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Notes -
One could certainly compare to other developed countries, as this issue seems largely a US-specific phenomenon. As far as I can tell, third spaces are alive and well in much of Europe and East Asia, where the denser urbanization with proper public transit, among other factors, don't keep kids completely dependent on their parents to get anywhere at all. I remember watching anime as a young teenager. The thing that always stood out as most alien to me, more than the monsters or magic or whatever, was the way that kids in Japan could apparently just go out, alone, and see friends without needing parents to give them a ride every time. As a 14 year old who only ever knew life in my typical American suburb, walking distance from almost nowhere (the nearest non-residential building was a single gas station a 40 minute walk through rows of copy-pasted single family houses belonging to complete strangers), I couldn't help but feel envious. As an adult, I get the appeal of suburbs, and there aren't many great choices for walkable cities in the US (maybe someone from NYC or Chicago, etc. can chime in on if their experiences differed), but I don't know if I would ever want to force that kind of isolation on kids of my own.
The most frustrating part about this is that it's still possible to have walkable suburbs. We have them in the Europe. The problem is that US zoning laws usually make it illegal to build anything except houses in suburban areas. In the UK, suburbs have shops, parks, schools and pubs and it is possible to walk to all of them.
Suburbs have all those things, the problem is that you can't build any of that stuff amidst houses (except parks and maybe schools).
'Amidst the houses' is the suburb. If there's a zone for housing and a zone for commercial, then the housing bit is the suburb, from the perspective of the residents.
By contrast, in the UK there are pubs and shops nestled in between houses. To take a random example, the suburb Jesmond, in Newcastle. Look at it on Google Maps. It includes two metro stations, bus stops, pubs, restaurants, playing fields, hotels, parks, churches, allotments, schools, cafes and small businesses. You can easily walk from any part of the suburb to any other part, and you can get public transport to the rest of the city.
When I look at (also randomly chosen) Rio Rancho in Albuquerque, I see vast tracts of houses, many located in cul de sacs (so you can walk to the end of your road and that's it) and all of the shops and restaurants are limited to the big road that surrounds the suburb.
Are you American? This isn't really how Americans conceive of suburbs. The typical American suburb is a small town that's predominantly residential, but it still has a shopping mall or main street. A town that's predominantly a bedroom community with people commuting to work in the big city is a suburb, not just the residential zone of that town.
Edit: even within rio rancho (which is not in Albuquerque, it's its own town) there are commercial areas, such as they are, sandwiched between residential areas:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/KoF7M9v9AWqNx1JW9
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ziwk7cAqQejR81Hp9
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