5 Best Cities to Have a Baby
funds and flexibility, and want to move to the U.S. city best suited
for your and your baby’s new lifestyle. What city would you
pick? Fit Pregnancy spoke to The Today Show about their findings of a review of the 50 most populous cities in the country, and how they stacked up in terms of health care, safety, child care, affordability, birthing options, and fertility laws. Who made the list?
1. Boston.
Awesome healthcare, and definitely the place to be if you need
specialized prenatal care (and I hope you don’t). Plus Boston has
the best chowdah anywheah.
2. San Francisco.
Well, duh. A healthy lifestyle makes for a healthy baby, plus it
has high breastfeeding rates and is chock-full of fertility
specialists. And the fried calamari? Yum.
3. Minneapolis.
Three times the national average for the number of child-care
providers? Wow! Plus it has lot of fertility clinics,
specialty birthing options, and midwives and doulas. Something
for everyone! And don’t mind the cold in winter: there’s a
cool network of above-street Habitrail-style walkways that can get you
all over downtown without setting foot in icy slush.
4. Portland.
It’s all about the nunnies, as we say in my house. Yeah,
that. Breastfeeding. Portland’s got the highest rate in the
nation. Woot! And is jam-packed with midwives and
doulas-a-plenty. If you have alternative leanings? Sounds
like this is the place to be.
5. Omaha. Er, Omaha?
That’s in Nebraska, right? Well, I hear they have great
steaks. Also? Affordable housing, access to daycare, and a
Baby Friendly Hospital. Who knew? Hey, Omaha! You’ve
been outed! (Get ready for the influx)
Although my personal
favorite city, Boulder, wasn’t mentioned (it’s not one of the 50
largest cities), nearby Denver made #6. So there.
Family-friendly bike trails, a wide variety of fresh and organic
produce, lots of alternative birthing options, over 200 days of
sunshine per year, and a gorgeous daily eye-feed known as the Rocky
Mountains make this MY place to be. (Philadelphia, the city near
where I’m presently interred stuck uh, living, is at almost the bottom of the list. Yeah, I knew that.)
[photo credit: UrbanInfant.com]
I was so mad about this list! Chicago was in the BOTTOM 5. I don’t know, but I find Chicago to be pretty family friendly. Great city park, plenty of organic options, alternative schooling, easy to get around. Why do they put these lists out there, just to make us feel bad?
Obviously there’s some major bias going on here:
San Francisco? You have to be kidding…all our friends who had kids in the city moved AWAY because everything is really kid-unfriendly…
It’s like they had to hide them in the closet or the neighbors were going to have them arrested.
So let’s say you have unlimited energy, funds, and a desire to make a baby (read the previous Babble piece for where to actually give birth to the kid). Where would a fertile type be advised to proceed? Well, Fit Pregnancy neglected to cover this, so
In what appears to be an unprecedented bow to the pressure of the Crappy Plastic Toy industry, the City By The Bay is proposing to drop a ban on the sale of toys and child care products containing phthalates , a group of chemical compounds used to make
How did San Francisco make the list? It is notorious in California for being particularly family unfriendly (more families move out of the city than migrate to it). While I did have my baby in SF and currently live there (and love it), it has a high cost of living for the area, lots of restaurants that aren’t particularly child friendly (though there are many that are too) – where the single hipsters go to drink – and the public school system is constantly dissed. Citymama moved out of The City and was happy to not have to worry about education. Glad we’re on the list, but ?? whether it is appropriate.