What (and where) is ‘family friendly’?
Timothy P. Carney
What is a good place to raise children? If you are expecting your first, and you pick up the New York Times’s real estate section, you might have started looking for homes in Newton or Brookline, Massachusetts. After all, the Bay State is, according to a new study, the “Best State for Raising a Family.”
As with all such studies and most “data journalism,” deeply flawed methodology has led to deeply wrong conclusions.
Supposedly measuring each state’s “Health and Safety,” “Education and Child Care,” “Affordability,” “Socioeconomics,” and “Family Fun,” the website WalletHub came up with an index of family-friendliness. The most glaring problem with the study: The results show no correlation with how many people in a given place have children nor with how many people with children move to these places.
Massachusetts, for instance, has one of the lowest birthrates in the country. Demographer Lyman Stone compared WalletHub’s scores to both birthrates and to how many families move to a place. What he found: “The things Wallet Hub thinks make for super family-friendly places in fact do not make for places families actually choose to live.”
What was WalletHub measuring? Many of the factors counted in the study really did bear on family-friendliness, such as safety, schools, and parks. But overall, the study showed skewed priorities.
WalletHub gave extra weight to factors such as the percentage of the population 12 and up that is fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
The website also weighed “climate disasters causing $1 billion or more in damage” as equal to violent crime and twice as much as the safety of roads near schools. And its quality-of-schools metric favored schools that stayed remote longer over schools that returned to in-person instruction.
Day care counted for nearly half of WalletHub’s “Education and Childcare” score, which is typical of these technocratic data-journalism efforts. They discount or count as nothing the support parents get from neighbors, communities, and church groups — the sort of help that can reduce the demand for (and thus the supply of) day care facilities. As a result, the supposed “child care deserts” include many of the best neighborhoods, counties, and states for raising children.
What makes a place family-friendly? Values and community. Do you live in a place where other people value family above almost everything else and live according to those values?
If WalletHub had used that measure, it would have found “family friendly” places where families are actually moving and where adults are actually starting and growing their families.
Values are hard for a data journalist to measure, but here’s one proxy that actually is correlated with birthrates and family migration: religiosity.
Want to know where to raise a family? Go to where the churches, synagogues, and mosques are full.