Well, I live in Chicago and am due with my first baby in August. It was a very unexpected pregnancy and my fiance and I are both from Iowa… so the though of raising a child in this city is mind-boggling to us… We live in a garden apt across from 4 frat boys and down 3 flights of stairs (stroller hell???) - anyone else raise their children in big cities? We are on a modest income as well, so buying a huge house or having a nanny is not an option here, unfortunately. Anyone move after they found out they were pregnant? Any feedback would be great… 
I don’t really have an answer to your question, except that Jeevmon and I plan to raise our hypothetical future children in Chicago. We live in Bucktown and it is very child-friendly. There are good magnet schools nearby (we are not private school folk) and so many things to do with a child that we really believe it can be done.
Keep in mind that it won’t make a difference to a baby–it might be an issue when the child is of school age, but I’d say for the next 5 years, it’s not. If you like living here, then stay.
I was raised in a small town (pop. 9,000-ish) and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. One of my cousins was raised in a big city and was talling me what it was like in high school. Some of the things she said shocked me, like if you had a car that was more than 5 years old then you wouldn’t be popular or have very many friends. In small towns everyone gets along. Plus, everytime I turn on CNN news its another murder making headlines, another rape or robbery, and you just dont get that in small towns. But, like jeevwoman said, its not going to matter to the child for quite some time.
Don’t worry about it!
How many millions of chldren have been raised in New York? Cairo? London? Mexico City? Paris? Tokyo?
Children are very resiliant. They accept what they know. They can get used to almost anything. Your child will not know that not every child is raised in a third story apartment.
When my first was born we lived right under the flightpath of an airport. About every 20 minutes a plane would fly very low, exactly over our house. It was completely deafening! So many people asked us if it disturbed his sleep. We lived there for years and he was so used to the noise that he never even noticed it. Never woke him up at all!
And as for having money be tight… it matters very little. Babies don’t really need much. Don’t buy into the consumerism advocated so strongly in baby magazines. They dont need matching sheets, a nursery with a theme, or even their own room for a long time. Breastfeed (that alone will save thousands a year), use cloth diapers (save hundreds), buy used baby clothes, etc. Baby will never know the difference.
As long as you provide the baby with lots of love, warmth, and security, the rest are details!
Well, we aren’t exactly in the middle of the city, but we are raising two kids (4 and 6) in a small apartment with no yard. We have surfing waiters instead of frat boys, though, being in San Diego.
I think there are some things to recommend city life. My kids have learned a lot about many different kinds of people. We are in easy reach of a great variety of things to do–museums, an aquarium, the Zoo, restaurants other than McDonald’s, and lots of other stuff. My kids have just as much fun, if not more, at the local playgrounds or parks or at the beach than they would in their own yard. And when they’re small they need to be near you anyway.
When I got pregnant with my first we were living in a small town. I’m glad we moved. They would have played outside more and we could have had a great big house, but the schools and other childcare options here in the big city are much better. I should mention, though, that my husband grew up here and my parents are fairly close, so we have a network of friends and family here as well, which makes a difference.
My wife and I have 11 month old twin girls. She’s very happy in the city because eveything is right out the door. She can walk to the pediatrician. There’s a park half a block away, playgrounds, pre-schools, drug stores, grocery stores, and lots of people with kids, so in that way it’s great for her and the girls. A local small book store has “story time” for the kids. Stuff like that is nice.
She really didn’t know about these places until she started going out with the girls and people told her - a whole new social world opened up. There are probably people in your building with kids that will become your friends.
You certainly don’t need a lot of space for an infant. For us things are different now that they’re becoming more mobile. Our lease is up at the end of May and I think by that time that might be it as far as our largeish inexpensive Manhattan studio apartment goes. We keep looking for ways to make it work, but it’s getting mighty cramped.
No offense, but doesn’t Columbine just completely disprove this thesis?
I attended high school in a big city, and never had any problems getting along with the other students, even without a trendy car or what-have-you. At least I didn’t get pestered by the jocks or teased by the other students in a small town.
I don’t have kids, but I was a city-kid for the first 9.5 years of my life. It was a terrible city… if you’ve heard of it, odds are 99 to 1 you’ve only heard horror stories about it. Lawrence MA, anyone? Yeah.
You’d think growing up in a city with that sort of reputation would be frightening, but it really wasn’t. It was just normal. It wasn’t until we moved away and got older than either my brother or I had even an inkling of how terrible the city was supposed to be. There were parks, lots of kids to play with, a nice library the next city over… and gangs, and drugs, and crime, but we didn’t think a lot about it beyond sort of knowing it existed. If you don’t raise the kids to think that cities are inferior places to live, they probably won’t come to that conclusion on their own.
One of my mom’s favorite stories is about going back there with my brother when he was a little older (somewhere between 9 and 11), and having him look around wide-eyed. His summation on our old city? " Gee mom, I’m really glad we lived here when I was too little to be afraid."
Besides, Chicago is probably much nicer than Lawrence 
I was a kid that grew up in the City. Actually, I was born in Indiana. When I was 5, my parents, both native New Yorkers, moved back. Our neighborhood was kind of rough when we moved there (several burned out buildings and a biker bar on my block) but it improved steadily. I walked to elementary school and, later, to Middle school.
I loved growing up in the city. When you’re little there are loads of parks and other kids and groovy field trips at school. When you’re older, you can be independent and get to all sort of fun stuff on your own.
Right now I live in a Midwestern city of 100,000 residents. EVERY year at least one local teen dies in a car accident. You know how many teens from my NYC high school died in car accidents: exactly none. We didn’t even own cars. We had subway passes and those were better than cars… no parking, no insurance, and you could ride them drunk without being a hazard to yourself and others.
I was born at Lawrence General, my mother was an OR nurse there. Grew up in Dracut, though.
I believe Lawrence had the distinction of being the car theft capitol of the United States.
Oops, make that "capital.
I grew up in Chicago, Hyde Park actually. My mother still lives there, but I spent a good portion of my adolescence in a small town with my father, and then college in a small town. I lived in San Francisco for 7 years after college and now Mr. Twiddle and our 14 month old Twiddlette have moved to a small town in Northern California.
I really enjoyed growing up in Chicago. I can’t speak to the high school experience but as a grade schooler it was a great deal of fun. My friends and I would play in the Museum of Science and Industry many weekends - our mothers dropping us off and coming back a few hours later. Around 6th grade we broke into the Frank Lloyd Wright House on the UofC campus, just to get a better look around. (Actually I think we just took advantage of an unlocked door. We were not hoodlums.) We also spent a lot of time in the Oriental Institute looking at unwrapped mummies. My friends and I were all student or professor’s kids, of all colors, backgrounds and beliefs. We went downtown on the El to shop in Water Tower once we got interested in that sort of activity. I took classes at the Art Institute, and spent a lot of time wandering around there. I took ballet lessons at the same dance studio my mother had danced at as a child.
I think there is a lot to recommend itself for rasing a kid in the city, yet I’ve still chosen to move to a small town to raise my daughter and other theoretical future offspring. For one thing, while it was incredibly enriching, I think there is a lot you give up for that. A feeling of safety, a tight knit community, a sense of permanance in your neighbors, teachers and the folks at church. I also want to live in a place where I feel comfortable sending my kids out the backdoor to play for a few hours, and I don’t believe I’d be comfortable doing that in a city - even though I did it only 20 years ago. Maybe cities aren’t any less safe than small towns, but here I can stick with my illusions!
I also want access to the outdoor lifestyle. For all the museum hopping I did as a kid, what I feel really developed my personality was the time I spent in outdoor activites; which was all too rare until I moved to my Dad’s small town.
I agree with the others though who have pointed out that the baby doesn’t care one bit where you live. Where ever you end up it will always be a wonderful and nostalgic place to him or her…just by virtue of being home.
Twiddle
Ahem, that should read:
Mr. Twiddle and our 14 month old Twiddlette and I
You asked for opinions, right?
I don’t think it matters much when your child is small and portable. However, around school age things get to be a little different. I’m originally from Chicago, and my best friend lives there now (in Ravenswood, so we’re not talking “inner-city”). She has an 11-year-old son and I am appalled at the machinations she goes through to coordinate her child with city living. Her son has never played outside without one of his parents in attendance. He doesn’t ride his bike around the neighborhood. They pay an ungodly amount of tuition for a parochial school that is five miles away, because their public school is literally an armed fortress where even kindergarteners have to enter through a metal detector. Because of his school friendships, she is forever driving him to and from friends’ houses - he has no neighborhood friends, because there aren’t many children in the neighborhood, and the ones that are there are don’t have school in common with him.
I want to be fair - Ravenswood is locked up between busy streets, and there are more “neighborhood” areas of the city that are not, and so require less direct supervision for kids. The Chicago public school system is a mess, but so is the suburban district in which I live. Some of my objections are to apartment life, rather than city life per se - this kid is conditioned to be quiet and not to stomp about, and an actual YARD is a mystery to him. There are positives to city life, too - they visit museums more frequently than we suburbanites do, and it’s a more culturally diverse area than most suburbs (although not MY suburb, which is very diverse.)
All things considered, I much prefer the suburbs for rearing children.
I have kind of the opposite situation - I was born in a small town (around 4,000 pop) and moved to the city when I was 8, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way ! Most of the people who I knew as a child (in the town) were, as teenagers, either pregnant or taking drugs. (They confirm that there wasn’t much to do on the weekends except for drive, drink, take drugs and have sex.) The ones who were neither got married at age 20 or so. Not saying there’s anything in the world wrong with getting married at 20, as long as you’re doing it because you want to and not because you don’t have any other options.
Note that I’m not trying to denigrate small towns or suggest that you will automatically become white trash if you live in one. Simply that cities offer waaaay more opportunities to learn about different things and new possibilities (importantly: that there are lots of different ways for people to be), and that there’s much more to do with your time.
Also agree with Hello Again about teenagers getting in automobile accidents. I also didn’t know anyone (as a teenager) who died in a car crash, while all the people I know who grew up in small towns, do.