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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6672 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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I prefer my kids will have good childhood at cost of some boredom as teenagers (boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway). Hopefully they are ready equipped to handle some adult excitement when they are adults.

In college I noticed that my classmates who had grown up in New York were generally more responsible and less likely to get into the sorts of trouble that a naive suburbanite would. Now, it certainly had more to do with parenting style than the nature of the built environment, but the latter sort of kid was notable for their paucity of life experience and inability to deal with interpersonal conflict. Personally, I went from living in a third world country to an American exurb at age 8 and the latter was so mind-numbingly boring that I have no memory of anything that happened in my life, good or bad, between then and high school.

I don't see why it should be a selling point of inner city childhood that you "get" to become that sort of unnaive(?) hardboiled(?) person with lots of adult-tier "life experiences" before you are an adult.

I do have many things to sneer at about American parenting practices, suburban and urban alike, including ability to handle various social situations, but I am restraining myself not to rant about them as I don't see the concept of suburbia (detached houses, low population density, boring by standard of single young adults) as the culprit.

Certainly I can see it would be nice to bring up kids in a nice city with "high culture" and civilized people and such, but current available cities are bit lackluster in that regard.

Personally, I went from living in a third world country to an American exurb at age 8 and the latter was so mind-numbingly boring that I have no memory of anything that happened in my life, good or bad, between then and high school.

I have hard time believing this lack of memories is a feature of American exurb. Perhaps it was just you?

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