I lived in LA for 20 years. It took moving my 3 kids to a small Arizona town to find what I'd been missing.

Jen Podany moved her family from California to Arizona.

Courtesy of Jen Podany Jen Podany raised her three children in a busy Los Angeles neighborhood where traffic limited their independence.

After moving to a small Arizona town, her kids can ride bikes and play with neighborhood friends.

She says their new lifestyle reminds her of the freedom children had growing up in the 1980s.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jen Podany , founder of Bluestone Sunshields.

It has been edited for length and clarity.

Near the end of 2024, my family of five had once again escaped Los Angeles for the quiet we found 10 hours south in Snowflake, Arizona .

We'd been doing it for years, renting an Airbnb in Snowflake, a town of 6,000 in the middle of nowhere, switching off amid the miles of empty land.

It had started as a stopover on our way to visit my husband's family in New Mexico .

We fell in love with the town, and from then on, we'd visit whenever we needed to get away from the busyness of LA.

In Snowflake, we felt like we could catch our breath.

Our souls calmed each time we arrived and ached to stay each time we left.

We put an offer on a house Back in LA, specifically Burbank, the five of us — my husband and our three children , whom we homeschooled — lived in a duplex made up of two connected apartments.

We lived in one of them, which had two bedrooms and one bathroom.