We’ve been in the suburbs for a year now. Now I know the best place to buy fresh fish. I know who has the best strawberries and the freshest lettuce. I know how to get to the swim club and the library. I know how to back out of a parking space when flanked by two SUVs. I know the backroads to the mall. I can use an edger. I leave the house without locking the front door. I have opinions on grills. I have considered running for town counsel.
Now that I’ve established my suburban creds, I think it is time to make some sweeping generalizations that are sure to offend somebody. I’m comparing/contrasting life in the city v. the suburbs.
In terms of the kids, suburbia truly is kiddieland. I’m still floored by how many options there are for kids out here. There are millions of pre-schools, camps, swim clubs, sports, library reading groups, party spaces. And compared to city prices, it’s SO cheap. At this minute, my oldest son is growing strong and tanned at the t0wn pool as part of town camp, which is from 9-3 every day. On Tuesday, the camp had a field trip to the ice skating rink. Last week, he went to a week long soccer camp run by coaches imported from England. The youngest one is at a free summer school program that is teaching him how to talk. I take them to the town pool every other day where we see dozens of friends. Last Saturday, we had a belated birthday party for Jonah at the local bowling alley. $6 a kid.
In the city, there was none of that. Perhaps in the swanky West Side of Manhattan or sections of Park Slope might have some of those services. But you have to afford to live there.
And, of course, there’s the backyard. Instant access to fresh air and buddies without dog poop on the sidewalk. In the city, I could only manage two big trips outside a day, because it was too hard to go up and down four flights of stairs. Bikes were impossible.
Their schools are five minutes away. No hour long subway rides. They have 16 kids in a class. And, surprisingly, there is some diversity. Our town has a population of Mexicans. Suburban diversity is a growing trend. Of course, there is nothing like the multi-diversity that you find in the city and that is a problem. However, in our old neighborhood, Jonah would have been the only gringo in a school of Dominicans. That’s not diverse, either.
However, however, however. In the city, we had so few options for organized activity and going outside was so difficult, the boys and I spent a lot of time playing together inside. Just the three of us. Jonah spent hour upon hour building train tracks, while Ian rolled over on a blanket next to him. I sat on the futon watching them and reading the New Yorker. We were three people stuck in one room, but now I sometimes miss that quiet industry. The kids’ toys aren’t played with that much anymore, and I’m always late for something.
Then there’s the museums, the parks, the subway. And though we visit them often, there is still nothing like experiencing them regularly. Feeling like the Museum of Natural History is your home, because you go there every rainy day with your mom. The kids and I really miss our daily walks through the park where we would watch the gardeners tend to the heather, pause at the hill where you can see the boats sail down the Hudson, and then play in the shadow of the Cloisters.
Kids probably thrive where ever you plop them. Even kids in the projects probably have their good days and look back on those years with fondness. Yet, each situation molds the kid differently. With easy access to sports and the outdoors, my kids are going to be different people than if they only had two highly supervised outings a day. Surrounded by the bland surroundings of green lawns and tufted shrubbery, they are going to be different people than if they were surrounded by lofty buildings, graffiti art, 60 foot neon signs of P. Diddy, subway musicians, and T-Rex.
I hope we did the right thing.
Apt. 11d 
The trick is to help your kids see how the sameness is produced and the acute differences. My mom narrated everything:
As we drove across Long Island to do vision therapy twice a week” You know, Robert Moses built these bridges low so busses wouldn’t be able to take poor people to the beach.”
Visiting a friend in a different section of our town: “Your dad and I looked at a house over here, but it was still restricted at the time.” Me: “What’s restricted?” “It means we couldn’t live there because we were Jewish.”
Even: “You ever notice how the houses over on this side of the street are different than that side? One side has bigger lots.”
Or: “All the roads in Munsey Park are named after artists. Can you tell me what Borglum did?”
Needless to say while developing a critical stance towards suburbia it also guaranteed that I was destined for a stay in academia. On second thought, maybe this is not a good strategy.
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We’ll be doing the same thing soon, and I do worry about being surrounded only by white people and surburbia. But, my happiest kid memories are of wandering my neighborhood playing in yards, walking my dog, riding my bike on a quiet street. That’s just not available in the city, and not even in Bklyn. The kids in my neighborhood play as best they can in tiny backyards and on the sidewalks, but even our quiet street has roaring, ferocious traffic that keeps them hemmed in. There’s no park close enough to walk to. It’s just not enough for my kid to be happy in, I think.
Especially after the other day, when I was walking home from the train and saw a tiny girl–less than two–standing on a very busy corner all alone, after wandering away from the sidewalk in front of her house. Another neighbor saw her and picked her up before I could, but really, it’s just luck that she was ok and not already hit by a car. Her mom hadn’t even had time to realize she was gone. That stuff happens in the burbs too, but at least you usually have to go more than 10 feet from your front door to be in the busy busy traffic like that.
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I’m baffled–not offended, just baffled–by the equation of “suburbia” with “bland” and “white.” I grew up in the suburbs of central New Jersey, and my experience was radically different than the milquetoast upbringing you folks seem to be suggesting is the default.
For example, my sister’s first boyfriend was from Guam, and as a high-schooler, she learned to speak some Gujarati to her Indian co-workers. The church where my parents met offers masses in Polish, English, and Spanish. The town to our east was a squeaky-clean haven for Orthodox Jews. The town to our north was a mostly-black slum. Other adjacent working-class towns were predominantly Italian or Polish; they still are, but now you can go to their downtowns and eat Thai food or shop at Filipino bodegas. We only had to drive a few minutes south to see farmland.
We also enjoyed true socioeconomic diversity. Our best students attended the Ivies; our worst pumped gas; the kids in-between (i.e., most of us) have gone on to do just about any job you can imagine, from Persian Gulf oil-rig supervisor to interior decorator. Our high school had the full complement of AP and college-prep classes, but it also had a beauty school, an award-winning music program, a radio station, and an auto shop.
Was it Utopia? Gosh, no. Traffic was abominable (and has gotten worse), one-party rule led (and still leads) to corruption, and overdevelopment made large parts of the town butt-ugly. Still, I miss it. I live in a city now, and I have lovely museums and monuments and parks and gobs of fancy-schmancy “ethnic” restaurants at my disposal, and I take advantage of all that, but I miss the random sprawl and Chaucerian diversity of central Jersey. When I get sick of Washington–and I do, often–I go up to New Jersey and reconnect, and it makes me glad to remember that my formative environment was a vibrant, chaotic, sprawling mess. It prepared me to live nearly anywhere and interact with nearly anyone, and all these years later, I still feel that it did that better than any city ever could.
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Laura, I’m sure you’re kids are going to grow up to be great, no matter where you raise them – it’s clear you guys are great parents who really care about your kids.
That said, I did want to add that it is among the profoundest regrets of my life that my mother didn’t choose to take an offered job in New York City when I was an adolescent, and instead had us finish school in the small upstate town where I was born.
For although small town/suburban life was fun as a small child – playing with neighborhood kids, having a huge backyard, going to the playground by myself – those aspects of an area that make it very idylic as a smaller child often translate into choking boredom as a teenager.
When I got to college I found I envied my friends who had grown up in the city. They seemed so much more mature, so much more interesting and personable than those of us who had grown up in much more limited environments.
Just my two cents.
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IS SUBURBIA KIDDIELAND?
I’m somewhat older than these observers and an emigre from early tract housing …
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Yay, Jeff. Good comeback.
Up here, in Northern NJ, things are a little less sprawling and chaotic. There are a lot of well groomed lawns.
There is some eye candy, too. I’m a fanatic for old houses, and there are a lot of those around here. I like the ones that are almost falling down, because I like to imagine how I would fix them up. (Explains some choices in boyfriends in my twenties.)
I didn’t mean to say that suburbia is all bland and boring. Lots going on here even in well groomed lawn land. But, visually, there is no comparison to Times Square on a summer evening.
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