent. So that’s a big problem. Anyway, so we do this league and they kind of piece together it’s a nonprofit league. These are the kind that are really good and need to be preserved and anyway are accessible for all kids. So doing great work. And they piece together the basketball courts. Basketball courts are, like, a great example of an amenity that’s very important to children, especially in a winter city like Cleveland, especially for boys that are a certain age, I think. Although I shouldn’t discount that girls who play basketball either. Anyway, regardless so they piece these together and we play a lot of our league is church basements. So in previous generations there was, I do think, more of a commitment to-- and I think it’s partly because we led more localized lives, but more of a commitment to building this civic infrastructure and recreational infrastructure.

[00:35:25] And one thing I talk about a lot in the book is the progressive era in the United States, which is like 1890s to 1920s which just I’m fascinated with this era because prior to that we didn’t even really think of children as occupying a separate sphere than adults. They just were there by the adult world. Sometimes they worked or they apprenticed with their parents. But then we started to think we had an industrial economy. We started to think about childhood as being a distinct phase. They introduced the concept of playgrounds, which really didn’t exist before that era. They also have introduced all these really lasting and impactful institutions. Like they introduced the YMCA. They invented the sports-- I talk about this in the book and I get really excited about it. They invented the sports of basketball and volleyball during that era at YMCAs. They invented summer camp. They invented scouting. All these really lasting institutions they were building in that era palatial Just enormous, beautiful swimming destinations. So there was this real civic spirit and investment. And getting back to my earlier anecdote, even a generation or two ago, every church was investing, people were attending church more, were donating, and they were building these shared resources for children to play on. And at the time, they were allowing, I assume, children to just come in and play whenever they wanted. It was part of their ministry. Now, we have all these schools in Cleveland that taxpayers pay for that are locked all night. There’s security reasons for that. There’s labor agreement reasons for that. But we pay for all these basketball courts that are locked to kids that are desperate to use them. One thing I found in my research was that it used to be schools in New York and Cleveland were open until ten at night to give people a place to go and were big social centers around the clock, especially for youth, but going up to adults.

[00:37:20] Beth: Yeah, I would love to see a resurgence of schools as community centered. And I know that our audience is filled with teachers and administrators who are like, “Please don’t ask another thing of our schools.”

[00:37:31] Angie Schmitt: I know.

[00:37:31] Beth: Which is fair. That’s fair. And I think how could we do this and it not feel that way to those folks, right? How could we give them what they need to do what they do, and then have other support that allows that building to still be a community center?

[00:37:46] Angie Schmitt: So I talk about this a little, too, in the book. And one thing that my school district-- I just complained about my school district like a number of times. But one thing that they do that I love and that more people could do that’s a very low bar is opening their school yards. So we can increase the amount of park space pretty easily just by don’t lock your schoolyard after school hours. If there’s a minor incident of vandalism, let’s just use public funds to repair that because there’s studies that I cite that show that just having the school yards open and near the kids can increase the level of physical activity kids get measurably. Now, in that study, I just want to qualify they did have a playground attendant that was there and that was paid for also. But in terms of getting the actual schools open it’s a bigger discussion. But I do think there could be a lot of benefits. And it’s been a frustration for me with our district that’s just their policy that they don’t like to do a lot of or they have a lot of rules around any after-school activity.

[00:38:48] But children in Cleveland really are under-resourced for. We do have these rec centers, and we do have some things, but compared to kids in the suburbs, really are not getting the same level of extracurricular opportunities and causes all kinds of problems. In fact I’m all over the place, but one storyline I’m really interested in is Baltimore. We’ve seen murder rates kind of plunge in a number of our cities, and I think Baltimore is a cool example. And I think part of their strategy there was expanding just recreational opportunities for kids. Get them in basketball leagues, get them working as lifeguards, get them at pools instead of running around getting into trouble. It makes perfect sense to me that would be quite effective. I think that’s influenced Cleveland a little bit, which is exciting. They expanded pool hours this year, I think, for that reason, for crime prevention. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that strategy.

[00:39:40] Beth: Yeah, I think so too, especially because if you get the kids out, you get some percentage of parents out with them, and that starts to lead to a more connected community and less of the sort of suburban, I open the garage door in the morning and pull my car out, and then I pull my car back in after work and close it, and that’s my engagement with my community for the day. I know my girls both swim for the team at our public pool. And your kids can’t just swim. Like you are volunteering constantly. And that’s annoying and tiresome and great, it’s all of those things.

[00:40:16] Angie Schmitt: I wish we had that opportunity. A swim team is great. I think aquatic. I don’t know. I just I’m thinking about that. I don’t know why. I think it’s very important to a good life to have that access.

[00:40:26] Beth: You were saying all over the place, which is our vibe at Pantsuit Politics, so we’re just right on target for what Sarah and I do here. But I was thinking about data centers. The last guest I had on was talking about data centers and how angry the public is and how people just do not want these in their community. I was out in Hocking Hills, the state park in Ohio. Very remote area. The only thing that even remotely political that I saw for a few days out there were signs saying, “No data centers here.” And I feel like some of that is just that we don’t believe in the promise that these things are going to create a life of more leisure. If big companies and the states doing economic development deals with those companies were saying, “You know what? We really believe that this isn’t going to create a lot more jobs, but it is going to create more community. So we want to start putting attendants in parks and lifeguards at pools and employees of our company driving bus routes as part of their duties or something.” Like where is the investment back to show the promise? If you really believe that this is going to change our culture in a way that is a net positive for everyone, prove it out now while you have people dumping buckets of money into it, and you’re asking everyone to take a leap of faith with you.

[00:41:40] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. I think when we were living more localized lives, there was more incentive for successful business people to be pumping that back into the local civic infrastructure. Yeah. But I’m not sure, and I think that’s what that blog post you referenced I think that’s really what his whole thing is talking about giving back and supporting sort of the social sphere. My sense is that has declined a little bit. That isn’t happening the same way it used to, but he would know more than me. I haven’t explored that too much.

[00:42:15] Beth: Yeah. We will link that piece so that everyone can continue to read and think about these topics together, and I want to make sure that we spend a second Outside of Politics before I let you go. So we always end on something just completely human and personal, and I saw that you recently listened to an audiobook with your children that really touched you, so I wanted to hear more about it.

[00:42:49] Angie Schmitt: Oh, yeah. Have you ever read, this was on our long car ride and came with Shiloh.

[00:42:54] Beth: No, I haven’t.

[00:42:55] Angie Schmitt: Which is an older classic. It won a Newbery Medal. I love children’s literature. I have all kinds of recommendations. But I actually think your readers would really enjoy it. It really surprised me, the message at the end. I don’t want to spoil it. It’s about a boy and his love for his dog, and my kids love storylines about animals, kids and animals, and it’s set in Appalachia. If you liked Demon Copperhead, a little bit that kind of setting and that kind of family a little bit. So it’s a little old-fashioned classic. But one of the things it was about was getting along with people that are difficult and having compassion for them and what might have brought that about, which I think is such an important lesson just for anyone. We all have to get along with people a lot of times that are difficult to get along with. And all of us at times are that person, yes. I know I’ve been that person myself. I thought that was really cool, and I was just really surprised. And it was refreshing I thought, the message, and it was very nuanced morally. I’m going on and on, but it reminded me a little of Huckleberry Finn. Because you have a boy going through this moral dilemma about the law, and in this case the subject is a dog that’s mistreated and how he should respond to that.

[00:44:08] Beth: I love that. I think children’s literature and just stories for children are so clarifying. My 11-year-old and I saw Sheep Detectives recently, and I felt just completely undone by that movie. I thought it was going to be so silly. It looks like CGI sheep and voices, and it’s just going to be goofy. And I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was almost a modern parable. I was talking to a friend of mine from church saying “We could make this movie the curriculum for our children’s program for the next year, and have something new to dig out of it every single week.”

[00:44:42] Angie Schmitt: Yeah, my kids love that, too. And one thing I loved because my blog is called Love of Place, and I’m just very interested in the settings of stories. Such a beautiful setting. I was in love with the setting. And then when we were up in Quebec, and my daughter said, too. My daughter picked up on that, too. It’s this quaint little... I don’t know. Where are they? Ireland? They were in Cornwall. Ireland. So when we were in Quebec, I said, “This is just like Sheep Detectives.” Very beautiful. Yeah. My kids loved that. Talking animals, I love it.

[00:45:08] Beth: Yeah. I think you’re right. Kids and animals just it works for a reason. And then to be able to use that over and over for generations to share something important. I thought Sheep Detectives really spoke to what belonging feels like in not a preachy way at all, just a really beautiful, nuanced, thought-provoking way. Sounds like I need to read Shiloh with my daughter.

[00:45:29] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. I really would recommend it. Yeah.

[00:45:33] Beth: Thank you so much for spending time with me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:45:37] Angie Schmitt: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:45:38] Beth: Thanks to Angie and all of you for being here today. If you’d like to continue the conversation, you can join us in the comments on Substack or email us at hello@pantsuitpolitikshow.com. I’m heading out on summer break now. Sarah and I have pre-recorded some wonderful new episodes for you, so don’t miss a Tuesday or a Friday next week. Everyone, have the best weekend available to you.

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