Here's to Urban Parenthood

“New population data show an unprecedented flight of parents with young children from big cities,” according to a recent report from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Big cities certainly have their problems, and it’s understandable why some parents move to suburban or exurban locales. However, some of the biggest social issues for children include fostering autonomy, building community, and combating obesity. And as a parent raising two young kids in a big-city neighborhood, I’ve learned that urban living can have positive effects in all three areas.

Autonomy

Many recent articles have discussed how modern intensive parenting is smothering kids’ autonomy and harming their ability to build self-reliance. There is no panacea for this, but the rhythms of big-city living can have significant positive effects.

Consider transportation. My own suburban childhood included hours each day strapped to a car seat, being ferried to school, friends’ houses, or extracurricular activities. For a kid, it’s hard to imagine a more passive or parent-dependent mode of transportation. By contrast, this way of life is utterly foreign to my own urban kids. We walk to school, friends’ houses, and extracurricular activities at the local community center. For trips farther afield in the city, we take the Metro. While my kids are still too young to ride the Metro unattended, there’s something ineffably charming about a four-year old swiping his own Metro card at the turnstile and navigating the stations on roughly-equal footing as an adult. More importantly, I’d argue that navigating public transit like an adult helps build kids’ self-reliance and sense of agency, compared to passively sitting in the back seat of a car day after day. (Added bonus: whenever we do take a Zipcar to state parks and the like, the car ride itself feels like a special adventure instead of a mundane event).

Community

Walkable urban neighborhoods can also foster a sense of community, as other commentators have noted. My kids walk by the local bakery every day, to the point where the proprietor knows them by sight and sometimes slips them a free sugar cookie. It’s similar for the Turkish restaurant down the street (free pieces of their favorite pita bread when we stop by for dinner). This Mayberry-like sense of community is possible to create in well-built suburbs or exurbs, but it’s much harder to create in the common suburban or exurban milieu where vast expanses of tract homes are physically separated from retail and other amenities.

Certain other community ties are common in urban neighborhoods but almost absent in suburban or exurban ones. Like most of our neighbors, we live in a duplex townhouse with a tenant in the downstairs unit and a shared patio out back. This shared living space means our kids regularly play with the tenant’s dog, we occasionally share alfresco meals, and we have a potential babysitter just 10 feet below us. This semi-forced intimacy is rare in most suburban or exurban settings, where typical zoning laws wouldn’t even allow such co-living spaces.

Obesity

Finally, because dense urban neighborhoods feature so much daily walking, they can help address the obesity epidemic that is plaguing America’s kids. Of course, not all urban kids are slender, and suburban or exurban parents are hardly powerless to help their kids maintain a healthy weight. But when your family’s everyday commuting occurs on foot instead of by car, it’s much easier for your kids to get a decent dose of exercise without even trying. Over the years, these thousands of steps per day add up.

A Closer Look

This is not to say that urban parenthood is right for everyone. Families with three, four, or more kids may have difficulties finding sufficient living space in dense urban neighborhoods. Other families may have an emotional attachment to the idea of a detached suburban house with a big back yard. But for young urban couples looking to start a family, my advice would be to not reflexively pick up sticks and move to the suburbs or exurbs. Give urban parenthood a closer look. The benefits may surprise you.

Joshua L. Sohn is an attorney and parent in Washington, D.C. His writings have appeared in the Institute for Family Studies, Public Discourse, and numerous law reviews.