The United States of America doesn’t have a single city in a study ranking the 25 best places in the world to raise kids. On the other end of the spectrum, Australia has three of the top seven.
Not only that, for anyone who has young children, the number one city in the world to raise kids, according to the study, is a place you are very familiar with thanks to Bluey: Brisbane, Australia.
The global rankings of the best cities to raise kids were created thanks to a study by home loan comparison experts Compare the Market. In the study, they ranked 50 cities worldwide based on nine data points using a weighted index. The researchers assigned a score from 0 to 10 to each data point, based on how each city fared relative to the others, to compute the index. The researchers then applied a specific weighting to these scores to determine the overall index score.
The study found cities in the United States dominate the bottom 10 scores
“While Australian cities were crowding the top 10, four of the bottom-ranked 10 cities were American,” the authors wrote. “Phoenix was ranked 48th (out of 50) with a score of 2.982/10, while Los Angeles was 44th with a score of 3.225/10, Washington D.C. was 42nd with a score of 3.274/10, and Houston was 40th, scoring 3.389/10.”
Several factors negatively affected American cities’ scores. In the U.S., family benefits spending was only 0.6% of GDP, the third-lowest among the countries included in the index; safety scores were among the lowest in the index; and the U.S. had the lowest combined national statutory parental leave, at just 12 weeks.
Meanwhile, Australian cities were often rated as extremely safe compared with others on the list, and the country has the highest statutory parental leave of any country on the index, as well as high world happiness scores and child vaccination rates. They also had an advantage in the calculations because Australian cities are generally far less expensive than other excellent places to raise a family.
The top 25 best cities in the world to raise children
• 1st through 5th: Brisbane, Australia; London in England; Auckland, New Zealand, Helsinki, Finland; and Sydney, Australia.
• 6th through 10th: Perth, Australia; Melbourne, Australia; Stockholm, Sweden; Berlin, Germany; and Seoul, South Korea.
• 11th through 15th: Paris, France; New Delhi, India; Prague, Czech Republic; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Barcelona, Spain.
• 16th through 20th: Lisbon, Portugal; Wellington, New Zealand; Rome, Italy; Vienna, Austria; and Madrid, Spain.
• 21st through 25th: Manchester, England; Tokyo, Japan; Brussels, Belgium; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Munich, Germany.
In the United States, New York City ranked 29th, Chicago 34th, Dallas 35th, San Francisco 39th, Houston 41st, Washington, D.C. 43rd, Los Angeles 45th, and Phoenix 49th. In Canada, Toronto at 30th and Montreal at 32nd, were the only cities to make the list.