"Subdivisions" is a song about a nerdy kid finding it hard to fit in, and the similarity of the houses in large developments is treated as a metaphor for the limited range of identities kids could adopt if they didn’t want to be socially excluded. The song says nothing about kids finding it hard to play together, because in lyricist Neil Peart’s childhood all the way to the 1990s, children were finding things to do together in those suburbs regardless. Moreover, the perspective of the song is a high-school one (“…in the basement bars, in the backs of cars…”, plus see the music video), not younger children.