Where Should We Raise Our Young Children?

An Investigation of City vs. Suburb vs. Country for those who have options.

Sixteen years ago my husband and I packed up the contents of our gorgeous rental right near the downtown “village” of the college town of Claremont, California and moved back to the country to raise our children. This piece is a celebration of that decision, a cautionary tale, and an investigation of the things I wish someone had told us back when we were deciding where to live.

In 2008 I was twenty-six years old, I had finished all my coursework and had just passed both the American and Political Philosophy qualifying exams for my PhD. I had a one year old son and was barely pregnant with my second child, a daughter. My husband and I had both grown up on acreage, but I was decidedly from a very small town, whereas my husband’s childhood home in Mesa, Arizona had been swallowed up by Phoenix’s urban explosion in the 1990s. When he was a boy he had his own mountain, and miles of unclaimed desert in which to run around, blowing up old cars and shooting off potato guns, completely free of adult interference. My childhood world was still in existence in 2008, largely unchanged in the hills of the California Gold Country. My husband’s childhood was gone. No one would ever experience it again.

When we were deciding where to live, my husband had two non-negotiables: one, that we be near one side of the family or the other, and two, that we raise our kids in a place unlikely to completely disappear and be swallowed up into a city. So we packed up everything and moved back to my hometown.

This is actually not my hometown. But nearby…

I think most people instinctively know that there is something about the countryside, or rural living, that matches the nature of young children. And I would go a step further and say most people also sense that whatever the benefits rural living offer to young children, there is less on offer for adults. There are variations in temperament that lead some adults to prefer country life over urban, but I doubt there are any children who truly prefer city life. In a very basic sense, cities just aren’t designed for children.

But they are designed for the intellectual and professional development of adults, and so most people split this difference and settle somewhere close enough to a city to benefit from the financial and cultural aspects of urban life, but far enough away to afford “a yard” and space meant to cater to the needs of a growing family. The suburbs.

For most people, suburbs are the “best of all worlds.” But for those of us who can work from home, or who can set up small businesses anywhere, the arrival of small children into our lives brings about a somewhat constant sense that life really would be better in the country, at least for our little kids. But would it be better for the adults, too?

This is actually my hometown, right near our ranch

The easiest way to understand this impulse to move kids to the countryside is to acknowledge that human development proceeds along certain stages, and that each of these stages features a “power” or skill that the children become absolutely consumed with mastering. The easiest stage to observe this is when a baby is about to start walking. Babies will frequently stop eating, and devolve into tantrums and miserable behavior during the day and sleepless nights when they are approaching walking because they are so singularly focused on the new power they are about to wield. It consumes them, and the change in their behavior can be frustrating to their caretakers because what used to pacify them no longer works, and what used to delight them no longer delights. They only want to try to walk, and nothing else. Experienced mothers will remember realizing this fact only after the child is walking smoothly and resumes normal eating and sleeping schedules.

Now, if a child is that preoccupied with attaining the power to do something physical, if nature is that strong that children will cease sleeping, eating, and behaving normally until they’ve reached and mastered this developmental milestone, why would we be surprised when a less engrossing, yet still demanding version of the same thing appears when they are learning to run, to throw, to climb, to ride a bike, to balance, to spar, or even to drive?

The reason the country beckons to the parents of small children is because it is a giant proving ground for the physical mastery of childhood. Kids are hardwired to make themselves and our lives miserable in their pursuit of the physical world. Most (not all!) adults mastered this stage and the workings of their physical nature years ago, and we forget what it is like to be so focused on the freedom to move and try things with our body.

Our ranch is a little less than an hour from a lovely little ski resort, the type of place that is still frozen in the 1970s when it was first developed by a couple of local families. There are special children’s ski rates available with instructors on had to give lessons. When my husband and several of our local friends first took our kids up there, the seventy-five year old grizzled ski instructor told them that our kids had exceptional coordination. “I can teach skiing fine, but I can’t teach that. No one can teach that.”

The vast majority of young kids, even young kids in sports, lack coordination because they simply are not allowed to be outside developing it, in risky and quasi-dangerous situations, throughout childhood. I doubt any of our own kids are truly exceptional athletes, but all of them had an edge before they entered organized sports because they spend the majority of their childhood outside orchestrating increasingly demanding kid scenarios. The ski instructor said that once kids are well into late childhood, it’s too late to acquire coordination. They either have it or they don’t.

Physical coordination isn’t the most essential skill in life. But it is a foundational skill, and it is essential in the sense that it helps young boys find confidence in themselves, in their movement and in their bodies. Such confidence is harder to go back and supply for oneself later in life.

The best way to understand children, particularly male children, is to consider what exactly is on display in their favorite movies. Most little boys love superhero movies, and I think this is because they themselves are like superheroes discovering and honing their powers. I remember one time one of my sons asked me what my power was. Like what could I do. What cool thing does my body do? I probably said have babies or something and he seemed vaguely impressed, if not disappointed in my boring power. How does one role play that? Gross.

The powers of little boys are pushing pulling scaling shoving running climbing hitting throwing and yelling. As they are working on these things, they imagine themselves as Spiderman, Thor, Superman, Ironman, etc. That’s pretty much the life of a small boy. Go and do cool things with your body pretending you’re a superhero. Sometimes cars and legos are involved. Rewind and redo in slow motion ad infinitum to impress your mom, the stand in for the superhero’s girl until our superhero is about seven or eight years old.

This is all very inconvenient for adults. None of these majestic powers works well in a city. Adults have long since moved past that stage of development and into the pursuit of social, cultural and intellectual mastery. But the great joke of the universe is that when intellectuals have children, those kids are just about the worst possible addition to the life of the mind. They ruin everything with their singular obsession of mastery over the physical world.

The intellectual parents will want to go to a museum or talk about philosophy with friends after dinner and the children of these intellectuals will only think of scaling, pushing, throwing, repelling, skating, or if all else fails burning the whole place down. They want to know what happens when I do this? What will happen if I scratch this? Do you think I could jump up high enough to slap that header above the door? How hard would I have to throw this priceless sculpture to burst that thick glass window?

Of course—the urban intellectual will object—the purpose of childhood is to turn into an adult, to move past the physical mastery of the world and into the things of the adult world. City life should show kids what they are aiming for, what they have to look forward to, right? What’s wrong with submerging them into the world of adults if that’s where they are going to end up, anyway?

The Palace of Fine Arts: one of the few palaces truly suitable for small boys

The problem with bringing kids along with you as you aspire and climb the social and intellectual world of adult achievement is that there’s nothing there for them. Not yet. And so you run the risk of raising kids who spend the majority of their childhoods feeling out of place, useless, burdensome, in the way, or just not a match for society. They never feel good about themselves in the way a man at the top of his game in his element feels. What they are, what they are consumed with, is decidedly rejected by most of modern life. This is damaging for young children.

There is, however, a stage of development at around thirteen or fourteen for boys, when the best possible thing for them would be to show up at a work site with a bunch of competent men and realize that they are the absolute weakest, least competent, most economically worthless man there. That can be really good for teenage boys. It can beckon them beyond adolescence and into the world of men. But that stage only comes after they’ve got mastery of quite a few things, they’ve earned the respect of their fellows, and they start to act saucy and self-important around the house and disrespect their mom.

Bye, Felicia. Have Fun Working With Dad!

I think the majority of the offerings for children in suburbs and cities are designed to usher children prematurely out of the physical mastery stage of development and into academics and social achievement, with organized sports remaining as the sole area to exercise physical mastery. But of course “organized” means adults are in charge, and parents are expected to participate financially and socially, spending lots of money and an outrageous amount of time in the stands.

The funny thing about life is that the young kid who is best at behaving himself while tackling “adult pursuits” like talking with adults, sitting still and listening, wondering about art, and moving really slowly and silently through public spaces will not actually end up being the best adult. This kid is good at pretending to be an adult around adults, but is often rejected by his peers because they do not value the things adults value in him. This kid is often “such a nice boy” and “such a mature, intelligent young man” according to moms, while simultaneously loathed by his peers.

But the reason for this is obvious. The excellence of, say, a ten-year-old boy as judged by his peers is facility with things proper to a boy: running, fighting, fishing, fixing things, climbing trees, playing tag, organizing games and winning. And in a real sense, his fellows are right—that kid is the most excellent boy. And the kicker is, the most excellent ten-year-old boy according to his peers will more often grow up to be the most excellent man according to other men. The most excellent ten-year-old boy according to moms and other adults will almost never achieve that. I’m not sure why this is but I do think it has something to do with the nature of leadership, and the reality of herd animals.

A child habituated to never being “in his element” or never fitting and mastering his environment might take an interest in pursuits of the mind and soul earlier in life, but for some reason the physically excellent, popular ten-year-old will always have an edge. Maybe this is because some part of the prematurely adult, precocious kid knows he never mastered that physical stage, or he never was allowed to fully pursue the powers of his body, and this deprived him of establishing himself to himself and among his peers before diving into the life of the mind.

All of ancient philosophy and pre-modern educational theory seem to posit the same understanding of children: the best education for children masters the physical before moving on to the intellectual. There is no weak-bodied yet socially accepted nerd. The Ancient Greeks wrestled and were in gymnasium and then poetry and music before moving on to military pursuits and finishing up with politics and the life of the mind.

The modern world largely skips the physical mastery phase and pushes kids straight into academics as early as possible. And, as we know, the modern world is no place for young boys. Physically active boys in particular end up with various diagnoses, often drugged into submission. Imagine doing that to the little baby obsessed with learning to walk.

Now, it is not automatic that moving to the country will solve this modern problem. I do not wish to overpromise or exaggerate the benefits of rural living. But the country is the only place where this problem might be addressed and where the physicality of young boys in particular might be indulged instead of punished.

In the end, the best argument for living in the country *for the parents* is that only the country can give parents of young children the freedom to be away from their kids for a few blessed moments while the kids are honing and mastering their physical skills. You don’t have to supervise them every moment of every day. Your life isn’t simply viewing kid life, 24/7.

Rural areas are the only remaining communities in America where children are allowed to run around outside and climb and build and spar without adult supervision, and this means that the mother who is home all day while these young olympians hone their various little kid powers can perhaps carve out a small blessed space for herself and her spiritual, social, or intellectual pursuits at the same time. The best argument for the country is this: You don’t have to drive them anywhere, and you don’t have to coordinate anything. This is the door, you may use it, kid. Go nuts out there.

For real, though.

Sixteen years ago, my husband and I both had a sense that moving to the country would be very beneficial for our children, and a mixed bag for us. That has turned out to be the case. Our kids have undoubtedly the best childhood of almost any kids I can think of. Their parents have suffered career and social setbacks, some loneliness, some intellectual atrophy and some social frustration.

My husband’s family had a horse ranch and he grew up building houses with his dad and brothers. He knows how to work on cars and take machines apart and put them back together again. I grew up on seven acres of dense mountain forest, gardening, working on a ranch, driving an old tractor with trailer when I was nine, cooking from scratch, playing sports, and taking care of animals. When we moved back to the country it was relatively easy—and enjoyable—for my husband and I to pick up all of these skills again and remodel our houses, work on farm stuff, and plant large, abundant gardens.

But for us, these were old skills. We learned some new ones like how to plumb an entire house and how to throw large house parties for our friends, but I’m not sure we have challenged ourselves to do a lot of things out of our comfort zone.

A lot of the new skills we should have been cultivating in the life of the mind, in music and advanced choir and orchestra, in local politics and a social group full of interesting friends took much longer for us to cultivate. It would have been easier for us to pursue these things had we stayed in the city. We have also raised our kids in a more economically depressed area, and I imagine some of our work life and financial success was hampered a bit by our decision to live rurally. It’s probably been harder for my husband to scratch out a living. But, then again, our cost of living is much lower in the country so much of the increased income the city provides would have gone simply to afford living there.

Overall, it was the best decision we ever made for our family. But we have had to be strategic and intentional with our need to continue to push ourselves in the intellectual and social pursuits that we have not yet mastered, and which are proper to adults who have graduated from the physical superhero phase of life.

Over the years we have done things like travel to San Francisco or Los Angeles frequently to go to performances, attending bigger, prettier churches for Mass with more professional choirs occasionally, and of course visit museums and such. I finished my dissertation and have worked, mostly remotely, for a couple of think tanks and a political magazine off and on, over the years. My career would have been better had I stayed in the city, closer to a college town. But most likely my career would have been derailed anyway with the raising of five kids, four of whom are boys, and the extra attention and coordination their frenetic activity would have necessitated had we stayed in the city.

And I have logged thousands of hours of reading and writing while my kids were playing outside. That’s not nothing!

For the past fifteen years we have lived on seven acres or more, with many animals to take care of, trees to climb, neighbor kids to run around with in complete freedom, and a dramatic decrease in desk and indoor time compared to what our kids would have had in that college town. What our decidedly blue-collar area lacks in glamor and sophistication it makes up for in endless opportunities and abundant apprenticeships in the trades, which has helped us launch them out of the little kid phase of life and into the young adult working world. They will be able to support themselves easily in construction or an adjacent trade should they ever need to. But we still expect them all to go to college, to take the next step into the life of the mind and continue their spiritual development. To do what is proper to adults.

In the end it is difficult and probably impossible to differentiate between the interests of adults and the interests of their children. The way families work, it is a rare adult who can peacefully pursue what is best for him, what is key for him to devote his energy to, at the expense of his kids.

The institution of the family really is for the sake of the children, for their development, for their good. I have no doubt in my mind that country life has more to offer the ideal ten-year-old boy. I have no doubt in my mind that the city discourages the excellences proper to him. So we went with the country, and we have no regrets.

Perhaps Aristotle is right that the life of the mind is really more fitting to old age, to retirement, to that time leftover when the business of life is through and true leisure can be found. I’m not sure. It is possible I will never get back the opportunities and hours I could have spent developing my mind in the prime of life. But it gives me great peace to say that as my kids grow up and leave for college, I will be able to turn to these things, belatedly, and pursue them with a clear mind and conscience.

If you have kids and you have the choice, I vote for the country.