City Kids Revisited

Despite my post all about the differences between living in Vermont and New York City, I have to admit we are not exactly rural living. Burlington in a city, after all, although as we drove to the city center on Saturday, passing parks and green areas, trees, trees and more trees, I smiled at Fran and said, “I love our ‘city’.”

It reminded me I wanted to revisit a post called ‘City Kids’ I wrote a couple of years ago for Nicole, the blogger behind Work in Sweats Mama. Sadly, Nicole’s blog is no more (but if you want to read about what a kick-ass fit mama Nicole is, you can check out the feature of her on Fit Mama Friday).

Since we’ve only just moved here and we’re still apartment living, still able to walk to stores, the farmer’s market and into town; I don’t think Roman is having a spectacularly different lifestyle from his Brooklyn days. I am beginning to see differences in our parenting style and in aspects of life we took for granted, or didn’t even imagine possible, when we lived in the city. I’m sure sometime soon I will write about what this lifestyle change is like from a family and parenting point of view.

Thinking about all this, I went back and re-read the post I wrote on raising a city kid. It struck me as serving as a kind of wrap-up of our time of being New Yorker parents and maybe as a way of understanding how these two little ones’ childhoods are going to be different now.

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City Kids

I was in the playground a couple of weeks ago, chit-chatting with another mama by the sandpit. She mentioned her family had just moved to Brooklyn from another city, where they’d had less access to green space. I asked how they were enjoying living so close to Prospect Park, the enormous swath of land that many Brooklynites in our area call their backyard.

“Great, we love it!” she replied. “Except… my son is kind of freaked out by all the grass. I’ve noticed he really sticks to the paths.”

Her comment took me aback. While my husband and I are raising our son in Brooklyn, we are lucky enough to live very close to the park. I’d always considered my son to be enjoying a similar childhood to mine – lots of trees and grass and places to ramble. It had never occurred to me that my son’s childhood was being shaped by his environment. Not half an hour after my sandpit conversation, I watched as he ran about near an open-air bandshell, with a big concrete area for seating during summer concerts. It’s a popular spot for kids to learn to ride bikes. As I watched him, I realized his solo game was running along the painted lines demarcating the seating aisles. He was, in a nutshell, sticking to the paths.

That’s when it hit me. I have a city kid.

This is a bit of a double whammy for me – as an Aussie ex-pat, it’s odd to hear my little man speaking in an accent unlike mine. I have ensured he eats Vegemite, but he’s never going to pronounce “G’Day” properly, or use the word “mate” like second nature when referring to his friends, enemies, or complete strangers. So to have a little American-accented boy be more comfortable with concrete than dirt… it’s like I’m running an experiment in child rearing.

For a bit of context, this is where I grew up:

And in all fairness, this city-living is new to my husband as well. This is the area where he was raised:

On top of that, we are in our 30s and 40s, so our childhoods were in the 1970s and 80s, when there was less helicopter parenting and more, “Go outside and play. Dinner’s at 6.” My friend Jenny and I once found a great spot for a secret hideout, after traipsing around the bush for a couple of hours. We made a lean-to and camouflaged it, then we hid a food supply in a little stream – you know, for refrigeration purposes. We’d really thought our plan through. We never were able to find the place again.

My older brother and his friends had various cliffs over the top of waterholes they’d visit, where they would take turns cannonballing in off 40 foot high cliffs. I’m sure they tested the water depth first, because they were 16 year-old boys, who as you know are very thoughtful and mature. My husband Fran grew up on skis and when there wasn’t snow, he was still outside from sun-up to sun-down.

Is it a big deal to raise your child in a totally different environment than you grew up? After all, people choose for themselves where they live as adults, or they find themselves in a place to which they adapt. Looking back at how I grew up, no-one would ever have predicted I would end up living in New York City. In fact, my mother still bemoans my distance, quoting 11-year-old me (apparently, since I don’t remember saying this) declaring, “I would never want to live in a city.”

There are so many wonderful things about being a city kid. The children you meet in this city are self-assured, confident, used to dealing with adults. They can navigate the subway system handily. They have access to incredible institutions and programs that are just not readily available when you grow up in the suburbs or the country. But what about the opportunities to be active? Is it a citified way of being an active kid when you’re signed up for a race in Central Park with the local running club when you turn two? Or is that just one of the perks of city living?

In the end, the issue is probably more in my head than anywhere. Your children are different from you – as much as you think of them as amalgamations of your personalities, as they get bigger they start surprising you with the little flashes of independence that are all them – nothing they could have got from mama or dad. And when my son grows up, he’ll make his own choice on where he lives and who knows? He may have the same misgivings about where he is raising his children, too.

Just as actions speak louder than words, so do our love and care for our kids speak louder than the place we raise them. I know my little man will be self-assured, adventurous, active and strong-willed.

Pretty soon, he’ll stray from the paths.