Rural vs. Urban: Where to Raise a Family?
I have lived in small towns and I have also lived in some of the largest cities in the nation. My opinion of rural life and urban life has varied over time. These changing outlooks came more from differing goals, and beliefs; rather than some strange epiphany. Having had the opportunity of living in both small rural communities and bustling urban cities, I have come to believe that a rural upbringing has many more advantages over an urban one.
Rural life travels along at a snails pace. There is simply no need to be hurried, there is no need for road rage over the mornings’ idiot drivers. If there happens to be a traffic jam, you merely get out of your vehicle, and help the other motorists round up the escaped cattle. Once that is completed, you all get back in your cars and go about your merry way. The tempo of life is so lacking in stress that living in a rural area could possibly increase a person’s life span.
As for crime, usually all you will see is the occasional drunken redneck endeavoring to outrun a local sheriff in a decrepit old pick up truck. The really bad criminals; such as, sex offenders, they get to enjoy constant harassment and protest to their presence in the community. Rural folk do not allow those types of vagrants in their town.
Sure the income level is fairly low compared to urban areas, but so is the cost of living. A person can actually live on minimum wage in a rural area, but the downside is the general lack of available jobs. However, if you have a good formal education, you would have a better chance at securing a superior paying job: where low paying jobs are more the norm. Of course, do not move to a small town without first having a place to work once you get there, or you may find yourself flinging cow dung for a living!
The most significant factor to be considered before deciding where to settle down is the quality of schools. With this issue, it is hit or miss in the rural communities. The quality of a rural school really comes down to the availability of good teachers, rather than budgeting or location. The key is research; a town may be everything you had hoped for, but if the schools are sub par then your children may be less prepared when they enter the real world. In certain rural schools, some of the best teachers in the state make a living. Also, the classrooms are smaller and the kids get the help they really need.
On the other hand, urban areas are always moving about at the speed of light. One must have the Go, Go, Go attitude, or face the blare of horns, and the eventual obscene finger gesture. The level of paranoia is so elevated that stopping to help a person left high and dry on the roadside does not even cross one’s mind.
There is good reason for that kind of paranoia in an urban metropolis. Crime is rampant: shootings, assaults, robberies, drug deals, and gangs. A person actually becomes comfortable hearing sirens, and police helicopters at all hours of the night. The most disconcerting aspect of crime is checking the Megan’s Law website to see thousands of red dots, each signifying an individual child sex offender in you’re area! Yet very few communities rise up to protest their residence in their neighborhood. There are too many people who just do not care what is going on down the street or even next door to their own home.
Naturally, the motivating force that brings people to the cities is the relative high wages compared to rural areas. Add that with the copious employment opportunities, and you will see a large influx of people moving into the city, and its outlying suburbs. Obviously, the cost of living in a large city is many times higher than that of a rural community. It is a classic catch 22, where you end up saving less money in a big city, yet you get to enjoy the many more luxuries an urban lifestyle offers.
One major benefit of living in an urban area is the many alternatives in schools. If you do not like the school where you live then you have the option of enrolling your child in a better school that is a little farther away from your home. In a rural area, a parent only has one school to opt for their children to attend.
A rural community is an obvious choice to raise a family as long as the person selects the right town with good schools. Rural life offers many advantages over urban life, such as, the lower costs of living, and negligible crime rate. A person cannot put a price on stress free living and the overall friendliness of the people in your community. While in a city, you should expect coldness and uncaring mannerisms from your neighbors. The cost of living will be so high that you will find yourself in continuous debt, not to mention, the soaring crime rates that cities are endlessly fighting against.
As a child, I grew up loving life in a small town. However, as I grew older, I began to detest rural life profusely. The monotony drove me to move to a large city the day after I graduated high school. My early adulthood was spent enjoying all of the things that make cities attractive to people. Now that I am a parent, I see the importance of living in a rural area. I have come full circle, and will do everything I can to move back to the country. I do this so my daughter will be given the chance to enjoy the rural life as much as I did. Even if she grows to despise small town living as much as I once did, at least she will have the benefit of knowing what it is like to live in both.
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So I have a theory about what the rural environment offers young people. My theory is that more than anything, what a young person needs is privacy. Privacy to integrate what they have learned, privacy to discover the nature of reality, privacy do do the most important of acts: think for themselves. So often when we find ourselves surrounded by people, the temptation is to get caught up in the flow, which may or may not begoing in the right direction, and sometimes it isn't even a temptation but a demand. Like you say in your post, you have little choice about whether or not you hurry in a city: you just have to do it.
Intellectual independence is so critical to the development of a rational human adult, that I even take issue with the school system that I was subjected to, even though it was rural. It was still dominated by the Progressive standards of education, with 'socializing' as the primary and 'learning' as a far distant second. Under those conditions is it any wonder that our Constitution is viewed as it is now, as something that can be changed by the whim of the moment or the fashionable trend? We created socialist adults by providing no other context for human achievment than secondhand social status.
The big benefit of a rural area, I think, is that there is so little interference between an individual mind and the reality they are trying to aprehend. Growing up relatively alone, with work to be accomplished, I learned pretty quickly that "reality to be commanded, must be obeyed." This is something a young mind can learn absolutely anywhere, but there is no denying that a rural environment is the closest to a "natural" environment that a mind can grow in.
And by natural I certainly don't mean rocks and trees, though those are wonderful things in their own right. I mean natural as the least likely to be affected by the bane of the rational mind: being physically "forced" to think or do anything. Fewer people=fewer people trying to force you.
Sweet! A place for political ranting!
That's odd to hear that your public school was so "progressive", my rural town was not quite as rural as yours, yet the school I went too mainly just taught what was in the various text books. I still have some of those text books and they are not biased much. Not like my college text books, one of which compares a picture of a baboon to George Bush Sr.
lol