Alex from New York. Summer with children in the city that never sleeps.

Summers in New York with children are different from summers in most places. The city does not slow down the way other places do. The shows still run, the restaurants are still full, the subway is still crowded, the construction is still happening. The city is not on holiday. You are on holiday in the city.

What this produces, I've found, is a particular kind of summer experience: intensely urban, very social, very sensory, very fast. My children love this. They are city children — they are calibrated for density and noise and the particular texture of a New York summer, which is hot in a specific way that I've never experienced anywhere else.

But I have started to notice something in the last couple of summers. When we leave New York for more than a week — to visit family upstate, or once to rent a house on the coast — the children change. Not dramatically. But they slow down. They look at things longer. They notice things they don't notice in the city. The eleven-year-old, who is extremely fast and funny and sharp in ways that New York has produced, becomes quieter, and from that quieter place she says things that she doesn't say in the city.