I think this is somewhat on point. Just, the blessings if urban living for me aren't so much the bars, restaurants or culture. It's the convenience of not driving everywhere - as a parent that means walking my toddler to school, swim class, and the park or sports, and in a few years them being able to do the same. Having a kid is a lot of work, and having to drive them everywhere is more work and makes it harder
Also more bluntly - cities are where people younger than me meet each other and start the process of making babies. I adored living in small towns and being outside, but I moved to the Bay and met my wife in SF. The nice thing about lots of people is it's easier to meet lots of people and find a connection.
Segmenting our society into suburbs of families, cities of young people, and Florida and Arizona for retirement communities adds unnecessary friction between those phases, causes a loss of social connection and community when changing phases, and feels and makes the different demogeaphic groups less sensitive to each other. Also, sounds a bit unnatural too.
Urbanism is for everyone. Urbanists need to prioritize families, and also acknowledge seniors. They need to build family housing in cities, as well as just more housing, and accommodate seniors in the fishbowls. We need more hotels so it is easier for grandkids to visit. We need karate classes and schools and kids bus passes and parks with baseball diamonds. Urbanism is for everyone. Including natalists.
I'm a parent with an almost 5-year old in the city. I would say that 60% of the time we are out (and 80% if I have a stroller), we are judged for taking up space. BUT I don't think this is an urbanism problem. I think this is a people problem. I experience the same glares, scoffs, and eye rolls everywhere. Don't get me started on airports...
I also, think, however, this is a gendered thing. My husband doesn't get nearly as much judgement if he's out solo with our kid.
Being a parent is hard no matter where you are. I actually find it easier to parent in the city because I am not dependent on a car and there are myriad ways to keep my kiddo entertained.
Another angle I've considered is how much extended family support (read: free babysitting) is such a life-saver for parents or parents-to-be. "Moving to the city" is a careerist rite of passage these days, that pulls ambitious young people away from their family of birth, who are still in the 'burbs.
If the whole clan is in an economically rich city with an abundance of opportunities, it's a lot easier for everyone to stay put and support each other. Whereas if your parents live in a suburb of a mid-sized city without adequate career opportunities in your field, of course you're going to move far away to the big city. And then having kids is going to be a lot harder without any volunteer baby-sitters on call.
I agree: cities aren't inherently anti-natalist, but policies they've pursued for other reasons, particularly around housing and childcare, have made them family-unfriendly. For instance, Lyman Stone, et al, recently published a paper showing that excessive childcare regulations increase the fertility gap (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4834635). I've written a few times about what these regulations look like in practice, but the net result is that they make childcare no more safe, but a lot more expensive and rare.
Further, there's also good reason to think that urbanism is quite good for kids. In "The Anxious Generation," Jonathan Haidt argues that the urban environment is actually incredibly supportive of healthy child development—if we allow it to be. Cities can and should be literal and figurative playgrounds for children (I wrote about this here: https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/the-montessori-metropolis).
So, I think you're right: anti-urban policy wrecked our cities, drove families away, and drove fertility down. And perhaps the verb "drove" is operative here.
There's definitely some "there there" in this idea. Suburbs have made us more individualistic, and have enabled households to be less intergenerational (which has benefits as well as drawbacks). Truly large families are more feasible to move by transit, once there are more people than seats in a car.
This point about the cars is so true! As a kid, I remember pushing two families around in a station wagon - dad's up front with one small kid, moms in the back with 1-2 kids depending in the size, and then 2 more in the backwards facing seats.
Now with car seats until kids are in grade school, a wagon isn't as convenient of a people mover as it used to be. Having more than two kids necessitates a minivan, and there are less of those on the market than 30 years ago. Raising kids in suburbia is harder than it used to be! (And we used to bike everywhere in dangerous traffic)
Car seats and minivans are arguably as much the result of bad regulation as they are of cultural change. In the first case, car seats / boosters have little benefit beyond the child's first 18-24 months, yet state laws in many cases require them until age 8.
In the case of minivans (and car-based SUVs, for that matter), the short version is that US fuel economy regulations let carmakers count them as trucks-with-good-fuel-economy whereas station wagons are cars-with-bad-fuel-economy. As a result, carmakers have a strong financial incentive to nudge buyers in that direction.
Re: CAFE standards, I agree that they have created unwanted market distortions around trucks and SUVs, but disagree with respect to minivans. Minivans are a fairly unpopular market segment that has contracted significantly over the past decades, but many parents still seek them out because sliding doors are so helpful with carseats. Minivans’ poor fuel economy and size and weight are mostly an unavoidable consequences of building a vehicle with sliding doors, which require a fairly long wheelbase.
And in minivans’ defense, compared to most vehicles, minivans make much more pragmatic use of their heft: low ride height simplifies loading/unloading and maximizes interior space, short hoods improve maneuverability and give minivans some of the best pedestrian visibility on the road, and small gas tanks reduce gross weight. It’s just too bad we can’t build equally practical family vehicles on smaller frames.
Compare that to fewer than 400 homicides during all of 2023--a nearly 75% decline in the rate, despite a substantially larger population. If anything, the book is a lot more plausible today.
In Canada, particularly Toronto, those with the means to do so almost always leave the city center when they have children. I don't have kids, but based on friends and family I see the main forces at play:
1. Cultural bias in Canada is very anti-city, in general, and when people have children they receive very strong pressure from family, friends, mother-in-laws etc. telling them that cities are unsafe and "no place for kids". Young parents are pretty easily influenced by this sort of pressure, and so they pack up and leave for the suburbs and a house with a yard and two SUVs to drive the kids everywhere.
2. The housing availability in the city center is mostly condo towers constructed in the last 25 years, and the majority of units are very small with 1 bedroom or fewer, targeted at young adults and investors, not families. Larger 2 to 3 bedroom units rarely come available and are extremely expensive. The buildings are mostly cheaply made, with thin walls, so people complain about the noise kids make. And there are never enough elevators, leading to long wait times, and fitting a stroller into a crowded elevator makes it even worse.
3. The city center itself is too gridlocked to easily drive around in or find parking, but but also difficult to walk or bike around safely with kids due to the traffic congestion, narrow sidewalks, constant construction, etc. And even if you live in a more walkable area, it's not always easy to get your kids admitted into a school within walking distance of your home.
There are kids downtown, but they are mostly either from recently immigrated families living in the subsidized housing blocks (who do not have the financial means to buy a house) or wealthier families living in the nicely treed inner "streetcar" suburbs built a century or so ago. These were working class houses back then, but now cost millions -- proof that if people truly have the choice, they will raise their kids close to downtown, but the few areas that make this pleasant are financially out of reach for most.
I can't see much changing. Attitudes about raising kids downtown won't change unless the infrastructure drastically improves and real estate prices normalize: all pipe dreams at this point.
Visiting Europe, on the other hand, I see how it *could* be, and all the families with young kids living in walkable neighbourhoods with 4-5 story buildings containing spacious apartments, with parks and public squares everywhere, and even pedestrianized roads near schools. But here in Canada we built for the car and killed all those possibilities decades ago.
>wondering whether early suburbs were so friendly and communitarian because their residents were largely ex-urbanites or small towners who brought city neighborhood culture with them, but then lost it as the new built environment made it much harder to transmit that culture.
I think it had way more to do with no a/c, no video games, and stay at home moms in early suburbs. Probably something to do with widespread church attendance, too (not that I would ever suggest going to church!)
Big front porches, etc.
I do think there is hostility to families with kids in dense parts of the city, though, among the urban population. Mainly bc of a sense that they feel entitled to accommodations that change the character of a largely childless area, at times. The hostility is largely shortsighted, though depending on what the issue is I can fall on either side of the debate as to who should give ground.
Cities do not HAVE to be anti-natalist, but they are. The biggest factors are crime, filth, and population overwhelming infrastructure. "Walkable cities" are meaningless if your kids (or you!) are going to get mugged walking home. ("Walkable cities" are also impossible if it's vital for every walkable space to be in range of passing police cars.)
I read Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing with my youngest a few months ago. The story is set on the Upper West Side and the kids have their own bedrooms and walk back and forth to the park without adult supervision. In the year 2024 this is more implausible than a science fiction story with warp drives.
I lived in NYC for almost three decades; neither I nor anyone else I know has ever been mugged. NYC is one of the safest places in the country; it's eminently walkable, and as for the "filth," perhaps you frequent areas of the city that are less attended by the government and the cop mayor, but the lion's share of Manhattan is clean and well cared for.
Personally I've never needed a cop guard to attend my every move, but I'm not a fraidy cat living in my Fox-news enhanced reality.
I have my answer. And it looks to me, from your reading list, like you are in general a small-minded bigot and person who lives in fear of what you don't know, while simultaneously being unwilling to learn anything that might challenge your biases, so I'll end it here.
I don't owe an answer to rude, ignorant trolls like yourself but just to disabuse you of your unearned self-confidence I will tell you I have spent the majority of my decades on this earth living in multiple cities and still live in one now.
I don't know how you manage considering how fucking terrified you obviously are, and how obviously you loathe every single city on the planet, to the point that you have to lie about how bad they are. Are you a shut in?
Weird that you would call ME a troll when you have a) no photo, b) no name, c) no posts, and d) no followers, but go off, dingus.
Very interesting. I think if you start with the long view, this is headed somewhere spot on. What we call “urbanism” is really just how humans lived naturally for thousands of years, all over the world. Our top-down, well-funded suburban experiment in the US is what’s novel.
Part of that evolution was that we made moving to the suburbs in the first wave very inexpensive and appealing for families and GIs home from the war. But everything evolves and changes. As families of means left the city centers, politicians adapted to the new political constituencies. So, cities became focused on who still wanted to be there, and suburbs focused on retaining and attracting families. In most big cities, that dynamic remains. It doesn’t need to be that way, but inertia is very powerful.
Until fairly recently, most people lived in the country and grew food. Visiting a neighbor required a long walk or a horseback ride. Trips to town were an event. A relatively small percentage lived in cities or in town.
People moved to the suburbs from the country, more than from the city.
This is a novel hypothesis, but the more I think about it, the more I think you're on to something. At the micro level, we are often smothering our children with excessive scheduled activities and exaggerated fears of stranger abductions. At the time, we seem oblivious to the macro level dangers that pose a real hazard to our children, including the following:
-- Taking no meaningful action on gun violence despite continued horrific school shootings
-- Denying children of a year or more of school even though COVID posed little risk to them
-- Doing little to slow climate change, even though it will affect future generations disproportionately
Abandoning cities for suburbs may have seemed safer at the micro level. It made individual families feel that they were sparing their children various indignities and hazards they associated with city life. At the same time, it created a world more hostile for children at the macro level by making it difficult or unsafe for them to travel to see friends or go to school without parental involvement.
It is worth considering how what we see, and don't see, influences our choices, and I appreciate your alerting me to this because it's directly relevant to a chapter I'm working on in the new The Great Good Place. Here's a passage (I'm definitely going to give this some attention when I get to children and third places): Ray Oldenburg presented two explanations for this estrangement between the family and the city. The sociologist Richard Sennett argued that it was an individual choice. As soon as an American family became middle class and could afford to do something about its fear of the outside world, it drew in upon itself, and “the urban middle-class shunned public forms of social life like cafes and banquet halls.”
Philippe Aries countered with the argument that modern urban development killed the essential relationships that once made a city and, as a consequence, “the role of the family overexpanded like a hypertrophied cell.[ Sennett, Richard and Aries, Philippe. “The Family and the City.” Daedalus, Spring, 1977. Pp. 227-237/]”
I would argue that in the US racism - and efforts at racial integration - was a major factor in people’s willingness to give up social life. There was more money to be made from people in sprawling, single-family developments, and corporate America was all for an independent, isolated lifestyle.
Given that when suburbs started, the majority of people lived in the country, and the growth of suburbs coincided with the decrease in rural populations, it seems likely the majority of early suburbanites would have been ex-rural, not ex-city.
Re fertility, when you look at birth rates, they are consistently higher in rural counties than cities - 14-19% depending on the data - and small metros have a higher birth rate than large metros. In general, fertility is inversely correlated with density. Which makes sense given the advantages of space, fenced yards, and more green space when raising a child.
I am not sure why you would think kids in suburbs are particularly vulnerable to traffic? I would have thought the opposite, as within the suburb itself, traffic isn’t usually much of an issue. I am guessing I am missing part of the argument.
I think this is somewhat on point. Just, the blessings if urban living for me aren't so much the bars, restaurants or culture. It's the convenience of not driving everywhere - as a parent that means walking my toddler to school, swim class, and the park or sports, and in a few years them being able to do the same. Having a kid is a lot of work, and having to drive them everywhere is more work and makes it harder
Also more bluntly - cities are where people younger than me meet each other and start the process of making babies. I adored living in small towns and being outside, but I moved to the Bay and met my wife in SF. The nice thing about lots of people is it's easier to meet lots of people and find a connection.
Segmenting our society into suburbs of families, cities of young people, and Florida and Arizona for retirement communities adds unnecessary friction between those phases, causes a loss of social connection and community when changing phases, and feels and makes the different demogeaphic groups less sensitive to each other. Also, sounds a bit unnatural too.
Urbanism is for everyone. Urbanists need to prioritize families, and also acknowledge seniors. They need to build family housing in cities, as well as just more housing, and accommodate seniors in the fishbowls. We need more hotels so it is easier for grandkids to visit. We need karate classes and schools and kids bus passes and parks with baseball diamonds. Urbanism is for everyone. Including natalists.
That third paragraph!!!
Urbanism isn’t for everyone. It’s for people who actually want to live in cities. Not everyone does.
Sure dont want to force it on anyone, but also want to make it available to everyone
I'm a parent with an almost 5-year old in the city. I would say that 60% of the time we are out (and 80% if I have a stroller), we are judged for taking up space. BUT I don't think this is an urbanism problem. I think this is a people problem. I experience the same glares, scoffs, and eye rolls everywhere. Don't get me started on airports...
I also, think, however, this is a gendered thing. My husband doesn't get nearly as much judgement if he's out solo with our kid.
Being a parent is hard no matter where you are. I actually find it easier to parent in the city because I am not dependent on a car and there are myriad ways to keep my kiddo entertained.
Another angle I've considered is how much extended family support (read: free babysitting) is such a life-saver for parents or parents-to-be. "Moving to the city" is a careerist rite of passage these days, that pulls ambitious young people away from their family of birth, who are still in the 'burbs.
If the whole clan is in an economically rich city with an abundance of opportunities, it's a lot easier for everyone to stay put and support each other. Whereas if your parents live in a suburb of a mid-sized city without adequate career opportunities in your field, of course you're going to move far away to the big city. And then having kids is going to be a lot harder without any volunteer baby-sitters on call.
I agree: cities aren't inherently anti-natalist, but policies they've pursued for other reasons, particularly around housing and childcare, have made them family-unfriendly. For instance, Lyman Stone, et al, recently published a paper showing that excessive childcare regulations increase the fertility gap (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4834635). I've written a few times about what these regulations look like in practice, but the net result is that they make childcare no more safe, but a lot more expensive and rare.
Further, there's also good reason to think that urbanism is quite good for kids. In "The Anxious Generation," Jonathan Haidt argues that the urban environment is actually incredibly supportive of healthy child development—if we allow it to be. Cities can and should be literal and figurative playgrounds for children (I wrote about this here: https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/the-montessori-metropolis).
So, I think you're right: anti-urban policy wrecked our cities, drove families away, and drove fertility down. And perhaps the verb "drove" is operative here.
There's definitely some "there there" in this idea. Suburbs have made us more individualistic, and have enabled households to be less intergenerational (which has benefits as well as drawbacks). Truly large families are more feasible to move by transit, once there are more people than seats in a car.
This point about the cars is so true! As a kid, I remember pushing two families around in a station wagon - dad's up front with one small kid, moms in the back with 1-2 kids depending in the size, and then 2 more in the backwards facing seats.
Now with car seats until kids are in grade school, a wagon isn't as convenient of a people mover as it used to be. Having more than two kids necessitates a minivan, and there are less of those on the market than 30 years ago. Raising kids in suburbia is harder than it used to be! (And we used to bike everywhere in dangerous traffic)
Car seats and minivans are arguably as much the result of bad regulation as they are of cultural change. In the first case, car seats / boosters have little benefit beyond the child's first 18-24 months, yet state laws in many cases require them until age 8.
In the case of minivans (and car-based SUVs, for that matter), the short version is that US fuel economy regulations let carmakers count them as trucks-with-good-fuel-economy whereas station wagons are cars-with-bad-fuel-economy. As a result, carmakers have a strong financial incentive to nudge buyers in that direction.
Re: CAFE standards, I agree that they have created unwanted market distortions around trucks and SUVs, but disagree with respect to minivans. Minivans are a fairly unpopular market segment that has contracted significantly over the past decades, but many parents still seek them out because sliding doors are so helpful with carseats. Minivans’ poor fuel economy and size and weight are mostly an unavoidable consequences of building a vehicle with sliding doors, which require a fairly long wheelbase.
And in minivans’ defense, compared to most vehicles, minivans make much more pragmatic use of their heft: low ride height simplifies loading/unloading and maximizes interior space, short hoods improve maneuverability and give minivans some of the best pedestrian visibility on the road, and small gas tanks reduce gross weight. It’s just too bad we can’t build equally practical family vehicles on smaller frames.
This kind of attitude is so odd. The crime rate in NYC generally, and on the Upper West Side specifically, is quite low--in fact, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing came out in 1972. There were 810 homicides in NYC during the first 6 months of that year (https://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/15/archives/murder-rate-here-in-first-half-of-1972-set-a-record.html )
Compare that to fewer than 400 homicides during all of 2023--a nearly 75% decline in the rate, despite a substantially larger population. If anything, the book is a lot more plausible today.
In Canada, particularly Toronto, those with the means to do so almost always leave the city center when they have children. I don't have kids, but based on friends and family I see the main forces at play:
1. Cultural bias in Canada is very anti-city, in general, and when people have children they receive very strong pressure from family, friends, mother-in-laws etc. telling them that cities are unsafe and "no place for kids". Young parents are pretty easily influenced by this sort of pressure, and so they pack up and leave for the suburbs and a house with a yard and two SUVs to drive the kids everywhere.
2. The housing availability in the city center is mostly condo towers constructed in the last 25 years, and the majority of units are very small with 1 bedroom or fewer, targeted at young adults and investors, not families. Larger 2 to 3 bedroom units rarely come available and are extremely expensive. The buildings are mostly cheaply made, with thin walls, so people complain about the noise kids make. And there are never enough elevators, leading to long wait times, and fitting a stroller into a crowded elevator makes it even worse.
3. The city center itself is too gridlocked to easily drive around in or find parking, but but also difficult to walk or bike around safely with kids due to the traffic congestion, narrow sidewalks, constant construction, etc. And even if you live in a more walkable area, it's not always easy to get your kids admitted into a school within walking distance of your home.
There are kids downtown, but they are mostly either from recently immigrated families living in the subsidized housing blocks (who do not have the financial means to buy a house) or wealthier families living in the nicely treed inner "streetcar" suburbs built a century or so ago. These were working class houses back then, but now cost millions -- proof that if people truly have the choice, they will raise their kids close to downtown, but the few areas that make this pleasant are financially out of reach for most.
I can't see much changing. Attitudes about raising kids downtown won't change unless the infrastructure drastically improves and real estate prices normalize: all pipe dreams at this point.
Visiting Europe, on the other hand, I see how it *could* be, and all the families with young kids living in walkable neighbourhoods with 4-5 story buildings containing spacious apartments, with parks and public squares everywhere, and even pedestrianized roads near schools. But here in Canada we built for the car and killed all those possibilities decades ago.
>wondering whether early suburbs were so friendly and communitarian because their residents were largely ex-urbanites or small towners who brought city neighborhood culture with them, but then lost it as the new built environment made it much harder to transmit that culture.
I think it had way more to do with no a/c, no video games, and stay at home moms in early suburbs. Probably something to do with widespread church attendance, too (not that I would ever suggest going to church!)
Big front porches, etc.
I do think there is hostility to families with kids in dense parts of the city, though, among the urban population. Mainly bc of a sense that they feel entitled to accommodations that change the character of a largely childless area, at times. The hostility is largely shortsighted, though depending on what the issue is I can fall on either side of the debate as to who should give ground.
Cities do not HAVE to be anti-natalist, but they are. The biggest factors are crime, filth, and population overwhelming infrastructure. "Walkable cities" are meaningless if your kids (or you!) are going to get mugged walking home. ("Walkable cities" are also impossible if it's vital for every walkable space to be in range of passing police cars.)
I read Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing with my youngest a few months ago. The story is set on the Upper West Side and the kids have their own bedrooms and walk back and forth to the park without adult supervision. In the year 2024 this is more implausible than a science fiction story with warp drives.
I'm guessing you've never lived in a city in your life, and that you know nothing about the alleged effectiveness of police in urban settings.
Either way, this reeks of the bias of someone who still thinks New York looks like it does in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies.
Why would you make such an ignorant guess?
You didn't say no.
I lived in NYC for almost three decades; neither I nor anyone else I know has ever been mugged. NYC is one of the safest places in the country; it's eminently walkable, and as for the "filth," perhaps you frequent areas of the city that are less attended by the government and the cop mayor, but the lion's share of Manhattan is clean and well cared for.
Personally I've never needed a cop guard to attend my every move, but I'm not a fraidy cat living in my Fox-news enhanced reality.
I have my answer. And it looks to me, from your reading list, like you are in general a small-minded bigot and person who lives in fear of what you don't know, while simultaneously being unwilling to learn anything that might challenge your biases, so I'll end it here.
I don't owe an answer to rude, ignorant trolls like yourself but just to disabuse you of your unearned self-confidence I will tell you I have spent the majority of my decades on this earth living in multiple cities and still live in one now.
I don't know how you manage considering how fucking terrified you obviously are, and how obviously you loathe every single city on the planet, to the point that you have to lie about how bad they are. Are you a shut in?
Weird that you would call ME a troll when you have a) no photo, b) no name, c) no posts, and d) no followers, but go off, dingus.
Very interesting. I think if you start with the long view, this is headed somewhere spot on. What we call “urbanism” is really just how humans lived naturally for thousands of years, all over the world. Our top-down, well-funded suburban experiment in the US is what’s novel.
Part of that evolution was that we made moving to the suburbs in the first wave very inexpensive and appealing for families and GIs home from the war. But everything evolves and changes. As families of means left the city centers, politicians adapted to the new political constituencies. So, cities became focused on who still wanted to be there, and suburbs focused on retaining and attracting families. In most big cities, that dynamic remains. It doesn’t need to be that way, but inertia is very powerful.
Until fairly recently, most people lived in the country and grew food. Visiting a neighbor required a long walk or a horseback ride. Trips to town were an event. A relatively small percentage lived in cities or in town.
People moved to the suburbs from the country, more than from the city.
This is a novel hypothesis, but the more I think about it, the more I think you're on to something. At the micro level, we are often smothering our children with excessive scheduled activities and exaggerated fears of stranger abductions. At the time, we seem oblivious to the macro level dangers that pose a real hazard to our children, including the following:
-- Taking no meaningful action on gun violence despite continued horrific school shootings
-- Denying children of a year or more of school even though COVID posed little risk to them
-- Doing little to slow climate change, even though it will affect future generations disproportionately
Abandoning cities for suburbs may have seemed safer at the micro level. It made individual families feel that they were sparing their children various indignities and hazards they associated with city life. At the same time, it created a world more hostile for children at the macro level by making it difficult or unsafe for them to travel to see friends or go to school without parental involvement.
It is worth considering how what we see, and don't see, influences our choices, and I appreciate your alerting me to this because it's directly relevant to a chapter I'm working on in the new The Great Good Place. Here's a passage (I'm definitely going to give this some attention when I get to children and third places): Ray Oldenburg presented two explanations for this estrangement between the family and the city. The sociologist Richard Sennett argued that it was an individual choice. As soon as an American family became middle class and could afford to do something about its fear of the outside world, it drew in upon itself, and “the urban middle-class shunned public forms of social life like cafes and banquet halls.”
Philippe Aries countered with the argument that modern urban development killed the essential relationships that once made a city and, as a consequence, “the role of the family overexpanded like a hypertrophied cell.[ Sennett, Richard and Aries, Philippe. “The Family and the City.” Daedalus, Spring, 1977. Pp. 227-237/]”
I would argue that in the US racism - and efforts at racial integration - was a major factor in people’s willingness to give up social life. There was more money to be made from people in sprawling, single-family developments, and corporate America was all for an independent, isolated lifestyle.
Some good comments. Have you run this by Chuck Marohn? I like the contrarian examination.
Given that when suburbs started, the majority of people lived in the country, and the growth of suburbs coincided with the decrease in rural populations, it seems likely the majority of early suburbanites would have been ex-rural, not ex-city.
Re fertility, when you look at birth rates, they are consistently higher in rural counties than cities - 14-19% depending on the data - and small metros have a higher birth rate than large metros. In general, fertility is inversely correlated with density. Which makes sense given the advantages of space, fenced yards, and more green space when raising a child.
I am not sure why you would think kids in suburbs are particularly vulnerable to traffic? I would have thought the opposite, as within the suburb itself, traffic isn’t usually much of an issue. I am guessing I am missing part of the argument.