Her only objection is that she prefers not to relocate our 3-year-old son. She thinks he would be better off with the advantages of a large school with an extensive athletic program and a wide variety of extracurricular activities.
Although I myself grew up in the city, I currently live in a small town and my kids go to school there.
In our experience there are actually at least as many or more extracurricular activities in the smaller cities (unless it really is a tiny village) than there are in the big cities.
Because there are not things like malls to hang out in, it seems that smaller cities are pretty good in providing extracurricular activities for children.
I live in Craig which has about 9000 people (pretty big, but is isolated a long way from any other towns) and there are plenty of activities here including soccer, basketball, swimming, skiing, etc, etc. even for little kids.
For the summer we lived in Granby, which has a population of around 1600 and is right next to the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park. There were an unbelievable amount of choices the town offers for extracurricular activities. There were organized hikes, camping trips, river rafting trips, soccer, sports clinics, etc, etc. River rafting was my sons favorite. He is seven years old.
Anyway, yesterday in Craig was the big homecoming game at the high school. In a big city, there are several high schools, so it wasn't that big of deal for the town. Here there is only one high school. Because of this the entire city gets involved with the homecoming game. There is fireworks and a big parade. The elementary and middle school students get out of school for a while for a field trip to the homecoming parade. All the town businesses show support for the "Bulldogs" and paint things on their windows. the homecoming events make the newspaper:
http://www.craigdailypress.com/news/200 ... ng_parade/
See photos:
http://www.craigdailypress.com/photos/g ... ng_parade/
Check out the front page story from this morning's paper:
http://www.craigdailypress.com/news/200 ... _loudysim/
I guess it doesn't compete with the front page stories of crime and murder in some large cities, but oh well.
My own kids have been in the newspaper many times when the paper has taken photos of different extracurricular activities, so it's exciting for the kids when that happens.
Anyway, to put in plainly, I do not believe that these bigger cities offer much more in the form of sports or extracurricular activities. They do miss things like movie theaters, malls, shopping. amusement parks and things like that and "city folK" kids might get bored if they aren't into outdoor activities and the like.