I love seeing how resilient NYC kids are, like the 8 year old who folds his own stroller or the 7 year olds who are pros at the subway. This independence is both terrifying (for parents) and inspiring (it preps them early in life).
My first year at Cornell, I remember every freshman kind of losing their mind with the freedom of being away from home (getting super drunk, not controlling themselves, never self-selecting to "stay in, not go out, for the night") --- except for the New Yorkers who would constantly think, "What's the big deal?"
The hard part of raising kids in the city is it's extremely expensive. But my wife and I are pretty focused on, hell or high water, on making it work in Brooklyn - so we'll see how it goes.
The definition of big cities is also pretty arbitrary. The first city mentioned, El Paso in Texas, has a lower density than the suburb I grew up in, but it's classified as a "big city" because its borders are simply larger. The suburb I grew up in is adjacent to multiple other suburbs, and if you add them all up it meets the article's definition of "big city" - 500k people. There are various definitions of urban area (CSA, MSA, etc) which are the correct methods of comparison.
What makes the suburbs and small towns good isn't positive / a presence of pros, but negative / an absence of cons.
hard pass. cars are the reason everything sucks in N American urban planning
(Anecdotal but reflected by a rapid increase in home values that came with that.)