Lastly, low density likely means that the one kid available close enough is not good friend match.
Raise a kid on acreage without electronics and internet and suddenly lo and behold, almost all of them will spontaneously go out and start exploring, and if they're all doing this they'll find and latch on to the other kids. And there's parks and playgrounds and church and sports and libraries and other places kids and families from wide areas tend to congregate.
And with all due respect: what is this idea of 'not a good friend match'? They're kids: they eat, sleep and play games. They're not professors or lawyers with 25 years of specialisation and gobbledygook talking past each other with their heads up their own arses about how important they are: unless they're violent and/or their family is dysfunctional, they're a good friend match. Isn't one of the first skills to teach a child the ability to negotiate, mediate, get along with others, irrespective of superficial differences or interests?
Raise children in an environment with on demand streaming, and multiple televisions in their homes and all their neighbour's homes, and hit them with games specifically based around quick dopamine boosts and vying for maximising engagement and attention spans, and with a parenting culture that says they have to be supervised and scheduled, and lo and behold, they act just like conditioned rats in psyche 101 experiments do.
And what is 'low-density'? Again, in my childhood, I moved INTO suburbia from a relatively less dense location. And I haven't even gotten started on the 'horrors' that happened where I lived when I was under 10. I'm in no way religious today (and back then, for context, it was the uniting church, which is barely religious by american standards), but we walked a few hundred metres to a neighbourhood house where an old couple lived and had church services and kids groups for the neighbourhood children: imagine the preposterous concept of 'not a good friend match' when you've got 10-20 kids in a several km radius. I had one friend a few hundred metres down the road. And I don't mean like 'one acceptable friend': i mean, there was a kid several hundred metres down the road. We just walked to each other's houses.
When the community got enough money together to build a church and community space out of cinder blocks, well then we walked a km down the road and back again.
To blame the things like 'kids don't like biking in all directions' or 'distance in suburbia' or 'not good friend match' as the causes or barriers to quality youth playtime? NO! Absolutely not! If anything, the very things that are being labelled as barriers are are the very ESSENCE of quality youth playtime and we wonder where its gone.
Quality youth playtime is BORN of isolation, independence, lack of supervision, self-direction, imagination, boredom, and danger.
The CAUSE of its decrease is not these things. Its not even necessarily technology: we still had TV and computers back in my day, but when you and everyone else have to wait a week between episodes of your favourite show (don't know what it was like in the US, there was no cable in my country), and you have to cycle 4-5kms over hilly terrain to get a book or a video or a game for a week and then return it, you did so (back in the day, our kids network also pirated pc games between us all, but that's another story).
Its universal supervision, scheduling, protection, anxiety, short-term rewards, emphasis on private vs public space, exclusion of children from public space, on-demand universal supply of media and entertainment, absolute abundance of convenience and the attention economy that's driving it.
The rest are just excuses to stop us having to deal with the actual issues. I'm no friend of suburbia, but suburbia itself does not negate quality youth playtime. And the idea that these things are the barriers or causes is somewhat comical to people who actually grow up with significantly greater levels of those things as actual barriers...and still have quality youth playtime.
Even without electronics, beyond age of 6, nearby areas are explores quick and indoor activities are more fun then biking alone again through area you know pretty well. I knew few kids who liked that, but they were very much minority - and they were the kind of kids that don't seek novelty and aresponsibility fine with doing the same thing same way every day. Even without electronics, over age of 6-7, indoor has more options, more interesting options and is more fun unless there is company outside. Hence kids not rushing outside if a chance of meeting someone is low.
Not a good friend is a kid you don't like to play with. It is simply not true that all kids like to play with all kids nor that all they do is games and games are the same. It does not have to be something bad like bullying or being little assholes - through it can be. It can be something as simple as one kid doing mostly focused plays and the other widely running around. With many kids they will sort themselves to groups, with few they just end up doing own thing and not having interest in each other.
How does school work in areas where there's only one kid? And how can that one kid ever learn to properly socialize when it supposedly never ever interact with other kids?
I mean sure, there's probably a situation like that out there with some home-schooled kids, but when I was a kid I also didn't hang out with dozens of kids, I had like 1-2 best friends with whom I'd hang out and that was already plenty enough.
I don't know much about home schooled kids, but afaik that is separate issue. They often live in communities with other home schooling families, it is often religious and thus implies many many siblings etc.
It's interesting how this happens, because there's definitely neighborhoods with a lot of kids about the same age. I can only assume it's the ways the markets function.
My neighborhood was full of kids growing up-- it was a brand-new housing development built to be compact and affordable that seemed to attract a lot of relatively young professionals who had recently started families and were in need of a cheap housing alternative.
In my town a lot of the more expensive housing might be snatched by kid-less couples, retired immigrants (I'm from Mexico, a lot of American immigrants move there to retire), etc.
Established neighborhoods will eventually see the older tenants move out (or, grimly enough, die off) but it happens in such a random fashion you never really see just a single influx of young families into the neighborhood, like you do with a brand-new development.
But of all its problems, what's the problem with kids having to ride 1+ miles to their friends?
When I was about 10-11, I was riding 2kms by myself (and then with my younger sister) in the Australian summer holidays down to a tennis camp. Sometimes it ran late and the sun went down, so my parents would come and pick us up in their car...just kidding, they bought me a generator to put on my bike and a reflector and I rode home in the dark.
When we moved again, I had a regular neighbourhood friend and we'd go and play networked computer games and nintendo during school holidays and after school during my teenage years (having two pc's you could network was quite advanced for the 1990's). But putting this into google, his place was 1.4 kms away from my house.
There was a video store 5 to 6 kms by car that had some rental games and videos, but of course we couldn't drive. But it must of been 4-5 kms by taking a shortcut through a nature reserve with our mountain bikes. And that's what we did. After a year or two, another store opened up a few kms in the other direction and we went there as well.
Even back then, video games were a huge part of my life...we were nerds in the absolute sense, but so were the mountain bikes and the exploring. Maybe we were lucky backing on to some nature reserves, but even in the staid morass of suburbia, are there too many places with nothing in a 10km radius? And even if the answer is yes, even that I'm a bit skeptical of. The nature reserve attracted us because it was a place without adults and it was a little bit dangerous, not because it was set up with activities or playgrounds.
In my mind, the distance wasn't a barrier to playtime. The fact that our parents would let us out to explore, and we subsequently went within about a 10km radius of our homes unsupervised on our bikes and without cell phones WAS the playtime.
The changing variable isn't the distances: its the supervisory culture and the fact that everything is now streamed conveniently into our homes on demand, and the fact that many of these products are now specifically engineered to try to turn people into screen viewing zombies.