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Harford argues that much can be done to make public space safe for children. “I would like to see pedestrian-friendly crossings more frequently on streets. I would like to see the streets be more kid-oriented with wider sidewalks, as well as a more coherent attitude amongst people on the street to be watching out for kids.”

in “real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn – if they learn it at all – the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

Ronda Howard, a Vancouver senior city planner, notes that when there are greater incentives for people to walk in their neighbourhoods, there are more eyes on the street: thus the streets become safer.

Despite the challenges facing parents raising children in the city, different social networks can augment child involvement in public space. Harford says that strong social ties help increase her son’s autonomy in Vancouver

When we actively engage with others who are different from us, we have the opportunity to become more sophisticated and tolerant citizens. When we get to know the diverse members of our communities, we create social networks that make our cities safer and more enjoyable. Public spaces are integral to making this happen. These spaces are an antidote to the inward gaze of individualism. We need to reclaim public space and work to expand its boundaries. It’s time for us to leave the house of the self in the background, and go outside

We’re happiest when our ties with others are deep and strong. And the research tells us that the ebb and flow of happiness in America is clearly linked to the quality and character of our social ties—including our friendships, community ties, and marriage. It’s also linked, specifically, to the frequency with which we have sex.

So we investigated four indicators of sociability among today’s young adults—marriage, friendship, religious attendance, and sex—in an effort to explain

married young adults are about 75 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not married

As it turns out, the share of young adults who are married has fallen from 59 percent in 1972 to 28 percent in 2018. The decline has been similar for men and women, although from 2016 to 2018 the share of married men fell, while the share of married women rose.

Faith was the second factor. Young adults who attend religious services more than once a month are about 40 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not religious at all

The share of young adults who attend religious services more than monthly has fallen from 38 percent in 1972 to 27 percent in 2018, even as the share who never attend has risen rapidly.

The third factor was friendship. The effect of seeing friends frequently is less clear than that of marriage or religion, but young adults who see their friends regularly do seem to be about 10 percent more likely to report being very happy than their less-sociable peers.

Indeed, it may be that rising social time spent with friends in recent years could be buffering young adults from the declines in institutions such as marriage or religion, as friends stand in place of other relationships or forms of community.*

And, finally, we looked at sex. Young adults who have sex at least once a week are about 35 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who have no sex.

This trend in rising sexlessness is broadly confirmed in other surveys of sexual behavior,

Less sex, we speculate, could help account for declining happiness for many young adults.

What’s more, as the #MeToo era has taught us, there has been too much unwanted or nonconsensual sex out there, which is obviously bad for the (more often female) target of such advances. From this perspective, the so-called sex recession might just amount to a sexual recalibration, with a lot of bad sex being eliminated from our social lives—and this would be a good thing. For all these reasons, the feminist family historian Stephanie Coontz is “suspicious of any hand-wringing” about the sex recession.