Uptown moms and downtown moms

Eventually they'll both settle down in the suburbs, says Kay Hymowitz.

Readers might have noticed a front-page article in the New York Times a week or so ago, reporting that Manhattan was in the midst of a baby boom. In the past five years, it seems, the number of borough children under age 5, including many in tony neighborhoods, has risen about 26%. This was taken as a sign, perhaps, that women can have it all: work, children and a hip urban lifestyle.

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For all the fanfare, these rumors of a baby boomlet have a sort of déjà vu quality. Several decades ago baby boomers like me, determined to spare our children the Eisenhower suburbs we were certain had warped our own childhoods, used to enjoy a bit of frisson when we read accounts of "yuppies," with their "renovated brownstones" in the "restored historic districts" of various cities. We were so important that Newsweek even named the year 1984 after us: "The Year of the Yuppie."

As it happens, many yuppies packed up their pinstripe suits and skulked back to New Jersey once their families outgrew their four-room apartments or, in a considerable number of unlucky cases, after their first child was mugged on his way home from school. Even now that many big cities enjoy a dramatically lower crime rate, history is likely to repeat itself.