How? My eight year old daughter gets to roam free and has seven or eight different kids she plays with on a weekly basis. A few of them daily. We’re not worried about her getting carried off because the area is super safe. We lived in the city before and it was dangerous and the neighbor had a crazy pitbull chained up that’d break out all the time so we couldn’t let her out of the house. It’s also very diverse, her friends parents are from Ukraine, India, Jordan, Vietnam, China, and those are just the people I’ve met. The American suburbs are an excellent place to raise children.

I've found that it's more about the person than the area.

My friend is an urban activist and he always complained that his childhood neighborhood wasn't conductive for meeting people.

Recently I learned that we actually grew up just a few bus stops from each other. For me it was never an issue to hop into a bus/subway train and reach my friends - usually unannounced.

Some people want to be forced to socialize - others find ways to socialize with those around them. And others only want to socialize with copies of themselves.

Easy to meet people, and easy to hop on public transport to visit existing friends, are two very distinct things. How did you meet these people who were not within walking distance?

School mostly - my family moved to the other side of the district when I was in 6th grade, but I already had an urban card and the right to go out whenever I pleased as long as was back by 7pm, so we stayed in touch, even though I went to a different middle school where in turn I met more people living closer to my new neighbourhood.

The only people my age in this new neighbourhood were bullies and/or juvenile delinquents, so I didn't make any friends there.

My closest circle currently is my class nerd group from middle school with one additional guy from a high school the two of those went together. The urban activist friend I met through another guy from this bunch, who introduced me into some extracurricular activities in his school which I could attend.

I also have college friends who, like me, didn't move cities to go there. One of them is actually a guy who my primary school friends met in their middle school and who went to my high school, but we only got to know each other better in college. We were all spread out over this 1.7mln city, but that was no problem since everyone had phones.

No, American suburbs are good enough compared to American cities that are just filthy. Cities outside of US are just fine for raising children.

> Cities outside of US are just fine for raising children.

Idk, there are many cities outside the US where I wouldn't want to stay more than absolutely necessary, let alone raise children.

There's a lot of dangerous cities in the world. Lots of countries have weak governments unable to keep the peace, with social life disrupted by crime, strife, unrest, distrust. But there are also lots of countries that are much, much safer than the US.

US certainly has its share of horrible cities.

That said, US is a collection of regions with very different social setups and it is easy to move between them. It is common, as preferences change, for youngsters to live for a few years in one state, settle to raise children in another, then move as empty-nesters to third.

If safety is what one is after, one can find a place that is super safe, comparable on safety to anywhere in the world. Someone else would aim for nightlife instead. This flexibility is what makes US very livable for me. Just my 2c.

Definitely this. I grew up outside Baltimore and went on to live in Boulder CO, Orange County CA, moved back home and then to LA on a whim. Finished school in Nashville, TN and my wife and I are about to get out and move to Maine. Zero red tape whatsoever- the flexibility and ease of traversing and moving around the USA is definitely awesome and rarely discussed in terms of the benefits of living here. There’s something for pretty much everyone and the culture varies greatly from region to region, city to city.

With freedom of movement, it's just as easy to move around the EU now. But I don't have to make a trade-off between safety and nightlife.

But I've got to admit that Maine looks pretty safe according to https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/charts-and-maps

First of all, I am not bashing EU or Europe -- great countries, great history, etc. But I would pretty strongly disagree on "just as easy to move around the EU" part. From what I understand it is super smooth for vacations, but not nearly as frictionless to move around semi-permanently. For example, someone graduating in Norway, moving to Spain for 3 years, then on to Germany would see friction in buying a flat, sending children to school or buying a house. If this is not the case, I would love to be corrected.

Also, it sounds strange to me to look at guns as an inverse proxy for safety. I would, especially with kids, first look at drug prevalence and second at accidents on the roads (both cars and bikes). Which reinforces what I started with: the ability to select the place I want to live in based on my own preferences. Given a wide variety of options, both politically and socially, one can usually find a place they are happy in. My 2c.

For school you may have language barriers, depending what language(s) your children speak. They're entitled to a place at school though.

The only barrier to buying a flat or house might be slightly reduced access to loans. I found in Denmark it is easier for a Dane to get a loan for 95% of the house value, but foreigners might only get 80%. EU citizens are somewhere in the middle, depending what the banks think.

Language is the main problem. If you aren't fluent in the new country's language, you can have problems with government bureaucracy, school/work, socialising, children's lives, doctors etc. If you speak English these are much reduced in countries with high English proficiency (IS/NO/SE/FI/DK/NL/LU/CY, obviously IE/MT). Or, if you are moving where there's already a significant community of people speaking your language.

Good to know, thank you! Totally fair on language, I assumed that a person moving to a country will have to learn (or, better, already know) a language.

Do kids from other countries tend to be accepted well in schools? I heard that at least in France schools can be very clique-ish and coming from the outside the kid can face significant hurdles. But I am just parroting what I heard elsewhere.

Highly skilled professionals in some fields (engineers, scientists, software developers, very senior managers etc) can often find a job with only English. These people are more likely to send their children to a foreign-language school, even if they have to pay for it, as they might not plan on staying forever.

Not knowing/learning the language also works for some jobs like cleaning or agriculture, if so many workers are migrants that everyone speaks Romanian or English etc. Also postgraduate students.

Plenty of people from the north who move south when they retire (e.g. Netherlands to Spain, Germany to Greece) move before learning the language.

How quickly people learn the local language depends. Slowly in Denmark or the Netherlands where English is almost universal and work is often done in English, quickly in France or Italy where the opposite applies. Slowly if you're 65 and surrounded by other Dutch pensioners.

From what I know of France, a child from the other side of France can also be excluded, but this is from French emigrants teasing each other. I haven't heard of similar problems in Denmark.

Growing up in London I didn't even notice the European immigrants in my class and could hardly exclude the 40% of the class who were descendents of South Asian immigrants, but this varies significantly around the country.

I expect compared to the USA there's much more reluctance to move when a child is 14-18 years old, unless they can be certain of a place in the French school in Copenhagen etc. But this is primarily because of the difference in exams and language.

Depends on the school of course. The school of my children has plenty of foreign kids, or kids with foreign parents at least, and that's not a problem at all. But Amsterdam is a bit more cosmopolitan than most places, of course. It might be harder for the only foreign kid in a small village. Or not. It all depends.

Not sure if there was much need for snark, I was simply stating some positive aspects of living in the U.S. - would be nice to not have the gun violence piece thrown in my face

Some of us have family and friends here or simply can’t afford to live in the EU if we wanted to.

It's not snark. Safety is a serious issue for me when it comes to my kids. An issue that I don't have to worry about here, but I'd feel quite a bit different if we lived in an area where you have to take the possibility of school shootings into account. It's good to know that's not an issue everywhere in the US, but I honestly wouldn't know in what part of the US it's not an issue; from the outside, it seems they can happen anywhere.

cool. just saying- consider yourself fortunate as I was born in one of the most violent cities in the world (Baltimore) to an over-bearing mother who had a very hard time with me leaving despite the riots, corruption, and nightly gunplay I could hear ring out from my row home. We are quite close but she didn't speak with me for months when I moved.

I do sympathize though. I do not have kids (yet) but our move from TN > Maine is definitely partially motivated by the fact that I said I would absolutely never raise a child in the south due to gun culture and archaic legislation in general. For example most states in the south still allow school teachers and administrators to hit children- most of this happens in Mississippi and TN, then basically other states where lots of poverty, christianity, or mormonism are.

I grew up in an American suburb and now live in Boston. I like that the city is more walkable, but still not very walkable. Transport is a hassle. The city streets are also often unclean, and there are some folk on the streets who most people would rather not associate with, e.g., homeless, vulgar, etc.

What is it about cities outside of America that make them better? Do you any any examples? Do you have any suggestions what we could do in America to emulate that?

Any American city of sufficient size has many parts, some better than others. Much of Baltimore is unpleasant or dangerous, but the Mount Washington area looks suburban and is pleasant. There are dangerous and unpleasant parts of Washington, DC, and there are parts that are fine. There are some troubled places in suburbs, as well.

I think this is a very rare situation in the US and depends heavily on either luck or targeted buying to land the right neighborhood at the right time.

I grew up in a wonderful neighborhood in a nice suburban area, but I was the youngest kid by about four years so I never walked to a friend’s house.

I also never realized I was missing anything until I moved to a non-US city in my twenties and found out how different life could be in a human-scale environment.

> We lived in the city before and it was dangerous and the neighbor had a crazy pitbull chained up that’d break out all the time so we couldn’t let her out of the house.

That's not specific to cities. My wife grew up on a farm, where neighbours lived a hundred meters away, and her brother had an entire chunk bitten out of his leg by a neighbour's dog. I grew up in a village, and I was terrified of some of the dogs there.

We live in a city now, and although we live in a street with a lot of dogs (to the dismay of my cynophobic kids), all dogs are very well behaved.

> The American suburbs are an excellent place to raise children.

I guess it varies. I've heard stories of American parents having CPS called on them merely for having their children play outside. Many American suburbs don't have the bike paths or even sidewalks necessary for kids to get around.

Oh yeah CPS came and determined we weren’t neglecting our children when some busybody called on us. It was annoying.

Then she lost her job and had to move away, which I definitely didn’t feel any sense of schadenfreude from. We ended up buying her an Apple Watch with cell service and the complaints stopped.

I think us letting our daughter roam free has changed the general mood of the neighborhood and I’ve noticed far more children playing outside. We’ve been the catalyst to get everyone to just chill out. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that.

That is pretty awesome. Well done.

I have lived both in suburbs and cities and there are just as many poorly-kept and dangerous dogs in one as in the other.

Huh? Growing up in the burbs (90's and 00's) I had dozens of kids around my age within biking distance.

This is changing, kids are riding a lot less than in the 00s (here's one of many articles):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/06/04/fewer-kids-...

It may be social, in that letting kids roam on their own is not as acceptable and could get you in trouble with courts. Also, "cars" are more dangerous these days, ans they shift into more trucks and SUVs with massive blind spots and distracted drivers, and there have been many efforts to eliminate penalties for speeding, and the difference between 20mph and 30mph is literally a ton of death.

The number 1 thing I would love for my child is to live in a place where I was not in constant fear of cars when on the sidewalk or street. It wasn't like that when I was a kid in the suburbs in the 80s. And I will likely have to leave the US to find what I want.

>And I will likely have to leave the US to find what I want.

Yep, that's exactly what I did. I'm in Tokyo now, and it's mostly what the "NotJustBikes" crowd is asking for: great public transit, walkability, lots of bike-riding, etc. I see kids walking or riding bikes by themselves all the time. I finally realized I was never going to be able to live in this kind of society in the US, so I found a place that had the lifestyle I wanted and moved there.

Helmet rules are a key part to that, it encourages the incorrect belief that riding a bike is dangerous (not to mention being something else to deal with), thus fewer do it

I was an extremely active kid, biking everywhere until the street lights came on pretty much every day.

The helmet safety panic really crushed a lot of my enjoyment of life. Made riding a bike utterly miserable for me - both socially with my peer group at the time, as well as it being massively uncomfortable to wear. Not to mention getting in trouble dozens of times for leaving it at whatever location.

I usually would end up biking outside sight distance of the parents and ditch it under a bush for later retrieval. But once this rule was enforced on me, my biking was severely curtailed as it didn't have the same simple joy of freedom it had beforehand.

I had the same experience. My memory of first grade until high school is getting home from school and hopping on my bike to ride to a friends house. I hope my kids can experience the same.