In June, an article in Forbes.com offered a top-ten list of the best places to raise kids. The article goes on about the process of selection, but in the end, it seems to add up to “uniformly white and middle-class” when you look closely at both the criteria and the final list. The article even suggests that proximity to shopping malls is a plus, because hanging out in them is important to teenagers' social development.
People in my former town used to say “but it's a great place to raise children!” after gripe sessions about the lack of diversity, over-abundance of fundamentalist churches or minimal opportunities for adventure. But I never agreed. I knew I wanted to raise my children in a city, and the “great place to raise kids” line always seemed to imply, “unlike a city where we adults might find many other things to enjoy but our children would suffer.”
It all depends on what parents want for their children.
Shopping malls aren't on the short list of what I want for my kids. What I do want is for them to feel that art, music and literature are theirs to make and own, not the special purview of a few special people. I want them to speak more languages than English and feel confident as global citizens. I want them to be just two more faces in a sea of friends without a dominant race or other social type. I want them to know that they aren't the only kids in the world with two parents of the same gender; or with parents of a different race than theirs; or who came into their families through adoption. I want Black adults in their lives to give them comfort in their own skin. I want somewhere interesting to go when there are 16 inches of snow on the playground and the wind-chill is negative five.
After their first two weeks in the city, my children have helped a professional artist with a piece for an upcoming show. They have met a dozen kids at the playground behind the loft where we're living and no two are in the same demographic. They have a French-speaking baby sitter and many Spanish-speaking friends and neighbors. They have a membership to the aquarium and have been there three times. There are two playgrounds within easy walking distance and an independent book store with a fabulous children's section and a weekly story hour across the street. True, the cost of living here is higher, but almost everything on that list is free.
When I opened the front door of the art gallery we are living above to a breathless young man introducing himself as “the drunken [expletive] that stole your bench last night” I was struck by how perfectly the event contained both the upside and the downside to living in an urban neighborhood. It seems the young man had a few too many and woke up with a new bench in his apartment. He recognized it as the bench the gallery owner keeps outside to accommodate the community of artists, art fans, neighborhood friends and homeless locals who gravitate towards her place.
I know that for some parents, the potential hazards of drunken revelers on the front steps is not worth the benefits of city life, but for my family, the limitless opportunities for reaching across difference and making friends out of those who might seem threatening at first glance, is more than a fair return for an occasional wandering piece of public furniture.
