It happens time and again: you start a family and realize that your current home isn’t a good fit anymore. Whether it’s a condo in the city or a single-family home in a neighborhood with no other kids, it’s not where you picture your kids growing up. Is it time for you to work with a new construction home builder to create your dream home?

Peer relationships are significant  for your children as they grow, and what better way for your kids to make friends than in your neighborhood? But how can you tell if a neighborhood will be family-friendly before you move in?

Signature Homes focuses on building communities, not just houses. Our neighborhoods are the perfect place to raise your family. In this article, we’ll share why a robust community is important to your child’s development and show you how we design Signature Homes communities for families.

Friendships Make Healthy Kids

Friendships are essential to children’s social and emotional development. Having opportunities to navigate relationships as a child can have lifelong benefits. First, having friends is strongly correlated with healthy self-esteem and a child’s ability to cope with stress and hardships.

Children face a lot of challenges as they grow into adolescents and teens. Their ability to transition and manage stress dramatically improves when they’ve had close friendships. Moving up to a new school isn’t nearly as scary if you have a few friends making the journey with you. Coping skills that children develop serve them throughout their entire lives as they deal with challenges.

Second, peers can have a strong influence over your child’s behavior, for better or for worse. If your child has good friends, they can influence his or her academic achievement and behavior. Having few or poor friends can lead to misbehavior, depression, anxiety, and a poor understanding of social cues.

When children can make friends in their neighborhood, they get a lot of practice navigating groups, making compromises, sharing, and understanding how other people feel. It’s certainly possible to help your child find social groups outside of your neighborhood, but many lifelong friendships begin in your own backyard.

Childhood friendships can also have a dramatic on your child’s health. Kids with friends are more likely to be excited about physical and imaginative play. Being physically active is especially important for kids as childhood obesity rates in the US remain high.

Did you know that lasting friendships can benefit your children throughout their entire lives, not just during childhood? Children who successfully navigate friendships can use those skills as adults to nurture existing friendships and build new relationships.

People’s overall health is better when they are socially engaged. Being accepted by a peer group lowers stress and creates positive emotions. Low stress helps your immune system stay healthy and fight off infections. Prioritizing a family-friendly neighborhood when your kids are young can have lifelong impacts on their health and well-being.

Make Friends in a Family-Filled Community

Signature Homes communities are great places to raise your family. Our communities are near great, award-winning schools. They have outdoor areas that beg for physical play, from our Tot Lots to our Bark Parks.

Our community events make it easy for you and your family to meet others and build lifelong relationships. Whether it’s a family movie night or just an afternoon at the community pool, you’ll never run out of ways to engage your kids in social events.

One thing that you can do to facilitate your kids building healthy friendships is to help them find peers who have similar interests. In a community filled with families, it’ll be much easier to find other kids with common interests. Also, your child will meet others who pursue different activities, which can open them up to new hobbies that he or she hasn’t yet discovered.

Build Your Family’s Dream Home

When you picture your dream home, what do you see? Are you having a barbecue with your neighbors while all of your kids play games on the lawn? Maybe you’re stretched out on a blanket with your family watching an outdoor movie beside your best friends and their kids. Perhaps your child is coming home from college to meet up with the next-door neighbor who has been his or her friend since they were both in diapers.

If you want to make a lifetime of memories and help your children build lifelong friendships, then it’s time to visit a Signature Homes community. We build beautiful homes, but our focus is on building amazing communities first.

About Signature Homes:

At Signature Homes, we know that home is more than just the place where you lay your head. Together, we’ll build your dream home in your dream community. For the past 20 years, we’ve been helping homebuyers build not just their homes, but their lives. Want to experience the Signature Homes difference for yourself? Call 888-339-6051 to schedule a visit to one of our communities in Birmingham or Nashville today.