This morning my sister and I were discussing our childhood neighborhood - NW side of Chicago in the late 50s-70s. Our block had 16 nearly identical bungalows on each side of the street. I asked who lived in a certain house, I believe 6 houses north from us. I vaguely recalled that they had a couple of girls. My sister had no recollection of who lived there or any kids.
I asked my other 2 sisters, and one came through with the family name and the names of the FOUR children - around our ages. We went to the public school, and they went to the Catholic school, and for whatever reason, we NEVER played with them.
Just struck me as so weird, that as kids we didn’t mix at all with the kids who attended the Catholic school (where we went to church.) In fact, kids who lived on the other side of the alley from us attended a different public school, and we never played with them either.
When you were a kid, were friendships similarly segregated by school? We didn’t have as many sports and activities, so other than scouts, I didn’t have many opportunities to hang with other kids.
Mine were a mix, tho many of the kids in my neighborhood went to the same grade school. Once I hit Jr and Sr high and rode the bus, my friends were more from school since most of the neighborhood kids were younger than I was.
Most of my friends growing up started off in the neighborhood, though I stayed friends with them even after they moved various distances away. It wasn’t until 10th grade that I became close friends with someone I met at school.
School. I lived in a very rural area, only a very small handful of other children within a reasonable distance of me, and they were for the most part total redneck trash.
My early childhood friends were all from church, though a few of them also went to my school. This was because there weren’t any girls my age in my immediate neighborhood. Boys were way over-represented which was no fun until we became teenagers and I started hanging out with my brother and his friends.
SW Side Chicago, and pretty much everyone I was friends with was from the parish school. Thinking on this more closely, I don’t think any of the kids that attended the local public school were friends of mine. It may as well have been a completely different world. There were two other sisters who lived on my block and went to the Catholic school, so I knew them – my best friend lived the next block over. A street over from that I know there were a bunch of public school kids, but I did not know them.
I went to Catholic school in first and second grade. None of the other kids in the neighborhood did, so I had both school friends and neighborhood friends. After that I switched to the neighborhood school, but none of my neighborhood friends were in any of my classes, so they were still two different groups. It wasn’t until 6th grade that the two groups finally merged.
I lived in the country. There were a series of villages along a stretch of highway that each had their own Primary School, aka Grade School, but we all shared a High School, so all my friends also went to my school.
Unfortunately I spent my early years in Pakistan in an area and era where crime was so bad that we almost never ventured out of our walled and gated garden, except in a car. I never even knew the names of any of the neighbor kids.
All my friends were either from school (“nursery school” was from age 3) or children of my parents’ friends whose houses we would visit. And my cousins. Lots and lots of cousins (I had 19 at one point).
This is probably common, but in our district there were multiple elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school. All the elementary kids were from the immediate neighborhood. Middle school was a combination of a few elementary school kids, so there were plenty of new kids who didn’t live as close. By the time you got to high school, all of those elementary school student had merged, so now you had kids that were actually from different towns.
As a result, the majority of my childhood friends were from my neighborhood, but as I got older, I developed friendships from a much wider radius.
Mostly from school, I moved around too much and often lived in “neighborhoods” where the idea of actually interacting with people who lived nearby was mostly fantasy. The first time I lived in an area for more than a year I did make a couple neighborhood friends, including one kid who I still consider my quintessential childhood best friend. Then I moved again (this time out of state) and never saw him again.
My oldest friend at this point dates back to 7th grade (1997) and I celebrated his 40th birthday with him and others last Summer.
Both, at first. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood, where the elementary school was right down my street. All of us on my block were friends, and all but two of us went to the local school. I also made friends at school. In middle school, I made more friends at school, and started to drift apart from the other kids on my block. By high school, my friends were from school only.
For elementary school, they were mostly one in the same. All the kids in my neighborhood went to the same elementary school, were in the same Cub Scout pack, were on the same local sports teams, etc… Some of us even lived on the same block as each other. Nobody in our area went to private schools in elementary school that I can remember.
In middle school, the range got a bit larger as the school was itself larger, so some of my friends were from nearby neighborhoods, but who weren’t really walking distance away.
I went to a private high school, so everything was basically city-wide at that point. I had friends from the Woodlands, Sugar Land, Tanglewood, Memorial, Westchase, Sharpstown, etc.
The interesting thing was that I sort of added to my circle of friends rather than supplanted them at each level. I mean, the kid who lived across the street from me was someone I hung out with my senior year in high school, even though we didn’t go to the same school. And I still keep up with him today. Same for my friends from middle school- I kept up with them and hung out with them through high school and college as well.