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Comment by bartwr | Hacker News Reader

Hey, it's the OP here - I explicitly mention in my post issues with having kids in the SFBA / SV (competition, high suicide rates) and being a teenager in the suburbs (I grew up in the city center until moving to suburbs as a ~14yo and hated it - totally isolating and depressing) as things that I consider and think it's a myth. I think it might be a great place for a few year olds, but once the school starts, I personally wouldn't want to grow up in SV. But obviously YMMV.

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If you stay in NYC and have kids, I'll be interested in your perspective then. I lived in NYC for a long time, and now live in the NYC suburbs. All your criticisms of suburbs are spot-on, IMO, even here in the NYC metro, but at the same time I don't think living IN the city with kids really would have worked out either. NYC is great because it's a true city, but it's very large, very loud, and still part of the broader American culture where you need to pay for what are arguably essential services such as good schools, physical safety, etc. We don't have a lot of in between options in the US though -- only here on the east coast do we have much urbanism, with NYC being the biggest and most intense by far, but pretty much everything else is suburban or exurban. I suspect this will be different within, say, 150 years, though of course that's a prediction I won't be able to check.

Yeah, no, parents value the Bay Area exactly for what it offers to older children and teens. You can live anywhere with a toddler, but you want your kids to spend their teens in South Bay. Why?

- Some of the best high schools in the country. Many teachers have advanced degrees in their fields. A direct connection to Stanford and Berkeley. Courses beyond AP Calculus available for children to take.

- You can raise your children in the church. You do not seem to understand what a luxury it is to have a vast choice of local churches, where many people you meet are doctors, engineers, lawyers, and other influential professionals. The Bay Area is composed of lots of tightly knit communities where people can exchange experiences, favors, and insights with others they can trust and relate to. Maybe you weren't able to break into one, so you couldn't see the benefits?

- You overstate the pressure on local kids. Aside from a couple of tragic incidents at Palo Alto High several years ago, children in the area have lots of opportunities to hang out in bubble tea shops and cafes, visit friends, participate in sports, and basically do whatever they want to. The unique luxury of living in the Bay Area is that if you kid is over at a friend's house, you can rely on the mom to say, "Sure, you can play Zelda, but first let's do an hour of homework!" This unique and amazing culture of high achievement is what drives parents to the area at any cost.

To be honest, all your points sound scary/depressing/unappealing to me. Like the last point - helicopter parenting - kind of creepy to be honest, yikes. But this might be a difference in our cultural backgrounds and how we grew up.

But one thing that is not just matter of cultural background and preferences, but of facts and ongoing research - is that pressure, high expectations etc. do have a devastating effect on teenagers' mental health and mental wellbeing.

Again, I'm glad you have decided to look for a place to live that's a better fit for you right now!

The way parents in South Bay raise their kids might seem hardcore, but it gets results. Many families come here from overseas with nothing and spend many years working in dismal jobs with low pay, all to give their kids a chance at success. We have some of the best schools and some of the highest rates of attending elite universities in the entire country. The FAANGs are stocked with graduates from local high schools. Many families have parents who work at Apple and other well-established companies. We live in wholesome, family-friendly, welcoming communities. If you ever decide to have kids, we would be happy to welcome you back to the area!

And when I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted himself to saving trees, and he’d just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods. And he was eighty-four years old, and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” And he said, “Ah, New York, yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” And I gave him different banal theories. And he said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” He said, “I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built—they’ve built their own prison—and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/278727-my-dinner-with-...

> is that pressure, high expectations etc. do have a devastating effect on teenagers' mental health and mental wellbeing.

Having grown up in the South Bay and then having moved to Europe myself I think that lots of parents in the Bay Area really don’t understand this, and props to you for doing so (even though you aren’t a parent). Sure plenty of kids end up being extremely high achievers. Plenty of kids also crack under the pressure and spend their formative years hating themselves.

Sure it’s a cultural thing, but it’s a cultural thing that actively hurts children.

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