Quote:
Originally Posted by The North One
You were still seriously considering a move to the suburbs though
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of course we were.
bog-standard upper middle class generic white american families are bombarded with the cultural message that the
only acceptable way to raise bog-standard upper middle class generic white children is in a 100% SFH suburban community where every family has their own yard, and every household has roughly the same income, and the barriers to entry keep "those people" out.
that messaging can be a pretty powerful force to overcome. not so much for me, but for my wife, who is less than 1/4 the urbanist that i am. had she married a different man and started a family, she'd very likely be living out in the burbs right now.
also, i know you don't have kids yet, but if/when you do, you might be surprised by how much you start re-prioritizing your life. i'm not being dramatic when i say "children change
EVERYTHING". it's such an awesome and monumental responsibility to raise another human being that it can cause all kinds of self-doubt. falling back on how you were raised (provided you had an enjoyable childhood, and i most definitely did) becomes an alluring and very safe-sounding option because most of us parent how we ourselves were parented when we were young. with the fact that both my wife and i were raised in the kind of lily-white upper middle class suburbia i spoke of above, it becomes a serious temptation of
"shit, maybe we should do that too, after all, that's what our parents did".
and then when you see many of your peers doing exactly that as their children reach school age, all kinds of questions start running through your mind. in just the past 3 years i can think of 4 couples in our social circle who were raising their preschool age children in the city, but have now moved out to evanston, glenview, park ridge, and oak park.
"are we making the right choice by staying in the city? should we be following our friends' lead?"
it can be hard and a bit scary to do something unorthodox, to break out of the normal pattern.