Is Hawaii a Good Place to Raise Kids?

so in this video I want to talk about three pros and three cons of raising a kid in Hawaii and let me just first off say that I don't have experience raising a kid yet but we are cooking our first child pretty soon and these are the things that I'm thinking about so this isn't like I raised a kid back in the 1990s because frankly that's not really relevant today because things have changed so much especially moving forward but these are the things that I'm thinking about now and will probably be changing in the future as I'm raising our kid in Hawaii but I just want to share some of the things that I'm thinking about as a first-time parent someone who's grown up here in Hawaii but now is going to try to grow up and raise up a child of my own here and just some things that I'm thinking about the first Pro I'm definitely the one that probably could take over the entire list of the pros is a family family in Hawaii is super important I was raised in a very close family and I think if you ask anyone who grew up in Hawaii they'll tell you that family is one of the most important things if not the most important thing here for local people having family to help raise our child I think that's gonna be crucial and I think it's one of the biggest advantages that local people have when put up against their out-of-state peers is that their family has to fly in and I've seen this with a lot of my peers you know if they have a child their family has to come in from the mainland if they're from the mainland and then they can only stay for a little while and then they have to go back being a person who grew up here my family is pretty much all here in Hawaii and I think that's a really big deal because I can tell you the number of people who rely on grandmas and grandpas and auntie's and uncles and not just biological but also an eye and extended family to help watch their kid because people have to work people are so busy that having that family here is crucial the second Pro is the exposure to different cultures and people that you will not get anywhere else probably in the world because you live in Hawaii you know Hawaii is super diverse we have all kinds of people who live here we're moving here all the time from different places and because that yeah you get some some rubbing people the wrong way you get some friction but it's a melting pot and we try to make do with what we can with all these different people trying to make a life here in Hawaii and I think that's for the better because you get to be exposed to different ideas different cultures different people different foods if you love the different foods and so our child is gonna be exposed to all of those things which i think is a good thing and the last pearl which I'm not sure exactly how this is gonna play out but it's about whether and I never thought about weather before because you know I don't it's fine you know rains it's it's sunny snow big deal right hawaii is always like 80 degrees or 85 degrees and then you know it drops maybe like the 70s with some rain so it's not too much variation here in hawaii but i know in other places the weather can go up and down it can be tough not just on your commute transportation but also on unreason a kid so I think it'll be great to have warm weather and raising a child not too cold so we don't have to have jackets and all those other things also not too hot where we gotta use AC and and we just can't go outside all the time what's good about that is it also promotes things like going outside and being outdoors so going to the beach going hiking just doing it physical physical activities I think will be a very beneficial thing for our kids because Hawaii it's just generally all year round it's gonna be really nice all right let's talk about some of the cons and these are some of the things that I am thinking about already of course the first thing is gonna be cost everything is expensive not just food but just everything you have to deal with when raising a child I think it's just gonna be expensive but it's always life here and you know that's okay we prepared for this and I think we'll be open but I am thinking about things like preschool things like childcare and even if private school is not even gonna be a thing III don't know but I know there's a lot of costs that people think about that are related to raising a kid in Hawaii and those costs are very expensive the second concern I have is education I really believe in public education I graduated from public school so I I went through that system I think it was okay it was good and I tried to do my best I know my parents did their best and enforce everything that I a reinforced everything that I learned so I thought that public school is it was a good experience for me I know that people nowadays and they think differently they may just think oh Harvard School is the only way to go or if you say oh yeah we're saying our kids to public school they'll go why would you do that to them you know and completely understand you know people have with certain attitudes towards public school or private school but it's something that I do think about the quality of the education moving forward not just how much we're spending on students but also the quality of the teachers because we have such a high turnover rate with teachers it does make me a little bit more concerned about the steadfastness or the consistency of education across the board if you're having new teachers come in every three to five years and keep our quitting and you bring new teachers in you're gonna have a lot of young teachers which is nice because they can keep up with the kids but you're not gonna have like that pass on history and as more and more of these older teachers start to retire I'm thinking about when our child gets to be you know school grade level age how many more of these older teachers are going to be left you know the ones who are in their 60s right now probably in about ten years they're gonna be retiring or sooner probably so I do think about those types of things all that institutional knowledge that's going to be lost where is it gonna go and I hope that the teachers that continue to teach in public education continue because without them we're just gonna have this sort of big revolving door big turnover right here and it's it's gonna be really tough to teach our kids for some people private school is the way to go they think that that's that's gonna overcome everything and they want to invest in their kids education and you can't really argue with that that's a great thing to invest in your kids education unfortunately it's not reachable for a lot of people private school is some of them it's more expensive than the University of Hawaii talking 2025 thousand dollars a year for a kid K through 12 that's a lot of investment so if not what other things can I do or what things can we do to make sure that our child is well educated well-rounded not just inside the classroom but also outside the classroom and those are things that I I'm thinking about right now and the last reason is limited opportunities and this is very abstract this is a lot of future projection but I feel like Hawaii has limited opportunities especially for the future so not just talking about jobs and job prospects and what you can actually do here in the future what types of industries are viable to make a good living here but there's livability and thinking about that if we raise our child here in Hawaii the chances of our kids actually being able to live here in Hawaii in the future seem pretty low and in a way that's kind of discouraging you know you want your kids or kids to live with you you know in the same area but if we choose to live here and our kid can't make it they're gonna have to go to the mainland or somewhere else in the world which is fine you know because my parents told me the same thing they said you know you want you go live on the mainland no big deal come back home and visit anytime you want and I did live on the mainland for a while and and it was nice but eventually I moved back back home to Hawaii and now I'm here I just think that for any kids moving forward next generations it's gonna be so difficult for them to be able to make it here in Hawaii and I think about how no matter what I do that is gonna be really tough because that's an economy thing that's a social thing those are things that I really don't have a lot of control over which I understand but it at the same time you want your your kid to be able to have at least a chance to live in the same area because then you could see them grow up to become adults and here it's probably not gonna happen growing up in Hawaii you also have this disconnect with the rest of the world because we're so isolated I don't know if a lot of Hawaii people will admit that but we we kind of have our own world we gotta have our own thing going here and a lot of people not all but a lot of people don't really pay attention to anything outside of Hawaii unless it's maybe sports or maybe entertainment news but in terms of us events or world events we tend not to worry about that kind of stuff here in general because all we care about is Hawaii and that's okay but it's also at the same time pretty dangerous and I would want to make sure that our our kid is aware that there is a bigger world outside of our little fishbowl here in the Pacific that there's other peoples and places and cultures Hawaii is not the only place to live there's things going on that are important that that people are kind of engaged with and if you grow up here and you live here too long sometimes you you forget that and that's one thing that I think is a huge disadvantage and so I want to make sure that again with limited opportunity I would want our kids to be able to go out into the world experience some of it on the mainland kind of like how I did I was able to go for about nine years and then kind of just see what the rest of the world is like and then you can always come back you know what we're boys not gonna go anywhere we're gonna be here so go I'll experience some of that stuff and then you can come back and tell us all about it and use those experiences to hopefully make this place a little bit better so those are my thoughts going into parenting and becoming a father especially here locally I'm sure that there's tons of auntie's and uncles and grandmas and grandpas and give me advice on raising a kid but those are the things that I'm thinking about now and why I think it's good and also why it's gonna be a struggle to raise a child here in Hawaii again this list made change as I grow into becoming a father a better father over time but as of right now this is what I'm sort of looking at this is what I'm thinking about and just want to share that so thanks for watching and aloha

Channel: Hello From Hawaii

Views: 8,072

Keywords: living in hawaii, Life in hawaii, what is it like in Hawaii, Moving to hawaii, hello from hawaii, hawaii, oahu, honolulu, hawaii life, life on hawaii, hawaiian life, raising kids in hawaii, raising children in hawaii, hawaii raising kids, pros and cons of raising kids in hawaii, raising kids hawaii, is hawaii a good place to raise children

Id: BKHFrbIJvCQ

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020