Safer to raise kids in suburbs vs. closer to perceived "vices", crime, etc.

[shootingstar]

All subjective opinions and of course, location is less important, compared to parenting styles, cultivating strong, confident kids that become self-motivated to learn, how kids develop interests and friends that don't bring them down into spiral of boredom and acting out in ways that hurt themselves or others.

I'm always intrigued why people think suburbs are "safer". A young woman in her early 30's is house hunting to buy with her newly wed hubby. My partner argues heavily that small towns and suburbs can also breed boredom in kids and if unoccupied they getting into trouble. He was raised in a small town, north of Toronto and saw that type of stuff.

I myself was raised in the downtown core in a historic residential neighbourhood or the parlance nowadays is "inner city". I know a number of other families didn't fall down into criminal behaviour or didn't have problems in school just because they were raised in the "inner city".

We were the poorest and big family on the street. But we also had bank manager, college professor, police officer, head of a university, etc. live on our street. A factory worker with 7 children.
My parents didn't know about the socio-economic characteristics of our neighbourhood. They just bought a cheap house they could afford. It was dilapidated = cheap price.

In retrospect, we were incredibly blessed to live in this inner city neighbourhood. I think it helped us realize that some wealthy neighbours had their own "problems". ie. one of the girls from a wealthy family, got accidentally pregnant when she was 18 yrs. old. That was a shocker to us at that time because she was an A+ high scoring student.

Of course, then reaching into my final year of high school..to learn of more accidental early pregnancies among the occasional academically high scoring and also outgoing teens at my age. It was just so foreign to myself and other female friends were like me....bookish, liked boys, but...