I think this is a question that every parent has asked at least once. Where do you want to raise your children? This is very important, whether you want to know if the area you live in has enough community for the life you want to build for your family, or you’re not sure about the state you’re in overall. Even more difficult is knowing where you really want to live. Well, it’s not exactly the best country to raise a family.
And thanks to U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Countries to Raise a Family” ranking, there are probably a few of us who feel that way.
Because the best place to raise a family isn’t just one with lots of families, good schools, and lots of green space (all of which are great). It’s a combination of everything, and U.S. News & World Report was able to compile several datasets to give each country a score on its ability to raise a family. Categories used by the organization included air quality, education spending, happiness, infant mortality, social protection, urban green space and years of schooling. And no, just because your country has the most money doesn’t automatically rank you higher in these rankings.
It’s shocking.
Here are the top 10 countries in U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of “Best Countries to Raise a Family.”
- Finland
- Sweden
- iceland
- Norway
- Denmark
- Israel
- Switzerland
- Germany
- estonia
- Belgium
I know, I know. What you are looking for is the United States. Despite having a GDP of $29.2 trillion (compared to $364.7 billion for Finland), it ranks 20th in the ranking of the best countries to raise a family.
(Despite our current administration’s obsession with having and expanding our families for all of us.)
That’s no surprise, considering the United States ranks 18th in U.S. News & World Report’s overall Best Countries ranking. We are a wealthy country with a great military and a huge culture, but when it comes to actually taking care of our people, protecting their education, and creating thriving communities. every Pocket of America, it’s a little lackluster.
For example, when we think about how important social protection systems are for families. U.S. News & World Report’s methodology involves looking at this data for each country, and social protection systems include the percentage of the population covered by basic government safety net programs. This could include “unemployment benefits, pensions, disability assistance, and child and maternity benefits,” said U.S. News Editor-in-Chief Eric Littke. The latter is most impressive to me because communities and systems need healthy children and healthy parents to thrive. Parents need support and resources to raise their children to be happy, successful, and contributing members of society. Litke acknowledges that “mother support is part of the equation” when determining the best countries to raise children, but it is not used as “an independent metric in our methodology.”
Regarding ‘education expenditure’, this is also an important category and includes the percentage of GDP of each country’s total government education expenditure. Given our country’s huge GDP, you’d think it would rank a little higher considering one of the categories is how to spend those trillions of dollars on education, right?
*looks at camera*
One of the most frustrating things is looking at this list and thinking about happiness scores. To calculate this for each country, US News & World Report used Gallup’s World Happiness Report as a source. Regarding this report of happiness, one thing the researchers noticed was a correlation between young people’s reports of unhappiness and heavy social media use (e.g., more than seven hours per day).
Social media bans for minors have been a hot topic in several European countries in recent years, with Finland also announcing new guidelines specifically regarding children and digital devices.
Oh, and see where Finland ranks on the list of best countries to raise a family.
Look, we all know America has problems, and people have been arguing for decades that Europe is quite the continent. But it’s still so disheartening to know that we have all the resources and money to fix so many things to make America the number one place to raise a family, and we’re just…choosing not to.
I am convinced that work is done from the inside out. So I’m going to continue to grow little humans into full grown humans, and hopefully the rest of America can do the same. At least with Otaku Gummy Clusters friend Rebroadcast. That’s helpful.
