Experts Claim Missouri Bad Place for Families-They’re Very Wrong

I know this will come as a shock to you, but not everything you read on the internet is accurate and this is a great example. A new study claims that Missouri is a bad place to raise a family. I will explain why these well-meaning experts are wrong.

I saw this interesting study shared by WalletHub. They took a look a the best and worst states to raise a family and it includes a lot of metrics that are more than fair to measure a state's environment for families including family fun, health, safety, education, affordability and more, but it's missing something vital.

Overall, Missouri is ranked way low as the 27th best place to raise a family, but all of these numbers are missing something important. The one factor that you can't assign a number to is the quality of people in each state. A side effect of my chosen profession is frequent moving over the past more than four decades that has taken me to virtually every state in America. While I appreciate the character of all of those places, I decided to come back to Missouri to finish out my career. Why? There are a lot of intangibles. Simple things like saying hello to a stranger when you make eye contact in a parking lot of a store. That doesn't happen everywhere, but it happens to me all the time in Missouri. When we bought our Missouri home a few years ago, nearly every single neighbor stopped by to say hello in the first few weeks and some kind hearts even brought us cakes, cookies and bread as a housewarming gift. That did not happen to us anywhere else. You can't apply a number to good neighbors and polite strangers. That's one thing that Missouri has been good at my entire life and it's why I consider it one of the best states to raise a family. WalletHub used very fair numbers in their study, but they lack one thing. They've never lived here.