growing up in the city essay

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Whether It Is Better for Children to Grow Up in The City, Or if the Countryside Is More Suitable for Them - IELTS Essay

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Model Essay 1

Determining whether children should be raised in urban or rural environments sparks a considerable debate, each possessing its own merits and drawbacks. This essay asserts that while cities are hubs of cultural and educational advantages, rural areas provide a nurturing, nature-rich environment. The following paragraphs will elucidate these points further by examining both the benefits and potential disadvantages intrinsic to each setting.

In urban settings, children are exposed to a diverse tapestry of cultures and life experiences, fostering a broad worldview and better social understanding. Cities offer robust educational infrastructures, including specialized schools and advanced courses that are often unavailable in rural districts. Furthermore, exposure to art, technology, and diverse populations can stimulate intellectual and social development, equipping children with skills necessary for a globalized world. However, urban environments can also expose children to higher rates of crime and pollution, potentially leading to adverse effects on their health and safety. The constant stimulus of city life can also be overwhelming, contributing to psychological stress and potentially detracting from a child's ability to focus and develop personal tranquillity.

On the other hand, rural environments are celebrated for their peaceful, spacious landscapes that encourage a slow-paced, healthy lifestyle. Children benefit from the direct contact with nature, which supports both physical and psychological health, and fosters a strong sense of freedom and creativity. The close-knit community typical of rural areas often ensures a strong support network for children, fostering feelings of security and belonging. This close community involvement often leads to personal development through shared community values. Nonetheless, these areas can suffer from limited access to comprehensive educational resources and healthcare services, which can hinder child development and future opportunities. Such limitations might affect children's career aspirations and access to higher education or specialized training programs.

In conclusion, while urban areas excel in providing educational and cultural opportunities, the countryside offers a tranquil environment conducive to health and personal growth. Each setting carries its distinctive benefits and challenges, suggesting that the optimal upbringing environment depends heavily on individual family values and priorities.

Model Essay 2

The debate over the ideal environment for children to grow up in - urban versus rural - continues to spark diverse viewpoints. Each setting offers distinct benefits and drawbacks that can influence a child's development. This essay will explore the advantages of urban living such as access to educational facilities, and the benefits of the countryside, such as a healthier lifestyle, while also considering the inherent disadvantages of each setting.

Urban environments typically provide superior educational opportunities, including access to well-resourced schools, a plethora of extracurricular activities, and cultural experiences that are less prevalent in rural areas. For instance, cities often host museums, science centers, and libraries that enhance a child's learning outside the classroom. However, city life is not without its pitfalls. The prevalent issues of pollution, noise, and often overcrowded living conditions can pose challenges to a child's physical and mental health. Moreover, the competitive nature of city life can instill undue pressure and stress from a young age.

Conversely, the countryside offers a tranquil atmosphere conducive to mental and physical well-being. Children growing up in rural areas benefit from regular interaction with nature, which studies have shown can reduce stress and promote a healthy lifestyle. The open spaces encourage physical activity and a closer-knit community provides a strong support system. Nevertheless, rural living can be limiting in terms of educational and social exposure. The lack of diversity and cultural facilities might restrict a child’s worldview and opportunities. Additionally, rural schools might not have the same level of resources as their urban counterparts, potentially impacting the quality of education.

In conclusion, both urban and rural settings offer unique advantages for a child’s upbringing but also come with their respective challenges. The city’s rich educational resources foster academic and cultural development, whereas the countryside’s serene environment promotes health and community engagement.

• Task 2 Essays

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September 11, 2024

Some people think it is better for children to grow up in the city, while others think that life in

Some people think it is better for children to grow up in the city, while others think that life in the countryside is more suitable. what are the advantages and disadvantages of both places, sample answer:.

Growing up in the city or the countryside both have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. In the city, children have access to better educational opportunities, diverse cultural experiences, and a wide range of extracurricular activities. On the other hand, the countryside offers a peaceful and natural environment, less pollution, and a strong sense of community.

Living in the city provides children with exposure to a variety of cultures, languages, and people, which can broaden their perspective and help them develop into more open-minded individuals. Additionally, urban areas are usually equipped with top-notch schools, libraries, and museums, offering children the chance to receive a high-quality education and engage in enriching activities. However, the fast-paced lifestyle and high population density in cities can lead to increased stress, competition, and safety concerns for children.

In contrast, the countryside offers a tranquil setting with clean air, green spaces, and a slower pace of life, which can contribute to better physical and mental health for children. Furthermore, living in a tight-knit rural community fosters a sense of belonging and support, as well as the opportunity for children to learn about nature and agriculture. Nevertheless, limited access to advanced educational institutions and extracurricular opportunities can hinder the overall development of children in the countryside.

In conclusion, both the city and the countryside have their own unique advantages and disadvantages for children to grow up in. While the city provides access to diverse resources and experiences, the countryside offers a more peaceful and natural environment. Ultimately, the decision of where children should grow up depends on the specific needs and values of their families.

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The Pros and Cons of Growing Up in the City vs. the Country

By: Author Paul Jenkins

Posted on Published: June 17, 2021  - Last updated: July 31, 2023

Categories Lifestyle

There are many benefits to growing up in the city. There are also many benefits to growing up in the countryside. So, which one is better? In this blog post, we will discuss the pros and cons of both locations and help you decide which one is right for you!

Country and City: My Story

I was lucky to grow up in Lancashire, in northwest England, and then spend thirty years living and working in London and Paris.

About three years ago, we moved back to the UK and live in a stunning part of southwest England on the fringes of the Exmoor National Park.

My earliest memories are of roaming freely and playing with my younger brother in the fields and woods. Being an explorer, climbing trees, or catching sticklebacks in the local stream with a jam jar.

As a pre-teenager, it was a life full of fun and adventure.

Every holiday, we’d wend our way down to our grandmother’s small terraced house in Somerset, where she and the family had evacuated during the Second World War.

I remember the wild strawberries we’d pick in her back garden. And the abandoned railway track ran about three hundred yards away after tramping along a lane lined with hedgerows full of blackberries in the summer.

An idyllic childhood? In many ways, it was!

Although country life certainly has its ups and downs, I’m often struck by how rich and varied my experience growing up in the countryside is.

As an older adult looking back now with a different perspective, I see that the memories accumulated in the country are irreplaceable.

Friendships Between Generations

I don’t have any empirical evidence for this. Still, my gut feeling is that there are more intergenerational friendships in the countryside than in the City.

This is partly due to the pace of life and perhaps partially because activities can be shared more easily in the country between generations than in the City.

Even as a pre-teenager, I faced swathes of boredom when living in the countryside.

Which, in a way, was a good thing. Because it forced me to come up with ways of entertaining myself.

It encouraged imagination.

By the time I was a teenager, and by the time I was 17 or 18, I couldn’t wait to get away to the city. This, of course, was not only connected to the fact that I was living in the countryside. A strong desire for independence was probably the main thing.

Living in a place where two buses per day went past our lane and watching a movie in the cinema involved a half-hour drive to the local town didn’t cut it once a teenager.

Teenagers living in the countryside probably have more options than I did. For example, my teenage son spends a lot of time on YouTube learning about cultures and all manner of stuff.

Almost any movie or audiovisual experience is a mouse click away.

This is still not the same as growing up in a place where you can spend hours and hours in a back garden or taking long walks along country lanes.

Connection With Nature and Natural Beauty

One of the most significant advantages of growing up in the countryside is your connection with nature. As a child, this is natural. You don’t think about the beauty around you or what you learn from the wildlife you observe.

Only later does it percolate through your consciousness and impact the decisions you make in your life.

There is the argument that growing up in the City exposes a child to a greater variety of experiences, especially to greater cultural diversity, than you would experience in the countryside. The ideal is to have both worlds in your life. Experience the country at one stage and the City at another.

You will not get the same exposure to different cultures in the countryside.

When I think about it now, there was a sense of wonderment as a child. For example, looking at simple things, fish in the local stream, or leaves swaying in the trees.

I remember being fascinated by this and staring at these things for many minutes on end. I’m not sure that adult life allows the same kind of observation and engagement. Or rather, as an adult, I feel more empowered to apply this kind of observation because I experienced it as a child.

There is a connection between childhood experiences and adult potential.

I did miss out on going to museums, galleries, cinema, and things like that compared to children who grew up in the City. It’s not that I had no experience of these things since now and again we would go down to the Big City and visit these things.

But they were not part of weekly life.

Compared to someone who grew up in the City, this did not reduce my capacity to absorb ideas and emotions in galleries and cinemas today. In the Internet world, I think this distinction has been reduced even more.

As a child, I would not have gotten total value from art galleries and museums. It would not have been wasted. But the real connections and understandings can only come later, with a degree of education and real-world knowledge.

An Introverted World

Growing up in the countryside can encourage introspection or even incline one to become an introvert.

Experiences in nature require a degree of reflection and introversion. Otherwise, you won’t get the most out of them.

It’s also true that this feeds an introverted side in childhood and later life.

London Reality – Suburbs!

In the same way, people can idealize the countryside; I think the same is true for the City.

In reality, many children living in the city live in the suburbs, not in the city center.

Therefore their experience can be spent a lot of time sitting on commuter trains, long bus rides, etc.

As an adult, I remember having to allow hours to do things in the city center. It became a block on doing stuff because of the hassle of getting to the center. In my case, central London.

The sad fact is that once a child reaches the age of 15 and 16, they get into a mill of exams. There is less time and opportunity to engage in all the delights a city can provide. Especially when those two delights are a commuter ride away.

What is lacking for children who grow up in the countryside is losing a city heartbeat. This is hard to articulate, but somehow it is to do with the Feeling for the City.

I can’t know what it is not to have had this as a child, but talking with friends makes it clear that this is part of their existence.

Discovery and Exploration

Growing up in the countryside allowed me to explore and discover. Often alone and frequently with friends. No adults are required!

I can recall adventures in the local woods, rivers, and fields.

More often than not, we would be the ones inventing the games.

The worlds that are created inside a child’s mind are wonderful. The most important thing is the development of curiosity and imagination.

Later, as a teenager, there were the challenges of experiencing adult stuff.

For example, walking two or three miles to a local pub where we can sip a beer without teachers being present. By the time you returned to the school, the alcohol had worn off.

The point was the adventure.

This kind of experience is, of course, shared by City kids. But I think there is more risk in the City than in the countryside. Which acts as a constraint, along with the commuting problem.

Later in life, these adventures propelled me towards a career and life where I traveled extensively, getting into all sorts of experiences and situations. It’s only now, writing this article, that I see that connection very clearly.

A Better Education?

Perhaps it is true that it is easier to access a better education in the City. However, many things feed into educational success.

Not least, health.

Teaching these days is far more than simply the quality of the teachers in a school. The ability to research almost anything and draw connections and insights is at our fingertips.

I never experienced this as a child, where the only resource would be the school library.

Libraries are, of course, a vital resource. The encroachment of the Internet should in no way degrade them; they are essential resources for cities and the countryside.

Not least in terms of fostering a community spirit.

Compared to its City equivalent, the relative lack of cultural diversity in a countryside classroom means less critical thinking and problem-solving.

To a degree, social and analytical skills might also be weaker in countryside children than in children raised in the city. Parents could consider this when choosing a location and lifestyle because it might be possible to construct experiences and trips to account for it.

There are wide variations in the experiences in the countryside and city due to deprivation. If lucky enough to live in a well-off area, deprivation is unlikely to impact childhood experience.

If living in a deprived area, the experience would probably be better in the countryside rather than the City.

The risks are likely to be fewer.

According to recent studies, kids who grow up in countryside areas are more likely to experience upward mobility than those living in city or urban areas. People who grow up in the countryside and move to the City, rather than the other way around, tend to have a higher IQ.

A controversial idea, I know.

Pollution and Health

This is probably obvious, but it becomes less so when you scratch the surface.

Living in the countryside is much better in terms of air quality. But this will change as electric cars become more prevalent and cities focus on net-zero climate change policies.

The evidence seems to support the idea that growing up in the countryside protects you more against asthma and allergies.

One downside can be access to medical services, especially rapid access. This varies significantly from area to area; for example, where we live now has excellent local GP surgeries and medical support.

Growing up in the countryside as a child, I believe you experiment with physical activities more than City children.

I remember climbing high up into trees, which I almost certainly would not have done if I lived in a City. That said, this carried intense risks that I would not do now as an adult.

I recall I climbed up the side of a barn, fell off, and managed to put a nail into my leg. I can remember the expressions of horror as my mother took me to the local surgery to have it removed.

Perhaps it’s fair to say that what we experience earlier helps protect us against later-life risks! Providing we get through them!

Crime, Violence, and Safety

Reading the media, you might think that crime and violence are much more of a problem associated with living in cities.

The evidence is that violent crime has fallen substantially. At least in the UK.

A much more significant risk to physical safety is road traffic accidents. The countryside is almost invariably much more severe than in the City. Not to mention that there is much more chance you will be in a car in the country than in the City.

This is not to say that you should choose the City because of the chance of being in a car! It is simply that the balance of risks is perhaps more complex than might first seem to be the case.

Ecology and Food Awareness

One of the essential things you develop as a child growing up in the countryside is an awareness of the food chain. The sources of food are all around you.

Whether dairy animals, their products, or simple things like picking fruit. This is not to debate whether a vegan lifestyle is more ethical or healthy than a meat-based diet.

Instead, it is a question of awareness based on everyday reality.

I remember we had a rhubarb patch and an elderberry bush in our garden in Lancashire. I still remember these things and treasure them, which says something about the connection you can develop with food sources as a child. Somehow, I feel that this is very important.

What we gained on the ground was lost on the street! I did not experience Pizza Express until I was in London as a young adult. Not as a student – my budget did not allow for it!

Once I started to get an income, things like dining out in pizza places became possible and very enjoyable. Something not easy to attain when living in deep countryside.

Time to Reflect

All of the above is contingent on the specific financial circumstances and location in which you might find yourself. It would be naive to think otherwise.

But I hope that the above article has helped give some points for reflection, which may be helpful if you consider where to live and raise your children.

IELTS Essay General Training: Children & the Countryside

by Dave | Sample Answers | 0 Comment

This is an IELTS writing task 2 sample answer essay on the topic of children living in the city or the countryside from the general training exam.

For all my exclusive IELTS PDFs, sign up for my Patreon here .

IELTS Essay General Training: Children & the Countryside

Some people believe that children should grow up in the city while others believe the countryside is a better choice.

Discuss both sides and give your opinion.

Many think that children ought to be raised in the city, while others feel a rural setting contributes to a better childhood. In my opinion, though living in the countryside allows children to learn a variety of useful skills, the crucial life skill is learned in the city.

Children who grow up in the countryside tend to have a good grasp of many household jobs. In the countryside, it is more difficult and expensive to bring in a maid or handyman for assistance. As a result, many country kids that live on farms or in remote areas must lend a hand in taking care of the livestock, cooking for the family, and undertaking various small repairs around the home. Children living in the city, in contrast, are more likely to get their food from restaurants and spend more time focused on their homework, not taking on an active engagement with the environment around them. Over time, the gulf in terms of what a child from the countryside from city can do widens.

Nonetheless, the city is better for raising children because of the social skills one can learn there. Children from country often find themselves a product of their unique household and struggle to adapt to different social spheres if they move to the city for work. Those who grow up in the city have to interact with other children from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds on a daily basis. In order to do this, they develop greater empathy for others and improve their conversational skills. They may switch from one group of friends to another or interact with adults with diverse occupations and nationalities, all contributing to their social education. The end result is that they grow up with a far keener understanding of how to communicate and connect with people, a skill of singular value.

In conclusion, children in the country learn a number of practical skills but lag behind in terms of social skills. Parents must weigh many competing priorities but if all factors are equal, they should opt for urban life.

1. Many think that children ought to be raised in the city, while others feel a rural setting contributes to a better childhood. 2. In my opinion, though living in the countryside allows children to learn a variety of useful skills, the crucial life skill is learned in the city.

• Paraphrase the overall essay topic.
• Write a clear opinion and choose a side. Read more about introductions here .

1. Children who grow up in the countryside tend to have a good grasp of many household jobs. 2. In the countryside, it is more difficult and expensive to bring in a maid or handyman for assistance. 3. As a result, many country kids that live on farms or in remote areas must lend a hand in taking care of the livestock, cooking for the family, and undertaking various small repairs around the home. 4. Children living in the city, in contrast, are more likely to get their food from restaurants and spend more time focused on their homework, not taking on an active engagement with the environment around them. 5. Over time, the gulf in terms of what a child from the countryside from city can do widens.

• Write a topic sentence with a clear main idea at the end.
• Focus on the countryside and include specific details.
• Explain the results.
• Contrast with city kids.
• Conclude with a strong statement.

1. Nonetheless, the city is better for raising children because of the social skills one can learn there. 2. Children from country often find themselves a product of their unique household and struggle to adapt to different social spheres if they move to the city for work. 3. Those who grow up in the city have to interact with other children from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds on a daily basis. 4. In order to do this, they develop greater empathy for others and improve their conversational skills. 5. They may switch from one group of friends to another or interact with adults with diverse occupations and nationalities, all contributing to their social education. 6. The end result is that they grow up with a far keener understanding of how to communicate and connect with people, a skill of singular value.

• Write another clear topic sentences with another clear main idea at the end.
• Explain your main idea.
• Develop it with specific details/examples.
• Continue developing the same main idea.
• This paragraph should be longer and more detailed because you agree with this side.
• State the end results and their importance.

1. In conclusion, children in the country learn a number of practical skills but lag behind in terms of social skills. 2. Parents must weigh many competing priorities but if all factors are equal, they should opt for urban life.

• Summarise your main ideas and repeat your opinion.
• Add a final thought/detail. Read more about conclusions here .

What do the words in bold below mean?

Children who grow up in the countryside tend to have a good grasp of many household jobs . In the countryside, it is more difficult and expensive to bring in a maid or handyman for assistance . As a result, many country kids that live on farms or in remote areas must lend a hand in taking care of the livestock , cooking for the family, and undertaking various small repairs around the home. Children living in the city, in contrast , are more likely to get their food from restaurants and spend more time focused on their homework, not taking on an active engagement with the environment around them. Over time, the gulf in terms of what a child from the countryside from city can do widens .

Nonetheless , the city is better for raising children because of the social skills one can learn there. Children from country often find themselves a product of their unique household and struggle to adapt to different social spheres if they move to the city for work. Those who grow up in the city have to interact with other children from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds on a daily basis . In order to do this, they develop greater empathy for others and improve their conversational skills . They may switch from one group of friends to another or interact with adults with diverse occupations and nationalities , all contributing to their social education. The end result is that they grow up with a far keener understanding of how to communicate and connect with people, a skill of singular value .

In conclusion, children in the country learn a number of practical skills but lag behind in terms of social skills. Parents must weigh many competing priorities but if all factors are equal , they should opt for urban life .

ought should

raised grow up

rural setting countryside

contributes to give to

countryside rural areas

variety lots of different types

crucial life skill important ability for life

tend to have usually have

good grasp can do well

household jobs chores, odd jobs

handyman person who fixes things

assistance help

remote areas rural areas, isolated places

lend a hand help out

taking care of looking after

livestock animals on a farm

undertaking doing

repairs fixing

in contrast compared to/however

taking on engaged with

active engagement fully involved with

in terms of as it relates to

widens gets larger

nonetheless regardless

social skills communicating with others

a product of the result of

unique household idiosyncratic home

struggle have trouble

adapt change

social spheres different groups of people

interact with talk to

ethnic race

socioeconomic backgrounds how rich you are

daily basis everyday

greater empathy for others understand others better

conversational skills being able to talk well

switch change

diverse occupations different jobs

nationalities from different countries

end result final outcome

far keener understanding better handle on

communicate talk to

connect understand

singular value inimitable importance

lag behind fall behind

weigh many competing priorities consider different interests

if all factors are equal everything the same

urban life city life

Pronunciation

ɔːt   reɪzd   ˈrʊərəl ˈsɛtɪŋ   kənˈtrɪbju(ː)ts tuː   ˈkʌntrɪˌsaɪd   vəˈraɪəti   ˈkruːʃəl laɪf skɪl   tɛnd tuː hæv   gʊd grɑːsp   ˈhaʊshəʊld ʤɒbz ˈhændɪmən   əˈsɪstəns rɪˈməʊt ˈeərɪəz   lɛnd ə hænd   ˈteɪkɪŋ keər ɒv   ˈlaɪvstɒk ˌʌndəˈteɪkɪŋ   rɪˈpeəz   ɪn ˈkɒntrɑːst ˈteɪkɪŋ ɒn   ˈæktɪv ɪnˈgeɪʤmənt   gʌlf   ɪn tɜːmz ɒv   ˈwaɪdnz ˌnʌnðəˈlɛs ˈsəʊʃəl skɪlz   ə ˈprɒdʌkt ɒv   juːˈniːk ˈhaʊshəʊld   ˈstrʌgl   əˈdæpt   ˈsəʊʃəl sfɪəz   ˌɪntərˈækt wɪð   ˈɛθnɪk   ˌsəʊsɪəʊˌɛkəˈnɒmɪk ˈbækgraʊndz   ˈdeɪli ˈbeɪsɪs ˈgreɪtər ˈɛmpəθi fɔːr ˈʌðəz   ˌkɒnvəˈseɪʃənl skɪlz swɪʧ   daɪˈvɜːs ˌɒkjʊˈpeɪʃənz   ˌnæʃəˈnælɪtiz ɛnd rɪˈzʌlt   fɑː ˈkiːnər ˌʌndəˈstændɪŋ   kəˈmjuːnɪkeɪt   kəˈnɛkt   ˈsɪŋgjʊlə ˈvæljuː læg bɪˈhaɪnd   weɪ ˈmɛni kəmˈpiːtɪŋ praɪˈɒrɪtiz   ɪf ɔːl ˈfæktəz ɑːr ˈiːkwəl ɒpt   ˈɜːbən laɪf

Vocabulary Practice

Remember and fill in the blanks:

Many think that children o_______t to be r________d in the city, while others feel a r______________g c__________________o a better childhood. In my opinion, though living in the c_____________e allows children to learn a v__________y of useful skills, the c______________l is learned in the city.

Children who grow up in the countryside t__________________e a g___________p of many h__________________s . In the countryside, it is more difficult and expensive to bring in a maid or h_____________n for a____________e . As a result, many country kids that live on farms or in r______________s must l_________________d in t______________e of the l_____________k , cooking for the family, and u_______________g various small r______________s around the home. Children living in the city, i______________t , are more likely to get their food from restaurants and spend more time focused on their homework, not t_____________n an a____________________t with the environment around them. Over time, the g_____f i______________f what a child from the countryside from city can do w__________s .

N_____________s , the city is better for raising children because of the s_______________s one can learn there. Children from country often find themselves a ________________ f their u__________________d and s____________e to a_________t to different s__________________s if they move to the city for work. Those who grow up in the city have to i_________________h other children from a variety of e_________c and s___________________________s on a d_______________s . In order to do this, they develop g___________________________s and improve their c________________________s . They may s_________h from one group of friends to another or interact with adults with d______________________s and n_________________s , all contributing to their social education. The e_______________t is that they grow up with a f_________________________g of how to c___________________e and c___________t with people, a skill of s____________________e .

In conclusion, children in the country learn a number of practical skills but l______________d in terms of social skills. Parents must w_______________________s but i________________________l , they should o___t for u__________________e .

Listening Practice

Learn about the costs of raising kids in New York City:

Reading Practice

Learn here about the benefits of raising kids in the countryside:

http://thestir.cafemom.com/being_a_mom/177008/reasons_raise_kids_country_benefits

Speaking Practice

Answers the following questions from the real IELTS speaking exam :

Where you Live

My sample speaking for these questions is here.

• Where do you live at the moment?
• What do you like about your neighborhood?
• Are there any parks where you live?

Writing Practice

Write about the following related topic and then check with my sample answer:

It is better for children if the whole family including aunts, uncles and so on are involved in a child’s upbringing, rather than just their parents.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

IELTS Essay: Whole Family Raising Children

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Sample toefl essay – growing up in the city or the countryside, the question.

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Nowadays, it is better for children to grow up in the countryside than in a large city. Use specific reasons and examples to develop your essay. (Adapted  from the Official Guide to the TOEFL ).

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The Sample Essay

         It is critically important that all children be raised in a supportive and healthy environment. In my opinion, it is more advantageous to raise young people in major city, than to raise them in a rural area.  I feel this way for two main reasons, which I will explore in the following essay.

      First of all, cities include a vast number of academic and cultural facilities, all of which help the intellectual development of children.  A child who visits such places on a regular basis will undoubtedly become extremely interested in some of them. My own experience is a compelling example of this. When I was young I lived in a major urban area, so my parents could easily take me to a cultural event almost every weekend.  We attended book readings at the local library, art openings at many of the galleries throughout the city, and literary festivals during the summer. As a result of attending these outings I developed a strong interest in artistic expression, and decided to major in music at university. Now I enjoy a successful career as a recording artist. Had I not visited so many stimulating places as a youngster, I would not be thriving like I am today.

         Secondly, children who live in cities are exposed to people from many walks of life, while those in the countryside communicate with only one type of person.  Cities are usually magnets for new immigrants to my country, and are populated by individuals from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I think it is useful for children to have friends who come from different walks of life.  For instance, my young cousin is growing up in New York, which is the largest city in my country. By the time she was ten years old, she had made friends from five different continents. Although she is still just a college student, she is comfortable interacting with people who speak a variety of languages and who have religious beliefs that are different from her own. Moreover, she recently mentioned that she was able to find employment at a company looking for workers with an international perspective.  Accordingly, I think that people who live in cities can enjoy a variety of beneficial interactions.

       In conclusion, I strongly believe that it is better for children to grow up in cities than in rural areas.  This is because cities are home to a variety of educational venues, and because they have very diverse and cosmopolitan populations. (415 words)

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Urban Advantage: Educational and Cultural Benefits for Children

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Introduction

Educational opportunities in urban settings.

Cultural Experiences: A Vibrant Tapestry in Big Cities

Conclusion: balancing the urban and rural dynamics.

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Growing up in the city is better for children's development, and it helps them have a good life later on compared to living in the village.  Do you agree or disagree?

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• Sentence 1 - Background statement
• Sentence 2 - Detailed background statement
• Sentence 3 - Thesis
• Sentence 4 - Outline sentence
• Paragraph 2 - First supporting paragraph
• Sentence 1 - Topic sentence
• Sentence 2 - Example
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In some countries, more and more people are becoming interested in finding out about the history of the house and building they live in. What are the reasons for this? How can people research this?

In some counntries, the cost of living is rapidly increasing. what do you think may be the reasons for this what effects might this have on society, a restaurant has placed an advertisement for waiters and waitresses in your local newspaper. write a letter to the restaurant, applying for the job. in your letter: explain what you are currently doing describe your suitability for this area of work say when you can attend an interview you should write at least 150 words., ●in the past, most people lived in small villages where everyone knew everyone else. nowadays, most people live in large cities where they only know a few people in their area., learning english at school is often seen as more important than learning local languages. if these are not taught, many are at risk of dying out. in your opinion, is it important fir everyone to learn english should we try to ensure the survival of local languages and,if so,how.

05 Growing up in New York City: A Generational Memoir (1941–1960)

If historians tend to proceed from external data to hidden motivation of key players, the personal essayist typically moves from the intimate level to the plane of sociology, politics, and history. He becomes, therefore, a generational memoirist. In this autobiographical essay, Howard R. Wolf seeks to become a generational memoirist of New York City.

Michel de Montaigne asked himself famously in his Essays of 1580, “What do I know?” This apparently simple question opened the door to the history of personal and private writing: letters, memoirs, autobiographies, the personal essay, and literary journalism, to name a few of its manifestations.

Montaigne’s question, like his near contemporary Shakespeare’s soliloquies, initiated a Humanist-Renaissance exploration of the interior life that led in time to the English Romantic Movement in the first part of the 19 th century and, beyond it, to depth psychology and stream of consciousness (James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) at the turn of the 20 th century.

Montaigne is a good example of how world-changing and revolutionary language—even one sentence—can be when it inaugurates or summarizes an epoch of human consciousness. Descartes, Rousseau, Goethe ( Poetry and Truth , 1811–1833), Freud, and Marx also come to mind.

I have resolved in an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself. (Rousseau, The Confessions , Book 1, 17)

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. (Rousseau, On the Social Contract , Subject of the First Book, 1)

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to hunt down and exorcize this specter; Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police-spies. (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto , 55)

Needless to say, it helps—doubtless is necessary—for the thinker-writer to be a superb rhetorician and stylist. The only prize ever awarded to Sigmund Freud in Austria was the Goethe Prize for Literature on August 28, 1930.

Charles Lamb, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Sigmund Freud ( The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900), Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka ( Letter to His Father / Brief an den Vater ), George Orwell, and James Baldwin are a few well-known practitioners of personal writing or lifewritingwho have helped establish, over time, the genre of what we now call “creative nonfiction.”

These writers, past and present, sometimes are accused of being self-serving, egotistical, and narcissistic; but a close look at the good work in this area usually reveals a balance of subjective and objective elements and of centripetal and centrifugal forces. In fact, these forces often co-exist and constitute a unified field.

In the Preface to his Stories of Three Decades (1936), Thomas Mann says that the chronological ordering of his stories constitutes “an autobiography, as it were, in the guise of a fable.” In his The Freud Reader , Peter Gay, the intellectual historian, says about Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams : “It is partly open and partly concealed autobiography […]” (129).

Generational history imprints itself, to say nothing of longer increments of time, upon the individual; whether they are minor or major forces in the world through which they move, people write their signatures micro- or macro-scopically on the scrolls and walls of the “cities” in which they live. In this sense, we all become in the fullness of time, as Emerson puts it, “representative” women and men.

Let me begin at the beginning and move forward in a straight line, or as straight as it can be, through my growing up in New York City—mainly Manhattan—during the 1940s and 1950s from Pearl Harbor to the edge of the Viet Nam War and then draw some generational conclusions from this personal history.

I was born November 5, 1936. The world was quite busy, as it tends to be, a topsy-turvy place with a mixture of positive and negative elements. On the first day of that month, Mussolini demanded that Britain recognize Italian Abyssinia; on November 2, in Adelaide, Wally Hammond became the first English cricketer to score a hundred runs by one batsman against Australia; on November 3, FDR was re-elected for a second term; on November 6, Madrid was bombarded and the Republican government fled to Valencia; on November 12, Eugene O’Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize; a month later on December 10, King Edward VIII announced that he would abdicate the throne. The 11 th Olympic Games opened in Berlin on the first of August, forever associated with the feats of Jesse Owens. Frederico Garcia Lorca was shot by the Falangists on August 18.

Opposing forces were at work in the world: sport, art, and terror. Athletics, aesthetics, and aggression wrestled with each other, the eternal struggle of the world. We are all born, in some way, into a dual world and come to enact a version of Laocoon’s struggle. We live at cross-purposes and bear a cross . Doubleness and two-sidedness, structured ambivalence, give shape to our lives.

This was certainly true for me. Although my mother went into labor with me in the Bronx, she had the wit and perhaps wisdom to hail a taxi in order to give birth to me in Manhattan so that I might lay claim to some finesse and panache for the rest of my life. There are five boroughs in New York City, but Manhattan is “The City.” No reader of Clifford Odets ( Waiting for Lefty , Awake and Sing ) or spear carrier for Liberal-Left Causes (the American socialist legacy of the 1930s), my western Pennsylvania-born provincial mother wanted me to enter a “swank” and “swell” world.

She was more attuned to the sounds of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” than she was to the folk- and work-songs of the Depression and the screams of mothers in Guernica. Willy-nilly, I became a son of the Bronx and Manhattan at birth—a double-man, so to speak, who would be mindful throughout his life of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s well-known dictum in The Crack-Up : “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still to retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise” (69).

Although I’m sure that the sounds and rhythms of the Big Band Era (Swing) and Cole Porter are deeply imbedded in my brain, I have only a few images of the years between my birth and the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. But I have a vivid picture in my mind of my mother, sitting at a kitchen table, listening to the announcement of FDR’s Declaration of War in his famous “date which will live in infamy” speech delivered to Congress on December 8, 1941: “The United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” I still can hear his voice.

I couldn’t understand “war,” of course, but I knew that something terrible had happened; and I wanted it to stop so my mother wouldn’t be unhappy. I later asked my older brother what war was and when it would be over. He said, “Not soon, so we better get ready for it, and, remember, kid, I’m a Captain and you’re a private.”

So the war became a family matter in some sense: my mother’s sorrow (thinking, doubtless, about the fate and future of her sons) and my brother’s assertion of male authority and superiority always thereafter would come to mind in times of international conflict—just as Pearl Harbor, though it was far from the mainland, always would be there for America as an icon of victimization, never more so than in the semi-paranoid aftermath of “9/11” with its disastrous consequences in Iraq. History always has a personal dimension.

Soon after America entered the war (1942), we moved to the fourth floor of an apartment in Upper Manhattan, Washington Heights, which had a panoramic view of the gleaming George Washington Bridge, the wide Hudson River, and The Cloisters, the impressive museum of Medieval art, in historic Fort Tryon Park. On a clear day, I could see the cliffs of the Palisades across the river, West Point (almost) to the north, and, alas, the Bronx, to the east.

In some ways, location, as much as anatomy in Freud’s geography, is destiny; and in this sense, the move to this part of Manhattan was fortunate for me. Fort Tryon Park and The Cloisters provided more than a glimpse of Europe. There were still, in those days, Sunday painters who themselves might have been the subject of a Seurat painting, and The Cloisters contained literally “pieces” of Europe in America. Many of the stones and columns had been brought from Europe before the war. There was also a café in the park where, I noticed, foreign speakers were gathering, huddled close together, and talking in low voices as if they were afraid of something.

It was painful to think, even at an early age, that a part of the world I was beginning to love—Europe—was being substantially destroyed by the war; that cities with their treasures, to say nothing of innocent people, were being bombed and consumed in flames. I was a patriotic young American and wanted “us” to win the war, but I also wanted Europe to be saved.

Some displaced people began to arrive in our apartment house, and even as I knew that they had suffered in Europe, their names and language pointed back to a civilized Europe that I wanted to experience. One person, who had studied at Heidelberg, told me stories about student life in the early part of the 20 th century that inspired me to want to become an accomplished student, if not a “student prince.” He even had a dueling scar. A baby-sitter showed me a photo of herself in a feathered hat, standing on a train platform in Bratislava. I knew that she belonged in a world that was disappearing.

For those of us growing up in New York City in the 1940s, Japan, following Pearl Harbor and the “death march” in Corregidor, seemed to be our most hated enemy. The Japanese were portrayed as grotesque and blood-thirsty on posters. My friends and I were fighting back against the “Japs” in movie after movie: Gung Ho , Back to Bataan , The Purple Heart , Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo , They Were Expendable , and Flying Tigers , to name a few.

We wanted to be like John Wayne when we grew up. It was only a few decades after the war, when we realized the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that some of us began to understand that the Japanese, whatever else was true, had been dehumanized as a people; that we had annihilated, guiltlessly at the time, hundreds of thousands of non-combatants in a horrific flash. It was only after the publication of John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946), that we began to think about other sides of the war that patriotic propaganda had concealed.

When my friends and I went to summer camp in the foothills of the Berkshires during the late years of the war and sang patriotic songs around blazing bonfires, we weren’t thinking about the firestorms of Europe (Dresden) and Japan. We were worried that our counselors would be drafted and suddenly disappear, leaving us unprotected.

The war in the Pacific overshadowed in many ways the war in Europe, even as we cheered for the democratic and freedom-loving spirit of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid in Casablanca (1943). Humphrey Bogart was to the war in Europe in his Sahara (1943) and Passage to Marseilles (1944) what John Wayne was to the conflict in the Pacific.

Bogart inspired a belief in the quiet heroism of American individualism against the threats of Totalitarianism and Fascism, but his movies didn’t present us with grotesque images. That came later with the Nuremberg Trials ( Judgment at Nuremberg , 1961), the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank (1947), and the return of the historically repressed nightmares of the Nazi era from which we have yet to awaken.

One of the paradoxes of the war for my generation was that—despite the anxieties of the period, the fear that parents and loved ones might be wounded or killed overseas—we emerged after Victory in Europe (May 8, 1945) and Victory in Japan (August 14, 1945) with a sense of American triumphalism.

I entered a privileged private high school in 1950 (Horace Mann School for Boys) during a period of economic boom and world-dominance at the beginning of the Korean War. Once President Truman ordered General MacArthur to stay south of the Yalu River—avoiding a direct conflict with “Red” China—and then relieved him of his command, that far-away “peninsula” war no longer threatened us directly at home. We assumed, post-World War II, that America would prevail everywhere.

America was in the driver’s seat, and the size and design of our cars in the 1950s expressed our confidence as a nation. Those sleek fins showed that we were flashy, bold, and innovative. We found some charm in those small Deux Chevaux we saw in French movies, but we wanted power when we got behind the wheel; we wanted to get our kicks on Route 66.

We were moving en masse in a spirit of togetherness, with a feeling of suburban and corporate solidarity towards a promised land in which the American dream (whatever it was) would be fulfilled. We were happy to be conformists, at least for a while. John Cheever’s New York suburban short stories and J. D. Salinger’s charmingly neurotic vignettes chart and capture the obverse and reverse of this cultural moment.

History, American-style, was on our side. Besides, even the cultural scale was beginning to tilt towards America. Jazz had come into its own as a world-class art form; it didn’t need to seek refuge in the “caves” of Paris; Action Painting, with Jackson Pollack as its star and the Cedar Bar as its Greenwich Village center, was making New York City, not Paris, the international art center. Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Paul Taylor, and Merce Cunningham created the New York school of dance, and New York City became the international capital of choreography. And the Bauhaus was asserting itself in glass boxes on Fifth Avenue.

At the same time, the exile and emigration of many European artists, writers (Berthold Brecht, Thomas Mann) actors (Peter Lorre), film-makers (Billy Wilder), art historians, psychoanalysts, scholars (Erich Auerbach), and intellectuals (the faculty of The New School for Social Research, an outpost of the Frankfurt School), made America, Hollywood and especially New York City, more European, in the best sense, than much of Europe itself—at least for a while. If you were anyone, you had a Vienna-style psychoanalyst on Madison Avenue.

The American Express Office in Paris in the mid-Fifties, when I first went to Europe, was still as glamorous to Parisians as the clock at the Biltmore had been to the earlier Fitzgerald generations of Americans. It was where they could observe a new style, the fashion of individual freedom as represented by the Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart look, lean and relaxed. Needless to say, we no longer can look to major American corporations with as much confidence; and obesity is a problem.

But there was another side: the U.S.-U.S.S.R. arms race and the fear of thermo-nuclear war. As much as those of us in our upper middle-class school believed that the world would be our oyster, we also feared annihilation, especially during what were called “Take Cover” drills when it seemed possible to imagine the end of the world. Stanley Kramer’s 1959 On The Beach and Stanley Kubrick’s 1963 Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb capture in a surreal and paranoid fashion some of what we felt.

Fear and paranoia were the reverse sides of the generational optimism of my high school contemporaries. Most of them were going to enter the Halls of the Ivy League and expected to lead successful professional lives and none of whom expected to be “losers,” that peculiarly American fear.

We were afraid of a catastrophic conflict between America and the Soviet Union; and then we became intimidated by the counter-thrust to what was called the Red Scare through the repressive, inquisitorial, and unconstitutional tactics of the McCarthy Period. The execution of the Rosenbergs (June 19, 1953) defined the extreme implications of ideology in a traumatic fashion.

This apprehension became more than an abstraction when our high school newspaper ( Horace Mann Record ) put out a Russian language edition of one issue and tried to send it to Moscow as a peace-gesture. We met stiff resistance from the U.S. State Department and thought we might be called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Some of us later had applications for the Foreign Service blackballed by the State Department for our “subversive” act.

As confident as we were as young New Yorkers in that post-war period, we still looked to Europe to add a touch of sophistication and finesse to our new status as an Empire; it wasn’t enough to be a reader of The New York Times and The New Yorker . And, believe it or not, we associated imported coffee with those qualities in the pre-Starbuck era.

One of the places where one could have espresso and cappuccino in those days was the garden restaurant of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). One could discuss existential angst in Camus’s The Stranger as one looked at an emaciated Giacometti sculpture (thinness was in). One even might see a real existentialist or an American version of one. I met one later, an intellectual assassin, as a colleague in Buffalo and was grateful that I hadn’t met him at a tender age. He once called a department meeting in which he suggested that the leaders of Columbia’s anti-war protest should be shot. His motion was defeated.

After two years at Amherst College (1954–1956), I had a chance for a wanderjahr in Europe as a chauffeur for a late uncle of mine who lived, as it turned out, in the Diaspora of his psyche. This uncle later committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a building on Broadway, putting an end to his version of the American dream, but I am rushing ahead of my story.

I left New York City, confident that I was going to expand my horizons and return a worldlier person who would take his place in what Henry Luce had called arrogantly, but with some accuracy, “The American Century.” My year in Europe (1956–1957) turned out to be quite different from what I expected. I had many enlightening experiences at a personal and cultural level, but I saw the ravages of conflict, internal and external, close up: my uncle’s disappointments and remnants of Europe’s rubble and ruin in Austria, Germany, and Italy. One paid for a sheet of toilet paper in Paris and could buy a single cigarette in Rome.

On the island of Majorca in Spain, still the Franco period, I met someone in a bar who regaled me with stories of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and whispered to me in a state of alcoholic despondency that “They killed Lorca, Spain died in 1939.” In Paris, I met Hemingway briefly in the bar of the Ritz Hotel who told me to beware of editors who “cut you up.” Aggression was never far from his mind.

When I returned to New York at the end of that year and sailed into New York Harbor on the Queen Elizabeth (it was still the era of luxury ocean liners for transcontinental travel), I was struck by the vertical majesty and safety of the city; it was intact and removed from the traces of devastation that I had seen in Europe.

My grandparents had left Lithuania and Bohemia to escape the limitations of Europe at the beginning of the 20 th century. Their lives in New York City were hard at the beginning, but there were opportunities for socio-economic advancement and personal development. Manhattan wasn’t the Promised Land, but it was possible to go from Downtown (the Lower East Side of tenements) to Uptown.

In going to Europe at the time that I did, I saw a version of what my grandparents had left behind. Looking at the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building from the deck of the great liner when I sailed into New York harbor on my return, I was aware that the city and America, my contemporaries and I, had been privileged to live in a safe haven, untouched by war on the home front. Many soldiers had been wounded and died overseas, but we had been safe.

I realized that a moral life could not be lived if it were removed from the hardships and complexities of lives lived elsewhere in the world. I had seen some of those hardships—mangled gun emplacements on the French coast, American cemeteries in other lands—and I was now a different person when the ship eased into the Cunard dock on the West Side of Manhattan and I disembarked in June, 1957.

In briefly reversing my family’s history, going back to Europe for something like a not so Grand Tour, I had revised, to some extent, my world-view and my emotional relationship to it. Manhattan’s towers seemed arrogantly beautiful, unlike the flattened rubble and bullet-ridden walls that I had seen here and there in Europe.

My age of innocence had come to an end, and there were signs that an emerging generation was becoming discontented with Madison Avenue’s TV-advertising view of America as a game-show in which everyone could be a winner and some, perhaps, “Queen for a Day.” The benefits of the “military-industrial complex,” as Eisenhower called it a few years later (1961), made the proto-rebels of this generation feel as if they were being enlisted in a civilian war against creative individualism.

The war had called for massive organization, but we didn’t want to become William H. Whyte’s “organization man” (1956). David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) spoke to a loneliness that we felt in the center of what was supposed to be at that moment the most successful city in the world. Part of the problem was, perhaps, that it was so successful at a time when people elsewhere were struggling and not so much lonely as displaced. Some of us were beginning to feel “lonely” in the crowd Riesman was writing about.

E.B. White, The New Yorker’s defining essayist, captures some of this attitude in the opening sentence of his Here Is New York (1949): “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness […].” The America to which I returned in 1957 was different from the one I had left in 1956. Marlon Brando was establishing a new “method” of acting; Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) called into question the apparent rationality of the postwar period, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness […]”; Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) inaugurated an era of hitch-hiking to the West for young Easterners searching for freedom. In fact, two high school classmates and I hit the road after our commencement in the summer of 1954; our “high” was pitching hay on a farm in Kansas, so there was nothing to write home about.

Arthur Miller’s poignant defeatism in Death of a Salesman, a legacy of the 1930s—set in New York—was giving way to a California dream of escape, a denial of limitations; Elvis Presley’s 1956 album, Elvis , went straight to Number One and stayed there for five weeks. Happily, I don’t remember “Ready Teddy,” but the majority of young Americans were moving to the rhythms of Rock ‘n Roll.

A few months after my return from Europe, I became enraptured of a young actress, daughter of wealthy Park Avenue merchants. She, let me call her “Marcia,” was sensitive to all the new currents. She had what Fitzgerald calls a “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life” ( The Great Gatsby ,2). But they were not the promises her parents or mainstream American wanted fulfilled. She wanted reality, not real estate. She read T.S. Eliot’s poetry to me as her parents and their cronies played gin rummy in their elegantly appointed Park Avenue dining room. Their voices drowned out hers. They did not “sing” to her. She studied literature for a year at the University of Michigan, but fellow students made fun of her because she read Holderlin aloud and wore black turtlenecks, so she dropped out.

I tried to make her feel normal, but failed. She committed suicide a few years later. Marcia was born a decade too early. Had she lived into the period of the Beatles and the anti-war movement of the 1960s, she might have survived. But as it was, she needed to escape. I once wrote a poem about her: “Later, in Brooklyn Heights,/ facing Manhattan, I heard you chant/a mantra as a freighter slipped by.”

I was pleased to return to college after my “year abroad,” as it was called generically, to be with my friends again, but I was somewhat out of step with their belief that they would glide into an America of unlimited possibilities after college. Having seen some of the ravages of history close-up—my uncle’s personal anguish and Europe’s disaster—I was more attuned now to the position of outsiders and marginal men. My closest friend, sensing some change in me, gave me a copy of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1957).

I felt half in tune now with those who had been rejected by Fraternities (the Greeks) and half in sympathy with those institutional men who lobbed Frisbees on smooth lawns, drove MGs, and expected to occupy a high office somewhere, including Wall Street, and to own a co-op on Fifth or Park Avenue. I was, true to my origins and beginnings, a divided man at this point.

Just as I graduated from college (1959), my father, poor guy, had fallen upon hard economic times. Unable to raise money, after filing for bankruptcy, to finance his Garment Center business, he had become, like Willy Loman, a salesman on a downward spiral. Having gone from poverty to prosperity, the father of a would-be professor (the Three Ps), he now was at the terrifying threshold of poverty again. He had been crushed by New York’s competitive engine. His American dream became, for a while, something like a nightmare.

My father was unable to help me attend a graduate school away from home, so I applied to, and was accepted by, Columbia University. If I had known that one day it would be President Obama’s alma mater, I might have felt better about being there; but after Amherst’s pastoral grace, the livable scale of a small New England college and its social intimacy, Columbia seemed to be—as we used to say in the 1960s—as much a part of the problem as it was the solution: cold, impersonal, indifferent to the life of the individual, even as its most famous literary critic, Lionel Trilling, celebrated the importance of individual consciousness in his still relevant The Liberal Imagination (1950).

I couldn’t relate the MA thesis that I was writing—the poetry of Robert Lowell, whose “confessional” poems were situated at the interface of self and history, a drama I was beginning to understand—to the monumental scale of Columbia. I felt anonymous on the Morningside Heights campus and retreated on many days, when I should have been studying, to the café in Fort Tryon Park where I began to write short stories and to know some of the foreigners who sought refuge there. Two of them, one an exile from Franco’s Spain, the other a refugee from Mussolini’s Italy, also were beginning to write. One, science fiction; the other, political drama. I wasn’t sure what I would write, but I knew it would deal inevitably with my family’s life and history in New York City.

When all my thesis advisor could say about my thesis at the end of the year (1960) was that it conformed to the MLA style-sheet, I decided to join the Army for a short tour of duty (six months) because I knew I would be drafted for two years if I weren’t enrolled in an academic program. I didn’t know how I would support myself as a writer, if I was going to abandon an academic career when I was discharged, but I knew that Columbia wouldn’t fan my creative flame. In some sense, Columbia had defeated me as my father had been put on the rack of Manhattan’s Garment District. I had tried to be his opposite growing up, but the city’s large forces had impinged on both of us. I needed to get away.

So I joined in June 1960 a National Guard Combat Engineer Unit whose late 19 th century castle-like armory was a short distance from our apartment in Washington Heights. I was sent first to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for Basic Training and then to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, on the banks of the Potomac River, not far from George Washington’s Mount Vernon home.

The comic irony was not lost on me that, like Washington, I was to become a surveyor. I won’t recount here my struggle with Trigonometry and the elusive mechanics of the Transit. I was more interested in finding a quiet spot on the nicely landscaped base—it was Virginia, after all—where I could sit and read after hours and wonder about the identity of the mysterious foreign troops who were on the post.

One group of platoon size, clearly Asian, didn’t eat in a common dining room or frequent the PX. They carried bags of rice to their barracks and kept to themselves or were kept from us. One day I asked the Company Clerk who they were:

“I think they’re from Viet Nam.” “Where’s that?” I asked. “Not sure,” he said. “Why are they here?” “Beats me,” he said, “but I’m busy, get outta here.”

Later that evening I looked up Viet Nam on a map in the post library. It seemed to be a French colony. I was interested in travel and wondered if I’d ever get there one day. Fortunately, I was too old to get to see it with the help of the U.S. Army by the time I returned to graduate school at the University of Michigan in 1963 and understood who those soldiers were. A great deal was to change in America in 1963 after the assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963) and the later assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968).

As T.S. Eliot says in “Gerontion,” “History has many cunning passages”; and one can be in one of them and not know, for a while, where he is. That is perhaps my theme: our lives are at least two-sided, even as, like Castor and Pollux, we try to become one Gemini of identity. As I was once a son both of the Bronx and Manhattan, as Manhattan has a Downtown and an Uptown, as Comedy and Tragedy divide the Red Sea of Literature, so human experience is always complex. We live in a hemispheric world (left and right brain; North and South America), a world of material contradictions (macro-matter and micro-particles). We need to be wary of simplistic reductions of experience at all levels. As Henry James says in “The Art of Fiction”:

“Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness […].” (composed in 1884, published in 1888)

Writers are experts in the field of multi-dimensional experience. Whitman proclaims in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” ( Leaves of Grass ): “I too walked the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,/I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me […].” “I too knitted the old knot of contrariety […].” Barack Obama writes in Dreams from My Father : “I spent a year walking from one end of Manhattan to the other. Like a tourist I watched the range of human possibility on display […].” (222)

And the narrator of my novel Broadway Serenade says about the protagonist Larry Mann who contemplates hang-gliding over Manhattan: “If he could soar, wheel, and swoop from the Lower East Side to The Cloisters, he might be able to make sense of this city of dreams which his grandfather had chosen for himself and his children and his children’s children as a homeland.”

My father’s dream of success had failed, but the money he had made in the canyons of W. 37 th and 38 th Streets during the good years had made my education and my brother’s possible. He had put us in a position to overcome his reversals. My brother had been able to make a life in Portugal; I had been able to see some of the larger world. I realized when I revisited New York City recently that I had been too hard on my father—I had focused too much on what he took to be his failure, not the renewals of family history that his labors had made possible. He had made our life in New York City, with all its possibilities, possible.

We get into trouble as individuals and nations when we become single-minded, dogmatic, and ideologically rigid. We deny our humanity and imperil the possibilities of survival if and when we try to eliminate the living and changing forms of diversity, if we exchange the multiple vistas of story-telling for the tunnel-vision of propaganda. Too often tunnel-vision at the highest levels leaves real people wounded and dead in real tunnels.

We need to be mindful that today’s certainty may become tomorrow’s ambiguity; that the identity we insisted on when we were twenty-one needs readjustment as we enter deep middle-age (believe me, I know); that what we took to be the meaning of our generation’s experience when we were living through it may turn out to have been chimerical. And we need to be sensitive to reversals, revisions, and renewals. There can be no better example of these healthy necessities than the now-emerging debate today in America about the treatment of prisoners during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

An image haunts me: the disfigured face of Sergeant Merlin German who endured more than 40 surgeries as the result of a roadside bomb-blast in Iraq before he died on April 11, 2008. Honored by the State of California for his “courage and unfailing loyalty […] as an inspiration to Americans everywhere” ( The Buffalo News , May 3, 2008, D5), he serves for me as a terrible icon of the disasters of war.

And it comes as a great relief to the majority of Americans that President Obama has condemned a “dark and painful chapter in our history” and has said that unlawful “interrogation techniques would never be used again” ( The New York Times , April 17, 2009, A1, A10).

As American history is of transformation, I recall with nostalgia and some sense of hope a United Nations song that we sang at P.S. 187 Manhattan in 1945: “One world, one world built on a firm foundation, built on a firm foundation of peace.” Its melody and utopian words, promising a world beyond contradiction, still haunt me.

A photograph of Fort Tryon Park is mounted above my desk. The campanile of The Cloisters rises above a canopy of trees, and a bend of the Hudson River can be seen beyond it to the north. I was fortunate to grow up in a place in New York City that allowed me to dream of other cities in other countries. It left me with a double legacy: the comforts of home and the allure of away, America and the world.

Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up . Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions, 1993.—. The Great Gatsby . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953.

Gay, Peter. The Freud Reader . New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989.

James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Nina Baum et al., 2nd edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979.

Mann, Thomas. Stories of Three Decades . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friederich. The Communist Manifesto . New York: Washington Square Press, 1976.

Mazzetti, Mark and Shane, Scott. “Memos Spell Out Brutal C.I.A. Mode of Interrogation.” New York Times . April 17, 2009, A1, A10.

Montaigne, Michel de. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Trans. George B. Ives. New York: Heritage Press, 1946.

Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father . New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. On The Social Contract . New York, Dover Publications, 2003.

—. The Confessions . Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Ed. James E. Miller. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.

Howard R. Wolf is Professor emeritus of American Literature, journalism and creative writing at SUNY Buffalo. His interests are travel and travel writing, imagination and short fiction, general criticism, literary journalism (creative nonfiction), autobiography, letters and history of American and British Literature. Howard Wolf’s publications include Forgive the Father: A Memoir of Changing Generations , 1978, A Version of Home: Letters from the World, 1992, Broadway Serenade, novel, 1993, The Autobiographical Impulse in America, 1993, The Education of a Teacher, 1987, and The Education of Ludwig Fried, stories, 2006. His most recent publication is Far-Away Places: Lessons in Exile, 2007. Professor Wolf was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for Turkey (1983–1984) and South Africa (1988). He was also a Senior Academic Visitor at Wolfson College, Cambridge University in spring 2007. http://wings.buffalo.edu/english/faculty/wolf/wolf.htm

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Living in a Small Town

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Growing Up in the City or the Contryside

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: City

While many people , including some educators and social scientists, agree that the countryside is better for the health and physical development of children, i believe that growing up in a big city provides children with more advantages than in the countryside. This is because children can receive more chances for better educations and cultural experiences if they grow up in an urban setting in comparison with growing up in the countryside.

Living in a big city almost guarantees children a better chance of receiving a better education than in the countryside. It only stands to reason that more populated areas will be equipped with more schools and facilities that support them such as large libraries , museums , zoos and other educational establishments that can assist children in their overall education . Parents can choose where to send their children to school based upon their own set of requirements and special needs or abilities of the children. In contrast, the children living in the countryside normally have few , if any, choices concerning where they will attend school and the educational facilities mentioned above as far and few between.

In addition to a better variety of educational opportunities ,children can learn through more cultural experiences when growing up in a big city. Since cities are busy places with events always going on , on the weekends children can have the opportunity to attend concerts or recitals ,view exhibits in museums and cultural cultural centers and exposed to many different kinds of people with different backgrounds. On the other hand, children in the countryside are very limited as to their exposure to cultural events and the types of people they see. Seldom do they ever even enter a museum or come into contract with people from different themselves . This can limit their knowledge and view of people outside their communities.

The Essay on Countryside v.s City Life

Life Have you ever thought about your birth place? Do you make your own decision where to live? I believe every person, in a certain time, think about the place they should live: countryside or city? To make the best choice, we must look at three big differences between countryside and city: the environment, education, entertainment. First of all, the countryside has a quiet and peaceful ...

To conclude, while the countryside surely provides benefits such as cleaner air, less noise and a calmer lifestyle , the benefits of living in a big city far outweigh those of living in the countryside . This is due to the fact that children can gain a better education and more cultural experiences when they grow up in a big city.

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How Growing Up In A Rural Community Shaped Me As A Person

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You can’t change where you come from. But what if people judge you for it? This is a series I’ve been meaning to write for a while and I think it’s more important than ever to fight for our small towns.

I keep hearing about the death of rural communities. In fact, in 2014, 54% of the world’s population lived in cities. By 2050 it’s expected that 70% of all humankind will live in a city ! I understand the why behind this, but I’ve come to really cherish my humble beginnings. It shaped me as a person.

It made me a dreamer

Growing up in a small town, a lot of people said to me, “you’ll never amount to anything.” This type of talk and small-mindedness made me think deeply about what I wanted to do with my life.

I was always a bit of a dreamer. Naturally, growing up in a rural community, everyone around me (except my grandmother and mother) would tell me to stop all this dreaming stuff and to just get a job like everyone else. But I knew I didn’t want to work where it was customary.

It forced me to become ambitious

Growing up in a working-class family forced me to be ambitious. I became obsessed with thinking of ways that would allow me to be different and make a name for myself. It hasn’t been easy and I’m not where I want to be just yet. But we’ve got many exciting new things happening at the Cadman Capital Group  and I’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks!

My parents would always take me to the city, day trips to London, etc. This is what set the fire in me if you will – and the flame hasn’t been put out yet.

It keeps me grounded

My small town values keep me grounded. Having my grandmother’s and mother’s support gave me the confidence to do what I needed to do to be successful. It helped me to pick up and leave when I was just 17 to go travel the world.

When I got back, my world experience helped start my own business. But without the support from the two of them to do what was right for me, I would have been completely lost.

The countryside is where I feel the most ‘me’

I still spend the majority of my downtime in the country. I feel the mos ‘me’ when I’m connected to nature – when I’m around water or can feel the light all around me. I spend my time fishing, walking, and thinking, which are things you really can’t do in the city.

I also understand that cities just aren’t for everyone. There’s a lot of good in small towns "“ in fact, I recently wrote a series about stimulating small business in rural areas . I touched upon why university may not be for everyone , how important trade skills are in modern society , why green is good for you , and 4 ways a small town can boost its economy .

I'm forever grateful for my experience growing up in a rural community. But most of all, for my grandmother and mother for supporting me, no matter what. I hope my children feel the same way.

Giles Cadman is Chairman of The Cadman Capital Group, a group of cohesive, complementary companies, operating in the international trade, retail, leisure, and investment markets. Learn more about Giles .

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Life-Changing Lessons Learned From Growing Up in a Small Town

Big wisdom from little places.

Growing up in a teeny-tiny community can definitely have its drawbacks. With so few people around, gossip pretty much travels at the speed of light. But it also has its perks; being raised in a tight-knit community often means feeling like your whole town is your family. And, you never have to set foot inside a big box store.

While these types of things may seem insignificant during childhood, they can actually play a significant role in shaping how we see the world as adults. To demonstrate what we mean, we partnered with Folgers Coffee , a brand that’s all about celebrating folks with can-do attitudes who care for their communities deeply. Together, we've brought you the best pearls of wisdom from small towners who embody Folger's spirit of giving back. Here’s what they had to say.

Finding “your people” is everything

When your town doesn’t have much in the way of entertainment, it’s important to learn how to make your own fun and find people who share your sense of humor. “Growing up in a small town taught me the importance of finding your people—like-minded friends who really ‘get’ you,” says Emily Farmer Popek, who grew up in Rickreall, Oregon.

“My best memories are of doing stupid, pointless things with really great people—driving around aimlessly, going to all-night diners to drink coffee, riding around in a shopping cart we found in the bushes. It didn't matter what we were doing. We just wanted to spend time together, and we always found a way to have fun.”

A tight-knit community can boost your confidence

Small towns may mean everyone knows your business, but it also means they’ll be there to support you through your triumphs and struggles. “The intrinsic value of growing up in a small community is measured by the assurance that where you live, people ‘see’ you and can call you by name,” says Bonnie McDaniel of Tucker Hill, Florida.

“You are not invisible, and the experience of having grown up surrounded by people who know you gives you a confidence that makes you walk boldly as you venture out into the world.”

Less really is more

There’s no doubt that urban areas offer more to do in the traditional sense., but small towners know that more isn’t always better.

“What I learned from my hometown was less is more,” says Janelle Ledyard of Stillwater, New Jersey. “We had less to do on paper, but we made our fun outside with fewer distractions and more creativity. There were fewer people, but that meant there were more familiar faces and deeper community roots.”

Cherishing small businesses is essential

Being intimately involved with the town’s businesses might actually influence your own career choices later on.

“My father has a woodcarving studio in our town’s small business district, Scituate Harbor, where I spent a lot of time growing up. The harbor has a strong community of small business owners,” says James Kukstis of Scituate, Massachusetts.

“Being around these people so much gave me a real appreciation for the importance of local businesses, and a drive to create things myself.”

Diversity is definitely a fantastic thing

When your hometown is so teeny you have to travel to another area for school, it gives you the opportunity to interact with a diverse group of people.

“I grew up in a town which is only one square mile in size,” says Rebecca Chin of Malverne, New York. “Because it was so small, the schools from elementary to high school were combined with other towns. I grew up and went to school with such a great melting pot of people; all different races, all different backgrounds. It gave me such an understanding and appreciation for people of all walks of life that I don’t think I would have received if I lived in a larger town.”

Kindness counts

In a close-knit community, it goes without saying that everyone helps one another. And becoming compassionate as a kid will stay with you for a lifetime. “One thing you learn in a small town is how to be a good neighbor. And in a small town, everyone is your neighbor!” says Weesie Thelen of Hendersonville, North Carolina.

“You work together to celebrate milestones—weddings and baby showers, for example—and when the hard times hit, you show up with a casserole and a shoulder to cry on.”

Always be on your best behavior

With little anonymity in tiny hamlets, children learn quickly to stay on their best behavior when in public. “In a small town, there's hardly anywhere you can go without running into someone you know,” says Dalene Rovenstine of Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

“You learn from a young age to be careful with what you say and do in public because even if you think no one's watching—someone probably is. As I've grown older and much of my life is lived out online, that lesson has translated well into how I behave on social media. Just like in a small town, on the internet, someone is always watching.”

Feeling inspired to give back to your hometown? See how others are working with their communities and learn more about Folger's Can-Do initiative here .

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This Is What It's Really Like Growing Up in a Small Town Where Everyone Knows Your Name

Growing up in a small town isn't everyone's dream, and it wasn't necessarily mine either, but it was my reality. I come from a town where everyone knows everyone, whether you know them personally or through a mutual friend. No trip to the grocery store is complete without running into your neighbor or someone you know from high school. I learned the "who's who" of the town at a young age, and knew that I would be surrounded by those people while I was growing up, whether I liked them or not.

As a teenager in high school, I didn't particularly care for the town I lived in and I couldn't wait to escape to college . I didn't like the fact that other people I rarely associated with probably knew everything about my personal life. I didn't appreciate when parents would gossip about their kids or their kid's friends, nor did I love when I or anyone I was close with became the center talking point. I felt trapped in my negative thoughts and desperately longed after the idea of leaving.

When it was finally time for me to pack up and move away, I felt an overwhelming amount of sadness to leave.

But as time passed I grew to appreciate little things about my hometown . I loved when the sunset turned the sky into a canvas of pinks and purples. I was excited when local events, like the seafood festival or the fair, came to town. I smiled when the cashier at the grocery store was friendly, asking how my family was doing and if I had a chance to try the new restaurant that just opened down the street.

When it was finally time for me to pack up and move away, I felt an overwhelming amount of sadness to leave. It was weird to graduate high school and say goodbye to my classmates who I quite literally grew up with. I dreaded every goodbye, no matter who I was saying it to. For the longest time I didn't understand why I felt uneasy about leaving, but now I realize that I felt emotionally confused because I planted such strong roots in the town where everyone knew my name. I knew that no matter where I lived next, this town would always be my home.

I could go on and on about how it's beneficial to leave the town you grew up in . You can't expect to experience all walks of life if you stay in the same spot forever, and you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't get out and explore the incredible world we live in . There's one thing about my town that makes it special, though. When I left, I realized what a strong community I had been a part of. Even though my town may not offer endless amounts of thrill and excitement, it does offer an endless amount of love and support. The sense of community that I feel when I'm home is overwhelming. Yes, everyone might know my personal business — and that does bother me at times — but that can also mean people are willing to help you out if you need it.

When I was in elementary school, my teachers and coaches were often the parents of my friends. Having these role models to look up to and listen to throughout my life made me feel safe and secure. I may not have realized it then, but I definitely realize now that the adults in my life look at me as their own. They want the best for me and my peers, and they won't ever stop encouraging me.

I don't think I would have the strong friendships I have now without growing up in my town. I've been lucky enough to call the same two women my best friends for my entire life . We grew up together, we've been with each other through thick and thin, and we've seen each other transform into the young women we are now. Without the bond I have with them, I'm not sure what my life would be like. I can think of several other people who have this same kind of bond with their friends, and it's all thanks to our home.

My small town taught me the importance of being there for each other, even when the going gets tough. The friendly faces I would see around town taught me to always be kind, no matter who I'm talking to. I learned how to be active in the community I lived in, whether it be through volunteering or supporting others in their efforts to make a difference. Most of all, I learned not to measure the significance of people by their successes in life, but instead by the consistent support and outpouring of love they offer to others. Without my small town , I wouldn't be who I am today, and I'm pretty proud of who I've become.

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Ielts writing task 2 sample 45 - it is better for children to grow up in the countryside than in a big city, ielts writing task 2/ ielts essay:, it is better for children to grow up in the countryside than in a big city..

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11 differences between raising kids in a big city versus the suburbs

• Raising children is expensive no matter what, but whether parents decide to raise them in a city or a suburb can impact the cost significantly. 
• Besides the cost, major differences between raising children in cities and suburbs include transportation, schooling, and housing. 
• Here are 11 major differences between raising kids in a city versus the suburbs. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

While many parents leave the big city to raise their kids in the suburbs, others opt to keep their family in a more bustling metropolitan environment.

Some of the key differences between the two lifestyles include transportation, cost of childcare, and the overall racial, socioeconomic, and cultural diversity of people you'll interact with. Reports have shown it's sometimes cheaper to live in a city, despite many preconceived notions. However, while suburbs certainly have hidden costs , the size of a family home is always bigger compared to a city apartment at the same price.

Read more : 6 of the worst hidden costs of living in the suburbs

Urban versus suburban experiences will always vary depending on city or neighborhood, but there are some general categories that remain true for every area. Many cities are not designed for kids. However, some parenting blogs ensure readers that most cities are adaptable to family lifestyle.

Ultimately, a key difference in raising kids in the city versus the suburbs is what you'll spend your money on. Though it is important to note that kids — regardless of where they are raised —  are extremely expensive .

Keep reading for some of the key differences between city and suburban life for kids.

Both the mode and the cost of transportation will vary between cities and suburbs.

Transportation varies depending on the city. Residents in major cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, use public transit systems, while suburban families are generally forced to drive cars for commuting and everyday activities.

A Vox report emphasized that traveling with a child in non-driving situations allows for multitasking, like reading or talking with them without fear of getting distracted. Additionally, raising children in the city usually entails more walking, which can help keep families healthy.

There's a monetary component as well — transportation can also be cheaper in cities if you decide to take public transportation, avoiding costs like car maintenance and fuel. Gas is a major hidden cost of living in the suburbs. 

Finally, smaller suburbs might not have access to other modes of travel such as Uber and Lyft. As children grow older, the opportunity for independence is greater in bigger cities as they begin to use these modes of transportation on their own.

As a result of transportation, children often have a greater sense of independence living in a city.

Some parenting blogs mention independence as a key difference between city and suburban living. Without the need for parents to drive them places, children learn how to become self-sufficient much sooner in an urban environment. 

This independence in cities is often without choice: Schools and friends are located across town and children learn at an earlier age to travel alone. Opportunities for independence certainly exist in the suburbs, but driving restrictions greatly affect this.

City schooling and suburban schooling is a big difference.

Unless parents opt to send their children to private schools or receive special permission, schooling in the suburbs is generally determined by geographical district.

Therefore, young students will usually attend schools with children in their neighborhood, oftentimes with those who live just a few houses away. Meanwhile, in the city, students attend schools with kids from all over the metro area.

This has pros and cons — while city schooling allows kids to make friends from other neighborhoods, it may be harder for clubs and other after-school activities. For parents, too, forming communities is easier in the suburbs, since most parents in a neighborhood will send their children to the same school. In the city, the neighbors across the hall could attend a school in a completely different area, despite having the same address.

Schools in the city can also be more competitive, especially when enrolling a child into preschool and kindergarten. Still, while schooling can be difficult, there is a much wider selection than in the suburbs.

The cost of childcare is higher in the city.

For parents who work, someone needs to watch the children after school hours. The cost of childcare in a city is much higher, including full-time daycares.

"Average childcare costs are astronomical," economist Elise Gould told Curbed . "The majority of families with kids have both parents working. In states that lack infant and child care, the cost of childcare has a massive impact."

Hourly rates for babysitters are higher as well . 

"I soon learned, post baby's birth, that I was about six months too late to the waiting-list game for daycares, and while adding my daughter to waiting lists in the city, I was baffled to learn the cost of childcare mimicked that of a second mortgage," Jayani Perera wrote for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation .

People spend money on different things in cities and suburbs.

There are many hidden costs in the suburbs , but certain aspects of city living are unavoidably expensive. Additionally, moving out of the city isn't always less expensive , and sometimes it is actually much cheaper to remain in a metro area than to move to the suburbs. 

For example, property taxes and the cost of groceries can be higher in the suburbs, but you'll spend more on rent for a much smaller home in a city.

The house or apartment your kids will call home varies greatly depending on location.

The old notion that moving to the suburbs is cheaper for raising a family isn't necessarily true. In some cases, it is actually cheaper to live in a city's metro area than it is to move to the suburbs — many of which have become extremely unaffordable.

However, the size of a family home is always bigger compared to a city apartment for the same price.

Due to the housing crisis in many major American cities, many millennials are forced to move to the suburbs . Even without the cheaper housing market, some parents would prefer to have a spacious two-story home over a cramped apartment. Especially depending on the number of children, storage becomes a major factor for family city living.

In many cases, a good compromise is living in a mid-sized city : families have access to all the benefits of a metro area, while also finding plenty of options for affordable and decent-sized housing.

Parental tasks like laundry, back-to-school shopping, and grocery shopping can be harder in the city.

Doing laundry in a laundromat for yourself is one thing, but the task becomes much harder when you factor in baby clothes, school uniforms, and soccer jerseys. While this is a minor difference in city versus suburban living, it's a convenience many parents would like to have.

In many cases, having in-unit laundry is an amenity reserved for suburban homes .

Other small tasks include back-to-school shopping or even the weekly grocery run. Without an easy way to load up a car in a parking lot, parents have to be strategic about what and where they buy things in order to make it home on the subway. Otherwise, parents are forced to spend more time making multiple trips in order to stock their family home.

All that being said, in a pinch, city stores are open later — even 24 hours sometimes — while many suburban shops close in the evening.

Diversity is a major difference between urban and suburban areas.

Perhaps the biggest difference for kids growing up in the city versus the suburbs is diversity . As cities draw workers from all over the world, children are more likely to spend time with students of different ethnicities, religions, and upbringings.

6sqft interviewed parents on why they picked city living over the suburbs, and several called attention to wanting their children to grow up in a diverse environment.

"We both really value the diversity that our children are being raised in," one parent from New York City told 6sqft . "We ride the subway with people from all over the world and their friends come from all kinds of families. And that is all normal to them."

In addition to hearing different languages on the subway, children in cities are exposed to different types of foods and meals they may otherwise never encounter until they are older and move to a city on their own. That's not to say parents in the suburbs can't try to expose their children to different experiences, but it makes it much easier in a city where there are streets full of different dining options.

There are different types of safety concerns in both environments.

No parent will ever stop worrying about their child's safety, but safety concerns vary depending on where you raise your kids. Michelle Woo of Lifehacker wrote that while homicide and crime rates are often higher in cities, car crashes are far more deadly and far more common in suburban areas.

A parent's report for Vox also said that car accidents are among the leading causes of death for young people. While city parents may worry about their children walking home, suburban parents worry when their children get their driver's licenses.

Families have better access to cultural events and entertainment options in the city.

As a parent, you won't be as spontaneous as you were when you were before children — regardless of location. But in the city, it's nice to at least have access to cultural events and entertainment, whereas living in the suburbs makes it hard for a quick outing.

Matthew Yglesias wrote for Vox about the variety of activities available to families in major cities: "One recent weekend when my wife was out of town, my son and I went with various groups of friends to the National Building Museum, a WNBA game, and a brunch-hour children's musical performance at a hipster cider distillery (don't ask)."

Finally, a previous report from Realtor shows that entertainment is actually cheaper in the city.

Spending time outdoors is different depending on where you live.

Finally, a key factor in the city-versus-suburbs argument is the space children have to be outdoors. In cities, outdoor playgrounds and parks replace backyards and cul-de-sacs for bike riding and pick-up hockey games.

Despite more open spaces, it may actually healthier to live in the city due to the sheer amount of walking outdoors. While suburban parents may have larger backyards, you'll have to make a conscious effort to make sure you are using the space regularly.

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Growing Up in the City: A Study of Juvenile Delinquency in an Urban Neighbourhood . By John Barron Mays. Liverpool: The University Press of Liverpool, 1954. 216 pp. 17 s. 6 d

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Wiley B. Sanders, Growing Up in the City: A Study of Juvenile Delinquency in an Urban Neighbourhood . By John Barron Mays. Liverpool: The University Press of Liverpool, 1954. 216 pp. 17 s. 6 d, Social Forces , Volume 34, Issue 3, March 1956, Pages 293–294, https://doi.org/10.2307/2574071

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Some of the key differences between the two ... Growing Up in the City: A Study of Juvenile Delinquency in an Urban Wiley B. Sanders; Growing Up in the City: A Study of Juvenile Delinquency in an Urban Neighbourhood. By John Barron Mays. Liverpool: The University Press of Liv Growing Up In The City or the Country Growing Up In The City or the Country Some people believe that it is better for children to grow up in the countryside than in a big city. However, other people think that a big city gives more opportunities and it is good for the long run. Personally, for several reasons I think that it is better for children's health to grow up in the country. assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis