Best Place to Raise Kids Depends on What Kind of Kids You Want to Raise
In June, an article in Forbes.com offered a top-ten list of the best places to raise kids. The article goes on about the process of selection, but in the end, it seems to add up to
Help! Where do you live? My daughter and i just moved to another house in the burbs and I hate it! We drive over an hour and 45 mins to get home each night and there is nothing around us chosing learning or diversity. I need to make my impulsive (yet way drawn out) move to the city. I just have no clue where to start.
Thank you, LilySea. I just read the Forbes article after spending some time looking for where I “need” to be to properly raise my daughter, who is African and spent her whole first year only hearing French. Then I realized, living 20 minutes from downtown Chicago, that I am already there.
Alice- i definitely think you should move. I was living in a very similar place. I swear from one day to the next i moved (i know it might be a little harder with two kids though). One Sunday afternoon i said “this place fucking sucks. i cant take it anymore. im not raising my kid around these dumbasses.” and monday morning i called a girl i knew that lived in Austin and asked if we could crash with her for a couple of weeks. That was 6 years ago and i haven’t looked back. Best impulsive move EVER.
My husband and I are expecting our first child in April. We live in one of the first towns outside of NYC in Westchester County where we can’t afford to buy a house so we are renting. We often talk about moving somewhere ‘cheaper’. Then, after our pre-natal appointment on Monday, we walked over to the Central Park Zoo. I was telling my husband (who is a Florida native) how when I was growing up I went to the zoo so regularly I had a personal relationship with the animals. And about the puppet shows in Central Park and the carousel. And it hit me, I would rather rent my whole life to provide my child with the upbringing I had … having ‘our’ museums being some of the greatest museums in the world, going to creative children’s theater, being in a place where hearing every possible language and accent is the norm, not an oddity.
LilySea, you and your partner are two of my heros now. I agree with every word you wrote. My husband wants us to move to NYC, somehow we will, for that life for our kids. We hate the southern suburbs with the strip malls, jumob malls, churches that run the city hall, meth heads in baggy pants that run us off curvy country roads in their monster trucks. My kids are not white and they stick out in a sea of whate faces except at school where they stick out in a sea of black and hispanic faces because all the white kids go to private christian schools. That is it here. Black, white, hispanic. Everyone speaks one language badly. Most have never visited the city zoo 30 minutes away or the science center. The teens hang out in strip malls leaning on cars and flipping around on skateboards marinated in cheap cologne waiting to get pregnant then testify before the congregation not to do what they did. We never eat out since we dont like hamburgers, fried chicken or steak. There is no place to walk to from out house. Just more houses. We are moving hopefully soon.