The 10 best small US cities for working parents

Being a parent is a job in itself. For working parents, it means that they are essentially working two jobs. Which small US cities are the best for working parents?

2. Los Altos, California

Paul Sakuma/AP/File
Then-California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina campaigns at a roundtable of business women at a cafe in Los Altos, Calif., July 20, 2010.

This city in Silicon Valley is a wealthy community that in recent years has experienced strong growth, much like the rest of the Bay Area. Although the cost of living is quite high here, families with children have a median income of $250,000, and have access to schools that received a perfect 10 score from GreatSchools, a nonprofit that rates schools nationwide. One of the local child care centers, Twinkle Twinkle, offers care for kids age 2 and older.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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