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Home › Articles › Parenting Strategies › City vs. Suburb

City vs. Suburb

Which Is the Best Place to Raise Baby?

By Jenn Director Knudsen

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Where is the best place to bring up Baby? In a city or outside it? That's a tough question, one sure to bring to mind stereotypical images of both.

To wit: All urban centers are crime-ridden concrete jungles, and all suburban and rural areas breed isolation and too much reliance on cars. Of course these stereotypes don't define every urban or more rural area, but there are pros and cons to each.

Here, experts and parents flesh out many of those pros and cons. They conclude the best way to make a decision about where to raise your family is twofold. Consider your own needs and values. And expose your children to as many experiences as possible, such as to music, dance, nature, books, sports and others' cultures, says Patricia A. Vardin, Ed.D., chair of early childhood education at Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y. Where you live may be secondary to what you do with and for your kids at your home base.

 

The 'Burbs
"Having a yard and better schools to look forward to are [some] of the usual assets of the suburbs," says Susan Isaacs Kohl, parent educator and author of The Best Things Parents Can Do: Ideas and Insights From Real-World Parents (Conari Press, 2004).

Space – more affordable space, even – is one aspect of suburban living that appealed to Rachel Beaver and her family. Beaver, mother of Hayley, 3 1/2, and Owen, 1 1/2, recently moved from Cambridge, Mass., home to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to Billerica, a "suburb with rural characteristics," she says. The suburb is 20 miles north of Boston and is dotted with farms and large lots.


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