Here is the question I am wrestling with: Do I want my children to embrace our rural life, learning how to negotiate playtime with one another and how to find fun in the woods and the garden, or on the bookshelves and in the kitchen and playroom?

Or do I want to move them to town, where they could walk to friends’ houses, to some school activities, to the movie theater and the bookstore?

This is a long-running internal debate of mine, and every time I think I’ve resolved it, I come across something that shakes my determination that the more reclusive life their father and I have chosen is better for us all. Today, it’s these words, from Richard J. Jackson, professor and chairman of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author and creator of the new book and public television series “Designing Healthy Communities”:

When there is nearly nothing within walking distance to interest a young person and it is near-lethal to bicycle, he or she must relinquish autonomy — a capacity every creature must develop just as much as strength and endurance.

“Children,” Dr. Jackson told Jane E. Brody for The Times’s Well blog, “who grow up in suburbia can’t meet their life needs without getting a ride somewhere.”

For me, and I’m sure for many of you, those are slightly chilling words. The amount of time my children spend in a car being driven somewhere isn’t about being overscheduled or my hovering tendencies (although we could certainly discuss those things). It’s about the fact that unless I drive them, they’re limited: to one friend, whose mother has often already driven him somewhere else, and to the entertainment that’s to be found in one another and in the woods and fields around us. There are no sports, no movies, no after-school activities without my help.

We didn’t precisely choose this — if the households around us were different, my children’s lives would be different, too. We purchased our house and land for different reasons. But maybe those were the wrong reasons. In his book “Stumbling on Happiness,” the psychologist Daniel Gilbert noted that people whose homes are close to friends or family are happier than those whose homes are not, even though proximity to friends is rarely on our oh-so-practical list when we shop for a house or apartment. In this, as in so many ways, we fail to understand what would truly improve our quality of life.

On the Well blog, Ms. Brody writes in her article “Communities Learn the Good Life Can Be a Killer,” about how some neighborhoods and towns are restructuring around the idea that easy access to work, school, services and recreation makes for a happier and healthier population. But as communities change around us, individual families like mine need to look at how we’ve structured our own lives around the expectation that we’re going to be constantly hopping in the car.

There are obviously practical barriers to dramatic change, but that shouldn’t put it outside the bounds of consideration. Have you changed your life so that your children or teenagers could have more autonomy, and how? Have you been surprised by which things about your home or community turned out to be most important to your family’s happiness? How should the parent of relatively young children think ahead to their more independent years?