[vibrio]

"This is all pretty US-centric."

Is it US-Centric or urban centric? My guess is most of this board falls on the Urban side (Me included). I am unable to apply many of my valuable unstructured rural experiences as a youth to how I want to raise a child in a city. I thing I'd have the same challenge with Rome, Dallas, Barcelona, or most other urban centers.

[jimbokun]

My kids go to a city high school.

They have different kinds of unstructured experiences. After school, they have all kinds of restaurants and coffee shops to choose from. They can hang out at the Jewish Community Center and play FIFA. They sometimes wonder with their friends to a field at a local university to play soccer. They watch movies at the local theatre I only find out about when they mention later what they saw.

Heck, my older son took his girlfriend to a fancy restaurant I haven't even been to yet. :)

Before high school, a big mile stone was when they were old enough to safely cross streets on their own to walk to the local pool and basketball courts in the summer.

So there are still plenty of unstructured, unsupervised experiences to be had, just different than the rural ones.

[conductr]

I feel grateful to have grown up in a mid sized town. Population ~200k + College town of ~50k students. My bike radius was determined by my fitness level. I had all of these city experiences and the rural ones too because it was 100 miles to a big city. Even that was close enough for when you needed it but far enough we weren’t a suburb. The constant flow of college students kept the restaurants and entertainment at a high quality and on trend.

However, my bike gang was a bunch of little vandals. So we probably skewed the stats towards not letting kids outside.

Now I’m parenting in big city and I feel sad for how kids around here live. Trying to figure that one out before he gets older. He’s only 1 so I have time.

[vibrio]

Thanks for this. That sounds pretty nice too. Different. I was thinking about it last night and there are aspects of my youth I very much miss. being able to wander in woods with no-one around. playing hide and go seek with a handful of friends over more than a square mile of hilly-wooded area. Discovering crayfish in creeks or finding an awesome uncharted sledding hill in the winter. that said, my extended family was in a very large city and we visited frequently. One thing I think I resented about my town (though I don't think I knew it specifically) was the lack of some of some of the culture you describe. Plus there are just few people in small cities-the of everyday life cast of characters is very small, repetitious and limiting. That can be odd. Not sure how to explain that better.

[icebraining]

In some places, you can have both; when I lived in Brussels, my apartment - which was quite close from streets with plenty of shops, bars, universities, etc - was also 10 minutes by bicycle away from the 16 square mile (44 km²) Sonian forest.

[jimbokun]

No need to explain, as I grew up in a small town probably closer to your experience. :) As a kid, I was fascinated by what growing up in the city would be like, so it's been interesting to watch my kids grow up here.