What's a Downers Grove Childhood Worth?

News of a neighborhood family's move surprised us a few years ago. Not because they planned to build a bigger home, but because they were relocating to an unfamiliar area of our hometown.

We're building a house in the most prestigious area of Downers Grove, they said.

Maybe it was a realtor's marketing ploy. Maybe we missed a community wide contest. But when you—like my husband and me—were raised in Downers Grove, the words "most prestigious area" just don't resonate.

If there was a most prestigious area of Downers Grove, it was unbeknownst to us. There certainly were haves and have mores, but despite living north, central or south within the village, we were on equal footing.

What made someone "cool" in high school might have been athletic prowess or social sophistication; I don't remember considering household income or the size of a friend's home. We didn't identify with kids who chose their friends based on the cars they drove.

Despite the passage of time (a year or two is all I'll concede), we returned to Downers Grove from the Big City to raise our own kids. We embraced the familiar idea of relative economic diversity (this is DuPage County, after all)—because it's part of life, because we've found friends within a wide spectrum of income levels, and because we want our kids to dig deeper than the square footage of a home to find what's important.

No, judging people by other popular measures isn't any better, but I like to think growing up in Downers Grove taught us how to value our neighbors for who they are, not what they have. It's my hope that, even in our village's "most prestigious areas", those values won't change.