Michigan City Nearly America’s Worst to Raise a Family In

Some say it takes a village to raise a child. Without a doubt, raising kids is hard, but having the right environment around your family can help tremendously.

Unfortunately, some places just seem to make parenting harder.

Michigan isn't exactly the best place according to a few studies. One study from WalletHub earlier this year ranked the entire state as the 33rd-best, or 17th-worst, state to raise a family.

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A new study released by WalletHub shows that Michigan's largest city is one of the very worst places in the entire country to raise a family. Out of 182 cities analyzed in the study, Detroit ranked No. 181. Only Memphis, Tennessee, ranked lower.

The only factor saving Detroit from being last was having an average ranking for family fun. In fact, Detroit ranked fourth, with three cities tied for first, for playgrounds per capita.

Unfortunately, Detroit had the worst median family salaries, percentage of families living in poverty, divorce rate, and violent crimes per capita. As a result of many of those factors and others, Detroit also had the worst socio-economic ranking.

Of course, there are suburbs across the Detroit metro area that are perfectly suitable for raising families. In fact, some of the best cities, towns and communities for Michigan families are in the Detroit metro. This study only focused on Detroit proper.

One other Michigan city did make the list. Grand Rapids landed at No. 87 on the list. Grand Rapids was drug down by its affordability and family fun rankings, though education rankings were No. 40 in the country.

One interesting note is another study I came across that can kind of show the results of these poor environments. Solitaired looked for the cities with the rudest children, and while the results weren't directly one-to-one, Memphis did come out with the rudest children while Detroit was No. 10.