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Seattle: Best place to be a mom? Okay, how about fourth-best?

The Daily Beast

Happy Mother's Day, Seattle moms. You live in the fourth-best place in the U.S. to be a mother.

At least that's what The Daily Beast is saying after ranking the 100 largest cities and ranking them on criteria such as mothers-per-capita, quality of public schools, number of childcare workers and availability of maternity health specialists.

Where are the better places to mother? According to the e-zine the top ten are:

  1. Tampa, FL
  2. Pittsburgh, PA
  3. Cincinnati, OH
  4. Seattle, WA
  5. San Francisco, CA
  6. St. Louis, MO
  7. Cleveland, OH
  8. Miami, FL
  9. Sacramento, CA
  10. Orlando, FL

Although Seattle might be a good place to be a mom, not many of them live here. The Emerald City ranked 95th - near the bottom of the list for percentage of mothers in the city. That squares with data which reflect Seattle's relative lack of kids. According to the U.S. Census, Seattle has the second-lowest number of households with children under 18, among major American cities. Only San Francisco has fewer young 'uns.

But Seattle fared better in other mom-related categories: It's 25th for number of childcare workers for every kid 5 and under. And 15th nationwide for OBGYN doctors and maternity-health specialists.

Quality of schools? Just a little below average at 6 on a scale of ten, as rated by GreatSchools.org.

Maybe the best Mother's Day news for Seattleite moms is The Beast's "pampering score": the city comes in at number 15 based on Citysearch.com's tally of brunch restaurants and hair salons per mother.