In her Nov. 9 online op-ed, “What’s the best place to raise a family? We scored every county.,” Youyou Zhou created a calculator to help readers determine the best place for them to raise children. Post Opinions asked: “What do you think is the best place in America for raising kids? Did you move for this purpose? How did it go?” Here are some of the responses.
In her Nov. 9 online op-ed, “What’s the best place to raise a family? We scored every county.,” Youyou Zhou created a calculator to help readers determine the best place for them to raise children. Post Opinions asked: “What do you think is the best place in America for raising kids? Did you move for this purpose? How did it go?” Here are some of the responses.
The best place to raise kids is a rural, conservative area of a liberal state. Here in Northeast Washington, we have the best of all worlds: Laws are balanced, life is mostly affordable, and schools are fair to excellent.
Our kids, now grown, were able to live basically as freely as we did in the ’50s and ’60s, and many local kids today are not very restricted in their activities like they might be in more densely populated areas.
Susan Durnell, Rice, Washington
Take out affordability, and I nominate New York County, New York, a.k.a. Manhattan. I grew up there and think about it every time I hear the phrase “check your privilege,” because:
From the age of about 8, I could go anywhere alone without being driven — and did, as long as I had a dime to make a phone call.
Museums were free, and cultural resources were everywhere. So were parks, tennis courts, hoops and playing fields.
Just walking on the street was educational. There was always something new to watch or hear — or eat.
Pete Seeger was my grade-school music teacher. My friends’ parents were artists, rich investors, professionals, small-business people and actual communists. I went to the best prep school in the U.S. (Bronx High School of Science) free, 40 minutes door to door on what are now the 6 and 4 trains, also free for kids.
I know it’s not the same as it was, but almost everything in that catalogue still applies.
Michael O’Hare, Berkeley, California
Living in more than one place can be an education all its own. I moved my girls, ages 10 and 12, from Dallas to Minneapolis in 1980. In Dallas, they were into dancing, testing makeup applications from the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and being driven by car to all events. When they appeared at their new school in Minneapolis, they were the only ones wearing makeup. They also didn’t know how to ride the bus. They soon learned, however, to pack ice skates with them (a plethora of lake rinks) and take music lessons by hauling a cello on the bus downtown.
A few years later, when one of my daughters visited Texas and worked with her aunt at a concession stand, she wrote to me saying, “When someone down here says ‘gimme one of them thar big uns,’ it means, ‘may I have a large Coke please.’”
She got it.
Barbara Elick, Minneapolis
The Post’s analysis is missing much of Southeast Alaska, for which data aren’t available. More fundamentally, you omitted important metrics for us, including recreation and outdoor opportunities. These basic tenets of quality of life, so important for holistic education, are often missing in kids’ lives.
Mike Hekkers, Juneau, Alaska
In deciding where to raise kids, drill down to school districts. I lived in Wyoming, Ohio, which had the best school system ever. Kids were challenged, and doing well was considered really cool. The students helped each other. They had study groups before tests, with each kid summarizing important parts of the material. They took SAT and ACT prep courses together. I couldn’t have asked for anything more.
Diane Shelleby, Plainfield, Illinois
As a new divorcee, I moved my four young daughters from Colorado Springs to Talbot County, Maryland, in June 1996, to be near my parents when my mother was dying.
My father, a career educator, warned me that the schools were unsatisfactory in Easton. He turned out to be right, and all four kids were being educated at home by the time the eldest was partway through third grade.
When my kids were around 10, I had to choose between raising them on public assistance and finding a much cheaper place to live. I wailed, “How am I supposed to raise children on a Third World income!” And it struck me that people in the Third World do it all the time.
So, we had a few yard sales, loaded up our minivan, and started a trip into Mexico and Central America. Home education and poverty meant we had the freedom to live as vagabonds.
We lived in every country between the U.S. and Colombia except for El Salvador, which we visited many times. We designed our curriculum to suit our location, studying biomes in Belize, for example, and geology in Guatemala. We didn’t have money to qualify for residency, so we moved to the next country whenever we had to.
When the eldest was 18, we returned to the U.S. to prepare for college. All four have earned bachelor’s degrees and gone on to grad school and careers. We are close. They make friends easily.
Without emotionally healthy parents, it won’t make much difference what the schools are like, whether the neighborhood is safe, how liberties are restricted or how much money you have.
Blyseth Isolde, Essex Junction, Vermont
Dictionary.com’s recent selection of “6-7” as the word of the year spurred me to revisit The Post’s contention that the viral term means nothing [“The 411 on ‘6-7’? ‘It’s really beautiful,’ but also, ‘it’s dumb.,’” Style, Oct. 25].
I am not familiar with the current usage by youngsters, but I had assumed “6-7” was shorthand for “at sixes and sevens,” a phrase used to describe confusion or disarray. That seems to be an apt way for members of Gen Alpha to describe how they feel living in our tumultuous world. (The Gen Alpha people cited in the article do seem dazed and confused.) Even octogenarians like me feel at sixes and sevens when reading the news.
Peter Sullivan, Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania
The Nov. 9 editorial “Zohran Mamdani drops the mask” dropped the ball by prematurely fretting about the future mayor’s intention to orchestrate a civil war between the haves and have-nots in New York.
The type of socialist welfare society that Mamdami envisions occurs only in countries that impose astronomically high taxes. Americans have never had the appetite for paying to create a more egalitarian society. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has already poured cold water on Mamdani’s plans to raise taxes, further reducing the city’s chances of becoming a miniature Finland.
Freezing some rents will get thunderous accolades from Mamdami’s base, but the city’s housing crisis can be addressed only by altering the supply over a span of five to 10 years.
A government-run supermarket will have a shorter shelf life than white bread. Mamdami might be naive, but I don’t think he’s stupid.
His wish list will shorten rather quickly once he faces how constrained New York already is in delivering existing services on the existing budget. If Mamdani can get the trash picked up regularly, decrease the number of rats and reduce the crime rate, he will be remembered as an effective mayor. Anything else should be viewed as gravy.
Steven Lutzer, Los Angeles
Regarding the Nov. 11 editorial “The shutdown was always going to end like this”:
However they try to spin it, the seven Senate Democrats — and one independent who caucuses with Democrats — who voted to end the government shutdown ignominiously capitulated. And what did they get in return? An anticlimactic status quo ante. All of the Democratic momentum and bravado following the election results in California, New Jersey, New York and Virginia was undone in one night. President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans will be only further emboldened in light of the disunity between Democratic moderates and progressives.
Mark Godes, Chelsea, Massachusetts
Post Opinions wants to know: What do city dwellers not understand about rural life? Share your response, and it might be published in the letters to the editor section: wapo.st/rural_life
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