I don’t think it’s unconventional, it’s just a definition of suburbs.
Worse of both world in my book. Unless you want to raise your kid in isolation.
Worse of both world in my book. Unless you want to raise your kid in isolation.
My friend is an urban activist and he always complained that his childhood neighbourhood wasn't conducive to meeting people.
Recently I learned that we actually grew up just a few bus stops from each other. For me it was never an issue to hop into a bus/subway train and reach my friends - usually unannounced.
The only people my age in this new neighbourhood were bullies and/or juvenile delinquents, so I didn't make any friends there.
My closest circle currently is my class nerd group from middle school with one additional guy from a high school the two of those went together. The urban activist friend I met through another guy from this bunch, who introduced me into some extracurricular activities in his school which I could attend.
I also have college friends who, like me, didn't move cities to go there. One of them is actually a guy who my primary school friends met in their middle school and who went to my high school, but we only got to know each other better in college. We were all spread out over this 1.7mln city, but that was no problem since everyone had phones.
Idk, there are many cities outside the US where I wouldn't want to stay more than absolutely necessary, let alone raise children.
That said, US is a collection of regions with very different social setups and it is easy to move between them. It is common, as preferences change, for youngsters to live for a few years in one state, settle to raise children in another, then move as empty-nesters to third.
If safety is what one is after, one can find a place that is super safe, comparable on safety to anywhere in the world. Someone else would aim for nightlife instead. This flexibility is what makes US very livable for me. Just my 2c.
But I've got to admit that Maine looks pretty safe according to https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/charts-and-maps
Also, it sounds strange to me to look at guns as an inverse proxy for safety. I would, especially with kids, first look at drug prevalence and second at accidents on the roads (both cars and bikes). Which reinforces what I started with: the ability to select the place I want to live in based on my own preferences. Given a wide variety of options, both politically and socially, one can usually find a place they are happy in. My 2c.
The only barrier to buying a flat or house might be slightly reduced access to loans. I found in Denmark it is easier for a Dane to get a loan for 95% of the house value, but foreigners might only get 80%. EU citizens are somewhere in the middle, depending what the banks think.
Language is the main problem. If you aren't fluent in the new country's language, you can have problems with government bureaucracy, school/work, socialising, children's lives, doctors etc. If you speak English these are much reduced in countries with high English proficiency (IS/NO/SE/FI/DK/NL/LU/CY, obviously IE/MT). Or, if you are moving where there's already a significant community of people speaking your language.
Do kids from other countries tend to be accepted well in schools? I heard that at least in France schools can be very clique-ish and coming from the outside the kid can face significant hurdles. But I am just parroting what I heard elsewhere.
Not knowing/learning the language also works for some jobs like cleaning or agriculture, if so many workers are migrants that everyone speaks Romanian or English etc. Also postgraduate students.
Plenty of people from the north who move south when they retire (e.g. Netherlands to Spain, Germany to Greece) move before learning the language.
How quickly people learn the local language depends. Slowly in Denmark or the Netherlands where English is almost universal and work is often done in English, quickly in France or Italy where the opposite applies. Slowly if you're 65 and surrounded by other Dutch pensioners.
From what I know of France, a child from the other side of France can also be excluded, but this is from French emigrants teasing each other. I haven't heard of similar problems in Denmark.
Growing up in London I didn't even notice the European immigrants in my class and could hardly exclude the 40% of the class who were descendents of South Asian immigrants, but this varies significantly around the country.
I expect compared to the USA there's much more reluctance to move when a child is 14-18 years old, unless they can be certain of a place in the French school in Copenhagen etc. But this is primarily because of the difference in exams and language.
Some of us have family and friends here or simply can’t afford to live in or move to the EU if we wanted to.
I do sympathize though. I do not have kids (yet) but our move from TN > Maine is definitely partially motivated by the fact that I said I would absolutely never raise a child in the south due to gun culture and archaic legislation in general. For example most states in the south still allow school teachers and administrators to hit children- most of this happens in Mississippi and TN, then basically other states where lots of poverty, christianity, or mormonism are.
What is it about cities outside of America that make them better? Do you any any examples? Do you have any suggestions what we could do in America to emulate that?
I grew up in a wonderful neighborhood in a nice suburban area, but I was the youngest kid by about four years so I never walked to a friend’s house.
I also never realized I was missing anything until I moved to a non-US city in my twenties and found out how different life could be in a human-scale environment.
That's not specific to cities. My wife grew up on a farm, where neighbours lived a hundred meters away, and her brother had an entire chunk bitten out of his leg by a neighbour's dog. I grew up in a village, and I was terrified of some of the dogs there.
We live in a city now, and although we live in a street with a lot of dogs (to the dismay of my cynophobic kids), all dogs are very well behaved.
> The American suburbs are an excellent place to raise children.
I guess it varies. I've heard stories of American parents having CPS called on them merely for having their children play outside. Many American suburbs don't have the bike paths or even sidewalks necessary for kids to get around.
Then she lost her job and had to move away, which I definitely didn’t feel any sense of schadenfreude from. We ended up buying her an Apple Watch with cell service and the complaints stopped.
I think us letting our daughter roam free has changed the general mood of the neighborhood and I’ve noticed far more children playing outside. We’ve been the catalyst to get everyone to just chill out. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/06/04/fewer-kids-...
It may be social, in that letting kids roam on their own is not as acceptable and could get you in trouble with courts. Also, "cars" are more dangerous these days, ans they shift into more trucks and SUVs with massive blind spots and distracted drivers, and there have been many efforts to eliminate penalties for speeding, and the difference between 20mph and 30mph is literally a ton of death.
The number 1 thing I would love for my child is to live in a place where I was not in constant fear of cars when on the sidewalk or street. It wasn't like that when I was a kid in the suburbs in the 80s. And I will likely have to leave the US to find what I want.
Yep, that's exactly what I did. I'm in Tokyo now, and it's mostly what the "NotJustBikes" crowd is asking for: great public transit, walkability, lots of bike-riding, etc. I see kids walking or riding bikes by themselves all the time. I finally realized I was never going to be able to live in this kind of society in the US, so I found a place that had the lifestyle I wanted and moved there.
The helmet safety panic really crushed a lot of my enjoyment of life. Made riding a bike utterly miserable for me - both socially with my peer group at the time, as well as it being massively uncomfortable to wear. Not to mention getting in trouble dozens of times for leaving it at whatever location.
I usually would end up biking outside sight distance of the parents and ditch it under a bush for later retrieval. But once this rule was enforced on me, my biking was severely curtailed as it didn't have the same simple joy of freedom it had beforehand.