Whereas the Boomers are openly gleeful to have denied the younger generations the world they knew, it grieves Generation X that we were unable to preserve it.
When Spacebunny and I bought our first house, I consciously sought one that was on a dead end culdesac backed up on a park, with the idea that the children we hoped to have would be able to run around and play there with the pack of neighborhood kids one day.
But, as Spacebunny correctly pointed out, it was already too late for that. Even by the end of the 1990s, suburban kids really didn’t do that anymore, for a variety of reasons.