This is not unusual in Manhattan. Pick any apartment and walk five minutes in every direction. You'll find a playground.

In the winter we take the subway 20 minutes to a large indoor complex with better equipment and hundreds of other children. They are not quiet!

Of all the places we go, his favorite is the subway, where he gets to say Hi! and Bye! to lots of people.

I dread the loneliness of the burbs.

There would be literally hundreds of children playing daily in that park when the weather was nice, and usually a smaller number when it wasn’t as nice, but still hardly ever zero during reasonable “kids playing outside hours”.

Ages were between kids that could barely walk there with parents or nannies all the way to young teens.

I’m sure many other cities are not like this, but in neighborhoods where people with children in NYC actually live (like the UES) there are plenty of parks and people to fill them.

Quite frankly it’s a miracle that the school district works at all. Having experienced it, school choice does not scale to a million plus kids.

Mine has a community sports league for just about anything you can think of. Swimming, soccer, baseball, lacrosse, touch football, cross country, etc...

There are four different community swimming pools, miles and miles of hiking trails, and sidewalks everywhere for bikes and dog walking. Courts for tennis and basketball. There are kids everywhere. It isn't unusual for the doorbell to ring with a kid wanting to know if your kid can come out to play. One neighbor kid used to ring our bell to ask if he could go in our backyard to play with our dog. On days like hallowe'en, people block the roads off and kids run wild.

There are elementary schools and middle schools spread throughout the neighborhood. Kids can walk or bike to school, although lots of busy parents still drive their kids.

As a 12 year old in a city you can walk to a park or get on the metro/bus and visit some friends or go see a movie etc. In the burbs if your parents aren't home or are otherwise unwilling to drive you somewhere you're basically stuck at home counting the days until you turn 16.

But overall I'm glad we did. As a teen there was absolutely nothing to do in the town we moved from. Drugs became a really big issue I heard. At least the city provided activities so we didn't get bored out of our minds.

If some "concerned citizen" doesn't report the 12 year old to child protective services. Looking at how children are pushed into so much fear it is no wonder how many of them escape into the virtual.

That sounds more to me like a thing that happens in the suburbs, where kids need to be chauffeured around in cars everywhere and the streets are too fast and too packed with cars for bikes to be safe, so parents don't even get the opportunity to contemplate letting their kids out of their sight.

https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/M...

> Skenazy's April 1, 2008 column in The New York Sun, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone," described her making the controversial decision to let her son take the New York City Subway home alone, which was completed without incident.

When I was a kid in Cupertino and San Jose, I biked everywhere. I biked to school, to meet friends in other neighborhoods, shopping centers (even Milpitas to Eastridge), etc. Even the shitshow that was County Transit got me to Los Gatos ahd Palo Alto. The nearest bus stop was a mile away; I biked there.

And I'd argue that most burbs have fewer crime and drug risks, but both tend to be way overstated by media.

Akao, cities tend to have a much higher ratio of people to sports fields. If you play baseball / football / soccer, you have much greater access (for pickup games as well as organized leagues).

It's not like combining a suburb space / greenery etc with a city experience is impossible. We just don't do it, since we mostly build our cities and suburbs for cars.

Cities should have plenty of parks, easy access to dense areas tastefully built (for walking, shopping, restaurants, coffee), and have plenty of trees, small and larger squares, and public transport, with several public buildings and monuments thrown in. A river or large lake or sea wouldn't hurt either where possible.

I grew up in a midsized city, when I was a kid I could walk, bus, or ride my bike literally anywhere I wanted to go without really any notable restrictions, including parks with sandpits. My parents kept a draw full of bus schedules. The best part is there were literally kids everywhere, so you were never lonely even if you left the house alone. We'd organize pick-up games of soccer or baseball or kickball, etc. I even went ice skating by myself. Sometimes I'd just walk outside during the summer just to see which of the "neighborhood kids" were out. I'd spend hours just exploring the city on foot or bike, so much so that I'd come home with sore legs. All snow storms were followed by sledding in the park. I spent very little time with my parents.

When we got older it was mall and movies, record stores, arcades.

We also had a back yard, shared between six families.

Sometimes my parents would even send me on errands for them.

I had an after school job starting at 16 and I'd never be able to if I had to be driven there, my dad was always home, but without a car. I'd take the bus there.

I was rarely home, it was amazing.

Compare that to the suburbs or rural areas where the only way to get anywhere is a parent driving a kid somewhere. Sounds stifling. My parents would never shuffle me around everywhere. (In fact, I didn't even care for it as an adult, sometimes I just wanted to go for a walk! But leaving required a car, no sidewalks, traffic much too fast for a bike)

I grew up in the suburbs. All my friends where within walking or biking distance, as was the local library. There was a small forest less than 5 minutes walk from our house we could explore, as well a nice sledding hill. There was a small field at the end of the road that had a couple of soccer goals. The 'big city' was ~30 minutes away by bus. When I got a bit older they even opened a mall within 20 minute bike ride of where we lived.

Basically whether a place is "good for kids" is entirely orthogonal to if its urban or suburban.

  I could walk, bus, or ride my bike literally anywhere ...  Compare that to the suburbs or rural areas

Anyway, it’s fine to worry but personally I’d try to hold off until there’s some empirical evidence that there is a problem. If there is (“study shows kids raised in city are maladjusted” — after controlling for all other variables), I’m not aware of it.

Our apartment building has its own patio space, a reasonably large butterfly garden, and some gardening plots in the back yard. We've set aside one of the garden plots for the kids to do whatever they want in (last summer's cherry tomato harvest was a sight to see), and turned another into a sandbox.

We spend lots and lots of time outside in those sorts of communal spaces. For my part, I feel sorry for kids living in these intensively inward-facing suburban environments where there are no sidewalks or community spaces, and kids are dependent on adults with cars to help them get together with their friends.

I walk across the street to the municipal park, where there's not only a playground, but also open outdoor spaces that people use for (to cite things I've observed this weekend) picnics, childrens' birthday parties, pickup sports, martial arts classes, playing frisbee with dogs, and general horsing around. There are smaller parks with playgrounds every 3 blocks or so in my part of town.

People raised in a stereotypical American suburb (as I was) tend not to grow up with common spaces that people use for individual purposes. It can be easy to end up equating space that's useful with space that one has exclusive use of, and so assume that city dwellers must be deprived.

Also, not everyone in a city lives in an apartment. Condos and single-family-homes typically include an outdoor space.

Globally, the figure is about 55%, passing the midpoint in the 2010s. The US became 50% urban in the 1920s. For England and Wales, the 1890s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization#/media/File%3AHis...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization

This is simply so untrue, that's it's laughable. High density, urban spaces have by-and-lqege more opportunities and places for kids than the hellhole that is the exurbs and most of the post war suburbs.