First Mugging essay at NYTimes.com's Motherlode blog

Lisa Belkin at the NY Times was kind enough to ask me to do a guest blog for her Motherlode column, which many parents are quite devoted to. I wrote about 'First Mugging' as an urban rite of passage for kids who grow up in the city, and I also mentioned that I'd take that over the suburbs with their teenage drivers and ticks any day.
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/raising-kids-in-the-city-or-the-suburbs/?hp

The post has generated a ton of comments - 149 at last count - and it's interesting to read them.

Most of them debate whether it is better to raise kids in the city or the suburbs, which is fine - we make our choices for whatever reasons and obviously we think we've made the right choice or we'd move, right?

But I was a bit puzzled by two types of other comments. One seemed to think I made up this stuff about fear of ticks. I assure you I did not.

My sister lives on Long Island and had Lyme disease. When I visit my college roommate in Rockland County, she always tells us to check for ticks when we go in her house. One friend at work had Lyme disease; she lives in New Jersey. Another lives in Connecticut and says she pulls ticks off her and her kids all the time. My neighbor's dog got bitten by a tick on an excursion to the 'burbs and actually died.

So anyway, just for the record, my fear of ticks is not hypothetical, in case anyone was wondering.

The other thing that has generated a lot of postings is questioning how common it is for kids to get mugged. I did not research police statistics for this story. I only know that among the teenage boys that I know in middle-class Brooklyn - admittedly a small unrepresentative sample - it seems like many of them get jumped (i.e., punched, assaulted or beaten in some way on the street) or robbed of some item - whether it's a cell phone or an iPod or a Gameboy - between 5th grade and high school. And by the way, I bet that 90 percent of those incidents do not get reported to the cops.

Many posters proudly stated, "I have lived in NYC all my life and never been mugged!" Well actually that is true for me also. But I have certainly been a victim of many, many crimes, and that was my larger point in the story - that if you live here long enough, someone is going to smash your car window, break into your apartment, steal your bike ... or mug your kid. And that it is one of the tradeoffs you make living in the city, and of course you hope that no one is ever seriously hurt.

I'll end by restating something I said in the story. If you are a New Yorker and you get called for jury duty, at some point they ask, "Has anyone here been a victim of a crime?" I have never been in a jury pool where every single person didn't raise their hand. This does not make me want to live in Larchmont. It merely makes me feel at one with my fellow New Yorkers. And the point of my story was simply that kids who grow up here get that, and they are OK with it.