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I have to look down the barrel of that subject Sam brought up a couple of blogs ago…raising kids in LA. My husband has gotten a great career opportunity there, and though we moved to Seattle last summer and love it, it’s at least 50-50 we’ll be back in LA by fall.

Now, I know LA intimately. Returning to my home town, Seattle, after 20 years in LA county, 15 in the city of Santa Monica, one could argue I’m as much an LA girl as a Seattle one. But I feel more Seattle, much as I participated fully in my life in Los Angeles.

Which brings me to life in LA for kids. We had good schools where we were — on the bottom rung of a very stratified world where Prop. 13 has ruined public education, and the few good public schools existed in a bubble protected by a fierce group of moms and dads, and in our case the Santa Monica City Council, which rescued our budgets one cut after the next. Sadly, we no longer own a home in Santa Monica. And like everyone else, we’re shocked by what it would cost to buy one.

So we’re thinking about private schools. Now, like most big cities LA had plentiful, diverse private schools. But they have one thing in common — they’re self-selected by parents motivated to find the tuition. I don’t think I need to explain that some families are on financial aid. Some are middle class stretched to the limit for the great education. And some, like in Seattle or anywhere, are wealthy. Listen, I have nothing against wealth. I went to a fancy private prep school myself and loved it. It’s only that in LA, many people acquire their wealth in ways that preclude restraint and discipline, values that help kids succeed.

Forgive me, this is my opinion — Los Angeles fosters amazing creativity by allowing people to be wild and rapacious. It’s a tremendously vital city with some great public institutions, but it’s also the Wild West. The spoils frequently go to the most aggressive, the most self-promoting, the most narcissistic. Perhaps not always, but regularly. If you’re a formed person, LA is the funnest place I know. It is a great ride. But if you’re an impressionable child, you might come to value yourself for qualities that will fade as soon as your youth does, leaving you unacknowledged for and ignorant of your deeper self. Leaving you, as your mother never wants you to be, doubting your value as an actual mortal human being.

I know a number of happy, well-adjusted children and adults who grew up in LA. And the adults will tell you without much prompting, how hard it was. It’s a fact. LA exerts pressures, from the ideal of beauty that exists everywhere but nowhere is more visible than there, to the flaunting of wealth and status that distracts from the matter of being a kid. Children I have known since infancy in LA are way more sophisticated at the same age than most of the kids I know in Seattle. They are more culturally aware, more sarcastic, more articulate, and more bitter. Is this a scientific sampling? No, but I love the kids involved, and I worry about them. Would I shelter them from their awareness of the imperative to be cool or die? To be gorgeous or risk being ostracized? To be hip at all costs? Yes, reader, I would. I moved my kids, the only ones I’m in charge of, to Seattle.

Not that Seattle is such a backwater, nor is it a safe harbor. Let’s be realistic. I grew up here, and knew more than a handful of kids who didn’t survive to adulthood, who succumbed by will or accident to drugs, alcohol, or what you might call the impulsiveness of youth. Growing up is hard anywhere, and Seattle possesses its very own temptations, its very own brand of cool, its own pressure to be amazing. I’m not blind to that, in fact I know it as only a native can. So I might be able to see it coming.

Every mom and dad tries to do the best for their own kids. My kids, especially my ten-year-old daughter, happens to be best suited to the natural beauty and inherent cerebral qualities of Seattle. Here she can raise her hand every time she knows the answer without fear of being teased at recess for being a show off. She can flaunt her knowledge of Neopets without getting the subtle message that she ought to be more worried about rap lyrics. In short, her essential childishness is encouraged by the world around her here, if not cultivated. She’s healthy enough to be ambivalent about growing up too fast. I want to keep it that way, as long as feasible, until such time as she seems not to be progressing toward independence. But short of giving away secrets, I assure you that she is growing up, plenty fast enough.

Parents everywhere love their children, and will protect them with all their might. In Los Angeles, many parents I know lament the overwhelming scope of their task. In Seattle, there’s more of a sense that kids can be independent, that they can walk a few blocks unsupervised, maybe even spend a while alone in the house. There’s an innocence. In Los Angeles, that security doesn’t exist. If kids are unsupervised, it’s only because of economic necessity, not out of a confidence-building strategy. Every cocktail party features the parents in the corner angsting over the no-door policy (i.e. no oral sex) in the middle school bathrooms, the honors student who was mistakenly shot by a gang. It’s a different world.

But it does have one advantage, and that is that no one is kidding themselves. There’s not much denial. Like everything in Los Angeles, parental anxiety and protectiveness is out in the open. Our kids may grow up in a weirdly cloistered world there, where all available resources are spent keeping kids on the right path. And for creative kids the opportunities are amazing, to become musicians, performers, visual artists. I know one wonderful, well-adjusted girl who went to LA public schools all the way through and has just earned a scholarship in Experimental Animation at Cal Arts. This kid is a true artist and a compassionate, mature person, a proud product of an amazing city. But if your kid dreams of riding her bike through the neighborhood unprotected, and wants to write poetry alone by the lake…well, that’s the challenge. That’s the work I have ahead of me.

There are no guarantees in life. The dream job may not continue, this discussion may be shelved. My kids may grow up in Seattle. Will we be spared pain and anguish? Not a chance. Will the day come when innocence is replaced by knowledge of the world? I sure hope so. Here or there, they will grow up, and I’ll have to let go of the job of sheltering them. But for now, the discussion continues…

Posted on April 24th, 2006 by MomStar
Filed under: Uncategorized