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Kids change mindset. Kids love yards. They love the little creek that runs past. I love the safety. Small neighborhood, we all know each other and look out f

Kids change mindset. Kids love yards. They love the little creek that runs past. I love the safety. Small neighborhood, we all know each other and look out for the kids that run around playing.

asveikau 6y ago
Everyone says this, as if none of us who advocate for urban life understand having kids. I have two kids. Also, they raise plenty of kids in other countries where they haven't oriented life around suburbs. Also, this was more true in the United States before white flight, and the US raised plenty of healthy kids then. So I don't think the kid thing makes as much sense as they say. But the state of US school systems does make the urban kid raising thing needlessly expensive for many.
- sharadov 6y ago
  The big difference is in other countries schools are not as bad as they are in cities in the US. Not a lot of countries have this huge divide of urban vs suburban culture. In America, you move to the suburbs to die.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  Violence and distracting behavior in schools are bad. But school scores, prestige, etc. don't matter as much as most people think. Your home environment matters more than the school. High achieving magnets and wealthy suburban schools are that way because of the selection profile for students, not because the school itself is transformative.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    Having exposure to high status schools in my own childhood, I agree 100% with your last sentence, that was one of the most important lessons I learned growing up, to completely ignore pedigree. I was in a well regarded school where pretty much everyone was an idiot. But they were born to successful people and most of them are now successful adults. Firm a proof as any that merit is either not the norm or completely doesn't exist. Still, I think more of an effort should be made to improve US urban public schools. I don't know what the answer is. It's surely very complex. I am not a specialist.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
watwut 6y ago
Yeah, and then you have to drive them to and from school, they have not much to do unless you drive them and one of you two have to stay home due to all that driving.
- masonic 6y ago
  I spent my entire childhood in the suburbs and literally never was I driven to/from school except for medical/dental appointments. I walked/biked from first grade until I bought my own car. My experience was typical in my peer group.
  - watwut 6y ago
    It is not acceptable nowadays to have your 7 years old to bike to school without adult. People overreact on 10 years old playing outside without adult nearby. Walking to school requires school/daycare/extracurricular center in walking distance walkable city. The spread in suburbs means that distances are higher then in the city.
- rustybelt 6y ago
  Were you a private school kid? School buses or walking were the norm for most people I know who grew up in the suburbs.
  - watwut 6y ago
    It is the experience of parents who complained about that.
stellar678 6y ago
I loved seeing 10 year old kids riding their bikes around the parks of Stockholm after dark in the summertime. Hell, I see the same thing in the recently-fixed Snow Park in Oakland. There's no natural law that says kids can't play safely in nature in an urban environment. Plus the added benefit of meeting and interacting with other kids from all different walks of life. We just have to prioritize it - and unfortunately the "got my own piece of nature and I'll drive everywhere else" suburban mindset is part of what forces our cities (and suburbs) to remain dangerous asphalt wastelands.
- CliffStoll 6y ago
  Our street in North Oakland (Colby St.) is now a "slow street": parents push strollers, kids are learning to bike, teenagers are skateboarding, techies commute to BART on bikes, oldsters walk in the street chatting. Wonderful change!
  - wetmore 6y ago
    I'm very excited by the fact that cities around America are slowly waking up to the idea that providing more spaces for cars instead of people makes living in them so much better.
nsnick 6y ago
The problem with suburbs is they don’t allow kids to get any amount of independence because they must be driven everywhere by their parents. I moved from a US suburb to a small city in Europe when I was 12 and it was liberating. I could suddenly walk or bike downtown alone.
- tayo42 6y ago
  suburbs are different then rural? I grew up in a suburb and walked and rode my bike everywhere. ran around the streets with friends and got into plenty of trouble skateboarding around town. population between 20-30k.
  - jackcosgrove 6y ago
    Need to make a distinction between car-dependent postwar suburbs and suburbs with train connections to the city. The latter are older and often have walkable neighborhoods.
  - spamizbad 6y ago
    Many HOAs have rules that require children under the age of 13 to be supervised by an adult when outside the home. Technically this is policy and not law but you could rack up huge fines if you do not supervise your kids. Often times parents trade off and coordinate but it’s still a hassle.
    - masonic 6y ago
      Many HOAs have rules that require children under the age of 13 to be supervised by an adult when outside the home. Not remotely the case in the US. There can be common-area usage restrictions (e.g. pool and spa), but they can't constrain anything done off property.
- treeman79 6y ago
  Downtown of our small 130k town is a mile walk. We can walk to many things. We are still considered suburban. Further out and walking to shops is less plausible. But then you have lots of nature to wak around
Androider 6y ago
I bought into this mindset, and regret it. That's what you do when you have kids, move to the 'burbs, right? We moved from a big city to suburban hell a few years after having a kid. In those first years, we took our kid to museums, parks, playgrounds, etc. all over the city. Now there is jack shit to do in the suburb we're in except going to the mall, cannot walk anywhere, have to use the car 100% of the time to even go to a shop. A backyard is a sad place compared to something like Central Park. I feel so sad for my kid. If the prices keep going lower in cities and remote work becomes the norm, we're moving back. (Un)fortunately my wife hates it here too, and we've often talked about moving back to a city.
- RHSeeger 6y ago
  Riding a bike/scooter in the cul de sac, playing in the woods, driving over to the town square and wandering around for a while. There's tons of things to do in the suburbs. There's tons of things to do in the city. Really, it depends what you like. Personally, I prefer to take my car to the shop because I don't want to carry a car load of stuff home. And Central Park is something I like to visit, but I wouldn't send a young child to play there by themselves.
  - rustybelt 6y ago
    "The suburbs" is such a broad category that it's practically useless. Houston suburbs, for instance, are vastly different than Chicago suburbs in terms of walkability, character, and access to nature. Even suburbs in the same metro are vastly different in experience.
- sharadov 6y ago
  Suburbs suck, mind-numbing pits, I don't know why people with families love them. I think they all secretly hate them, it's just that they want you to share their misery by convincing you to move.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I'd point out that there are plenty of areas that are neither urban or classic suburbia. But I'm guessing you don't like more rural areas either.
stormbrew 6y ago
Yeah until those kids are teenagers and they're bored out of their minds with nothing to do.
reccanti 6y ago
I see this expressed a lot, but from my personal experience growing up in a small rural community, I always wished I lived in the city. Maybe it’s just a “grass is always greener” thing, but I always wonder why people assume kids really want the suburban life.
- wiether 6y ago
  Because it's what is pictured in almost every movie/TV show ? Crime stuff in cities, nice family comedies in the suburbs.
ACow_Adonis 6y ago
I have a kid. And a cat. My neighbour has two kids and a dog. Their neighbour has a kid. Across the hall from them, two kids. approx 80 sqm apartments each. I might as well just copy your last paragraph. Additionally, we love the parks, the playgrounds, the gardens, we walk to childcare, walked to work before this whole pandemic thing. We all have memberships with the museum and the zoo that give us unlimited visits. And since the pandemic, my son often rides in a Thule transport behind my bike. we've got a creek along the bike trail, and one in one of the gardens. we've even got a children's farm down the road. Culturally many Australians are like Americans: the refrain is "you need to move to suburbia once you've got kids" and "kids need a back yard to run around in" and "you can't raise a kid in an apartment". To the point that half of them never move into the city in the first place or reflexively move out without an actual thought or goal. And it IS frustrating to lose friends (so far everyone I've talked to that has moved out regrets it or at least looks back wistfully) , and knowing that this belief is the viscious circle that stops people improving cities. But while I will admit that rural areas have something we can't replicate in the inner city (we all have trade offs after all), I WANT my child to have the opportunities afforded in the city and will actively fight the forces trying to set suburbia as a default. judging by the number of childcare centres, prams and scooters showing up in my neighbourhood, we might finally be on the verge of a generation that will try to stay. the pandemic has changed things, but as I've said to my wife and has been echoed by other posters, maybe this will clear the way for people who want to be here...
- jddj 6y ago
  Oh man, please allow me to do my best to offer some subjective validation of your life choices. I grew up in one of the small, very coastal Australian towns that stayed beautiful but got expensive and boring (alternative seems to be: grew big and turned awful, not much middle ground here). This was a ride your bike to school at 6 years old, spend one third of your life in the ocean, "just try to be home for dinner" town. Then I spent some time in some of the nicer, central suburbs of a second tier Aussie city. Then some small, blue collar northern European industry towns, then a major southern European city. Of those, and given the chance/choice, I'd raise children in the tiny coastal village and the dense European city (within 100m of my apartment - pedestrian streets - there were two small playgrounds, a market, a school, a library, a park, the beach was a 15min walk). Anywhere between those two extremes and adventure turns into a thoroughly planned outing, with a strict time limit on the paid parking if you got lucky and found a spot. The moderate densities are (or become) sprawling nothings with one coles/woolies/liquorland/bws/bunnings "hub" and long commutes to anywhere. Like you, many of my friends who plan to become young families seem to gravitate towards these starter-package lives, and although I'm probably listening for it, I hear the same regret and resignation from them that you do. Older relatives live in more expensive versions of the same thing, with a better quality finish on the bathroom and a glass fence on the pool they never use, and an 80k SUV for the just-as-long commute. There might be a flashy bowls club filled with pokies instead of a shitty tavern filled with pokies. Keep fighting the good fight. We build these 5 bedroom homes in the suburbs so that we're comfortable staying home. Because there's nothing to do outside, because we spent so much energy building nothing suburbs.
colinmhayes 6y ago
I loved living in the city as a kid. Going to the suburbs to see my grandparents always showed me how miserable it was out there. The parks in the city are better, the food and culture is incomparable, and the diversity was incredibly important to who I am today.
- andykx 6y ago
  You’re spot on about the diversity. I did not grow up in a very diverse place and it’s one thing I feel that I really missed out on. But parks? In the NYC suburbs (maybe exurbs is more accurate) where I grew up, I had like 5 beautiful state parks within walking distance from my house. I could walk through my friend’s backyard to a pair of beautiful lakes where we could swim, fish, kayak, whatever. It’s interesting. I’m not trying to be argumentative, but when I go to the city (any American city, at least), I find it to be really dirty, loud, and I find the people to be generally rude. I also don’t like the complete and total lack of outdoor space that isn’t public. Nothing beats a backyard to me.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    I live in Chicago which has the entire lakefront as park space and is filled with tons of other parks too. The suburbs are all off the lake so they don't have any beaches. Unfortunately there aren't any national parks or mountains in the midwest so the suburbs don't really have anything that the city doesn't other than some more empty space I guess.
    - rustybelt 6y ago
      You should check out the forest preserves. The Chicago suburbs really got it right there.
      - colinmhayes 6y ago
        I really enjoy the forest preserve. Love biking the north branch trail. Especially nice how easy it is to get to it by going up Milwaukee.

Kids change mindset. Kids love yards. They love the little creek that runs past. I love the safety. Small neighborhood, we all know each other and look out for the kids that run around playing.

asveikau 6y ago

Everyone says this, as if none of us who advocate for urban life understand having kids. I have two kids. Also, they raise plenty of kids in other countries where they haven't oriented life around suburbs. Also, this was more true in the United States before white flight, and the US raised plenty of healthy kids then. So I don't think the kid thing makes as much sense as they say. But the state of US school systems does make the urban kid raising thing needlessly expensive for many.

sharadov 6y ago
The big difference is in other countries schools are not as bad as they are in cities in the US. Not a lot of countries have this huge divide of urban vs suburban culture. In America, you move to the suburbs to die.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
Violence and distracting behavior in schools are bad. But school scores, prestige, etc. don't matter as much as most people think. Your home environment matters more than the school. High achieving magnets and wealthy suburban schools are that way because of the selection profile for students, not because the school itself is transformative.
- asveikau 6y ago
  Having exposure to high status schools in my own childhood, I agree 100% with your last sentence, that was one of the most important lessons I learned growing up, to completely ignore pedigree. I was in a well regarded school where pretty much everyone was an idiot. But they were born to successful people and most of them are now successful adults. Firm a proof as any that merit is either not the norm or completely doesn't exist. Still, I think more of an effort should be made to improve US urban public schools. I don't know what the answer is. It's surely very complex. I am not a specialist.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

watwut 6y ago

Yeah, and then you have to drive them to and from school, they have not much to do unless you drive them and one of you two have to stay home due to all that driving.

masonic 6y ago
I spent my entire childhood in the suburbs and literally never was I driven to/from school except for medical/dental appointments. I walked/biked from first grade until I bought my own car. My experience was typical in my peer group.
- watwut 6y ago
  It is not acceptable nowadays to have your 7 years old to bike to school without adult. People overreact on 10 years old playing outside without adult nearby. Walking to school requires school/daycare/extracurricular center in walking distance walkable city. The spread in suburbs means that distances are higher then in the city.
rustybelt 6y ago
Were you a private school kid? School buses or walking were the norm for most people I know who grew up in the suburbs.
- watwut 6y ago
  It is the experience of parents who complained about that.

stellar678 6y ago

I loved seeing 10 year old kids riding their bikes around the parks of Stockholm after dark in the summertime. Hell, I see the same thing in the recently-fixed Snow Park in Oakland. There's no natural law that says kids can't play safely in nature in an urban environment. Plus the added benefit of meeting and interacting with other kids from all different walks of life. We just have to prioritize it - and unfortunately the "got my own piece of nature and I'll drive everywhere else" suburban mindset is part of what forces our cities (and suburbs) to remain dangerous asphalt wastelands.

CliffStoll 6y ago
Our street in North Oakland (Colby St.) is now a "slow street": parents push strollers, kids are learning to bike, teenagers are skateboarding, techies commute to BART on bikes, oldsters walk in the street chatting. Wonderful change!
- wetmore 6y ago
  I'm very excited by the fact that cities around America are slowly waking up to the idea that providing more spaces for cars instead of people makes living in them so much better.

nsnick 6y ago

The problem with suburbs is they don’t allow kids to get any amount of independence because they must be driven everywhere by their parents. I moved from a US suburb to a small city in Europe when I was 12 and it was liberating. I could suddenly walk or bike downtown alone.

tayo42 6y ago
suburbs are different then rural? I grew up in a suburb and walked and rode my bike everywhere. ran around the streets with friends and got into plenty of trouble skateboarding around town. population between 20-30k.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  Need to make a distinction between car-dependent postwar suburbs and suburbs with train connections to the city. The latter are older and often have walkable neighborhoods.
- spamizbad 6y ago
  Many HOAs have rules that require children under the age of 13 to be supervised by an adult when outside the home. Technically this is policy and not law but you could rack up huge fines if you do not supervise your kids. Often times parents trade off and coordinate but it’s still a hassle.
  - masonic 6y ago
    Many HOAs have rules that require children under the age of 13 to be supervised by an adult when outside the home. Not remotely the case in the US. There can be common-area usage restrictions (e.g. pool and spa), but they can't constrain anything done off property.
treeman79 6y ago
Downtown of our small 130k town is a mile walk. We can walk to many things. We are still considered suburban. Further out and walking to shops is less plausible. But then you have lots of nature to wak around

Androider 6y ago

I bought into this mindset, and regret it. That's what you do when you have kids, move to the 'burbs, right? We moved from a big city to suburban hell a few years after having a kid. In those first years, we took our kid to museums, parks, playgrounds, etc. all over the city. Now there is jack shit to do in the suburb we're in except going to the mall, cannot walk anywhere, have to use the car 100% of the time to even go to a shop. A backyard is a sad place compared to something like Central Park. I feel so sad for my kid. If the prices keep going lower in cities and remote work becomes the norm, we're moving back. (Un)fortunately my wife hates it here too, and we've often talked about moving back to a city.

RHSeeger 6y ago
Riding a bike/scooter in the cul de sac, playing in the woods, driving over to the town square and wandering around for a while. There's tons of things to do in the suburbs. There's tons of things to do in the city. Really, it depends what you like. Personally, I prefer to take my car to the shop because I don't want to carry a car load of stuff home. And Central Park is something I like to visit, but I wouldn't send a young child to play there by themselves.
- rustybelt 6y ago
  "The suburbs" is such a broad category that it's practically useless. Houston suburbs, for instance, are vastly different than Chicago suburbs in terms of walkability, character, and access to nature. Even suburbs in the same metro are vastly different in experience.
sharadov 6y ago
Suburbs suck, mind-numbing pits, I don't know why people with families love them. I think they all secretly hate them, it's just that they want you to share their misery by convincing you to move.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I'd point out that there are plenty of areas that are neither urban or classic suburbia. But I'm guessing you don't like more rural areas either.

stormbrew 6y ago

Yeah until those kids are teenagers and they're bored out of their minds with nothing to do.

reccanti 6y ago

I see this expressed a lot, but from my personal experience growing up in a small rural community, I always wished I lived in the city. Maybe it’s just a “grass is always greener” thing, but I always wonder why people assume kids really want the suburban life.

wiether 6y ago
Because it's what is pictured in almost every movie/TV show ? Crime stuff in cities, nice family comedies in the suburbs.

ACow_Adonis 6y ago

I have a kid. And a cat. My neighbour has two kids and a dog. Their neighbour has a kid. Across the hall from them, two kids. approx 80 sqm apartments each. I might as well just copy your last paragraph. Additionally, we love the parks, the playgrounds, the gardens, we walk to childcare, walked to work before this whole pandemic thing. We all have memberships with the museum and the zoo that give us unlimited visits. And since the pandemic, my son often rides in a Thule transport behind my bike. we've got a creek along the bike trail, and one in one of the gardens. we've even got a children's farm down the road. Culturally many Australians are like Americans: the refrain is "you need to move to suburbia once you've got kids" and "kids need a back yard to run around in" and "you can't raise a kid in an apartment". To the point that half of them never move into the city in the first place or reflexively move out without an actual thought or goal. And it IS frustrating to lose friends (so far everyone I've talked to that has moved out regrets it or at least looks back wistfully) , and knowing that this belief is the viscious circle that stops people improving cities. But while I will admit that rural areas have something we can't replicate in the inner city (we all have trade offs after all), I WANT my child to have the opportunities afforded in the city and will actively fight the forces trying to set suburbia as a default. judging by the number of childcare centres, prams and scooters showing up in my neighbourhood, we might finally be on the verge of a generation that will try to stay. the pandemic has changed things, but as I've said to my wife and has been echoed by other posters, maybe this will clear the way for people who want to be here...

jddj 6y ago
Oh man, please allow me to do my best to offer some subjective validation of your life choices. I grew up in one of the small, very coastal Australian towns that stayed beautiful but got expensive and boring (alternative seems to be: grew big and turned awful, not much middle ground here). This was a ride your bike to school at 6 years old, spend one third of your life in the ocean, "just try to be home for dinner" town. Then I spent some time in some of the nicer, central suburbs of a second tier Aussie city. Then some small, blue collar northern European industry towns, then a major southern European city. Of those, and given the chance/choice, I'd raise children in the tiny coastal village and the dense European city (within 100m of my apartment - pedestrian streets - there were two small playgrounds, a market, a school, a library, a park, the beach was a 15min walk). Anywhere between those two extremes and adventure turns into a thoroughly planned outing, with a strict time limit on the paid parking if you got lucky and found a spot. The moderate densities are (or become) sprawling nothings with one coles/woolies/liquorland/bws/bunnings "hub" and long commutes to anywhere. Like you, many of my friends who plan to become young families seem to gravitate towards these starter-package lives, and although I'm probably listening for it, I hear the same regret and resignation from them that you do. Older relatives live in more expensive versions of the same thing, with a better quality finish on the bathroom and a glass fence on the pool they never use, and an 80k SUV for the just-as-long commute. There might be a flashy bowls club filled with pokies instead of a shitty tavern filled with pokies. Keep fighting the good fight. We build these 5 bedroom homes in the suburbs so that we're comfortable staying home. Because there's nothing to do outside, because we spent so much energy building nothing suburbs.

colinmhayes 6y ago

I loved living in the city as a kid. Going to the suburbs to see my grandparents always showed me how miserable it was out there. The parks in the city are better, the food and culture is incomparable, and the diversity was incredibly important to who I am today.

andykx 6y ago
You’re spot on about the diversity. I did not grow up in a very diverse place and it’s one thing I feel that I really missed out on. But parks? In the NYC suburbs (maybe exurbs is more accurate) where I grew up, I had like 5 beautiful state parks within walking distance from my house. I could walk through my friend’s backyard to a pair of beautiful lakes where we could swim, fish, kayak, whatever. It’s interesting. I’m not trying to be argumentative, but when I go to the city (any American city, at least), I find it to be really dirty, loud, and I find the people to be generally rude. I also don’t like the complete and total lack of outdoor space that isn’t public. Nothing beats a backyard to me.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  I live in Chicago which has the entire lakefront as park space and is filled with tons of other parks too. The suburbs are all off the lake so they don't have any beaches. Unfortunately there aren't any national parks or mountains in the midwest so the suburbs don't really have anything that the city doesn't other than some more empty space I guess.
  - rustybelt 6y ago
    You should check out the forest preserves. The Chicago suburbs really got it right there.
    - colinmhayes 6y ago
      I really enjoy the forest preserve. Love biking the north branch trail. Especially nice how easy it is to get to it by going up Milwaukee.