ABSTRACT
While the moral order of Canadian suburbs celebrates the ideal of ‘family togetherness’, their geographical expanse systematically frustrates the realization of this goal. The cost of suburban housing typically requires two incomes, with the logistical consequence of affording parents, who may well have to commute some distance to and from paid employment, with reduced time to spend with family. What is more, the rapid pace of movement into, and out of, the relatively new and growing suburbs of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia does little to promote or sustain extra-familial relationships between either children or adults. Yearning for a sense of community or belonging in such a setting reflects adults’ and children’s respective social positioning, but is further challenged by the characteristic impersonality of suburban living. ‘Suburbanization’ is, indeed, often stereotypically likened to a virtual disappearance of communal relations (Gusfield 1975: 96) or a retreat of social activities behind the closed doors of family life (Fine and Mechling 1991: 60). Pronounced social differentiation and dispersion do, in fact, engender forms of residential isolation that make extra-familial social life tenuous. Moreover, contemporary suburban life is frequently accompanied by gnawing parental insecurity about the adequacy of efforts at child rearing (Fine and Mechling 1991: 72-3; Dyck 2000a, 2000b). Hence, although the origins of suburbia may have celebrated a familycentred environment that declared the importance of providing for children within a domestic setting (Fishman 1987: 7-8) and that also implied the existence of community, in practice the exigencies of contemporary suburban life in British Columbia make the realization of these ideals a difficult matter. Nevertheless, suburban residents seek in differing ways and with varying degrees of success to fashion
arrangements for overcoming isolation and connecting with others, not least through various renderings of community.
