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So where did I claim that "rebellion" will do any work? Scans comments I wrote. Apparently nowhere, which is good as I remember writing no such thing. I did wrote that some cultural limitations on sex and drugs puts limits and boundaries how far teenage rebellion will push them. In more concrete terms, in today's day and time and culture, teenagers are prone to experiment with premarital sex and mind-altering substances. I believe it will be a more innocuous experience in a low population density moderately high trust suburbia. Part of maintaining that includes that adults consider topics of sex and drugs uncouth instead of interesting conversation starters with random young adult males (which was the original complaint upthread).
I can agree suburbia is neither the ancestral hunter-gatherer or agricultural environment. Neither is any of available alternatives. Are megacities more conductive for social and psychological growth to adulthood? Until recently most people lived their whole lives in small rural communities with population far below Dunbar's number. Cities were not really comparable to modern cities in size, and in their modest size were disease-ridden population sinks, meaning, they were places where many people went to die childless. Fertility ratios in modern Western urbanized areas suggest cities are still population sinks when we have solved disease with indoor plumbing and antibiotics.
Suppose many kids are bit bored and more than bit sheltered in sterotypical suburbia. If they stay bored for more than one week, I'd say that betrays only emptiness of mind and lack of creativity, and I am uncertain how city life would help with it? What precious experiences are there to be found in a big city that kids will miss out on if faced with few boring teenage years in suburbia? High culture? I propose that only minuscule percentage of teenagers in places like NYC frequent or obtain value from the Met or MOMA or access to university tier libraries or any other similar venue. Perhaps some highly successful people can find a super enriching bubble for raising children in a big city, but that is very select slice of population. Hard city life? I suppose most kids can and will survive and be "hardened" through a stereotypical hard city high school experience (humans are quite adaptable and have survived in quite shitty societies). Still I'd rather avoid such environments if I can, because I do not think that is the civilization I want my kids to grow in and consider as "normal".
History of literature is full of artsy authors complaining how stifling small provincial towns and then later suburbs were for more than a century now, and yet they remain popular and sought after localities. Seems likely to that most people who seek out the artsy vibrancy are exceptional people, and very few who seek it achieve anything of note with it.
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