The Best Countries To Raise A Family, According To Data
America, WYA?
It’s a question I think every parent has had at some point — where do I want to raise my kids? Whether you’re trying to figure out if the neighborhood you’re in has enough community for the life you want to build for your family or you’re not sure about the entire state you’re currently in, it’s a really big deal. And even tougher can be learning that the place you really want to live? Well, it’s not exactly the best country to raise a family.
And thanks to the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Countries to Raise a Family rankings, there are probably a few of us feeling that way.
Because the best place to raise a family isn’t just one where lots of families are or where the schools are good or where there’s a lot of green space (although all of those are great things). It’s a mixture of everything, and U.S. News & World Report was able to compile several datasets to give a score to countries on their raising-a-family capabilities. The categories the organization used included air quality, education expenditure, happiness, infant mortality, social protection systems, urban green space, and years of schooling. And no, just because your country has the most money, doesn’t mean you automatically rank high in these.
Shocking, isn’t it?
On the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Countries to Raise a Family rankings, these were the top 10:
- Finland
- Sweden
- Iceland
- Norway
- Denmark
- Israel
- Switzerland
- Germany
- Estonia
- Belgium
I know, I know. You’re looking for the U.S. Well, despite our $29.2 trillion GDP (Finland has $364.7 billion), we ranked #20 on Best Countries to Raise a Family.
(Despite our current administration’s obsession with making us all have and grow families.)
It makes sense considering the United States of America ranks #18 in the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Countries overall ranking. We are a wealthy country with a great military and a huge culture, but when it comes to actually taking care of our citizens, protecting our education, and creating thriving communities in every pocket of America, that’s a little lackluster.
Like when you consider how important “social protection systems” are for families. The U.S. News & World Report’s methodology includes looking at this data for each country, and the social protection systems encompass the percentage of the population covered by basic government safety net programs. This can include “unemployment benefits, pensions, disability support, or child and maternity benefits,” says U.S. News Managing Editor Eric Litke. The latter sticks out the most to me, because when it comes to a thriving community and system, you have to have healthy kids and healthy parents. You have to have support and resources for parents to raise their children into happy, successful, contributing members of society. Litke acknowledges that “maternal support is part of that equation,” when figuring out the best countries to raise kids, but it’s not used as “a stand-alone metric in our methodology.”
When it comes to “education expenditure,” this is also another important category and includes what each country’s total government expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP is. With our enormous GDP, you’d think that would rank us a little higher considering one of the categories is about how we spend those trillions on education, right?
*stares into camera*
One of the things that’s most frustrating is looking at this list and thinking about the happiness score. To calculate this for each country, the U.S. News & World Report used the world happiness report from Gallup as a source. On that happiness report, one of the things researchers noticed was a correlation between young people reporting unhappiness and their high use of social media (like, 7+ hours per day).
In recent years, banning social media for minors has been a hot topic with several European countries, and Finland even released a new set of guidelines specifically regarding children and digital devices.
Oh, and look where Finland ranks on the Best Countries to Raise a Family list.
Look, we all know America has issues, and it’s been decades of people suggesting Europe is quite the continent. But it’s still so discouraging to know that we have all the resources and the money to fix so many things to make America the #1 place to raise a family and we just... choose not to.
Work is done from the inside out, I’m sure of it. So I’ll keep raising tiny humans to be grown people, and hopefully the rest of America can, too. At the very least, we have Nerds Gummy Clusters and Friends reruns. That helps.
