I moved my family from Dallas to a small town in Missouri

• Josh Hartman and his family moved from Texas to Missouri in 2021 when he started a new job.
• He said he misses the easy access to the amenities Dallas has to offer.
• But Hartman and his wife are happier with their children’s education in Missouri.

This essay, as stated, is based on a conversation with Josh Hartman, a 42-year-old operations manager who moved with his family from Dallas to Sikeston, Missouri in 2022..

I moved around a lot growing up, but I spent four years in Missouri and graduated from high school there, so I consider myself to be from the Midwest.

My wife is from Kansas. We have been married for almost 20 years. We have three children aged 14, 12 and 10.

I spent about 10 years in Minnesota after I graduated. We weren’t big fans of Minnesota.

A career change brought us to Texas in 2015

We live in a suburb of a suburb in Dallas, just on the edge of the DFW area. I was there for about eight years.

I had a house in a bedroom community. It was one of the fastest growing areas in the state.

We loved Texas. It had a southern feel to it. There were many good people in that area. I appreciated that.

Dallas gives you access to everything. It’s huge. From every type of sports team to every fair, Dallas has everything you could ever need. There was an Amazon unit at our nearest outlet, so if we ordered something at 7am, it would sometimes be delivered within five hours.

There were many benefits to living there.

But Dallas is so crowded. So many people are moving and it’s just neighborhoods on top of each other. We moved there too, so we were part of the problem.

These communities are quadrupling in size, but their services are not growing at the same rate. Many of the roads would only have two lanes and would be supported at six miles.

I don’t know if I’d want my kids driving there for the first four or five years while they’re learning to drive.

Our children went to schools in modular units behind the building. The area couldn’t build schools fast enough with how many people were moving, so they used modular units for some classrooms.

Handing over and taking over was like a death match for the mothers. There were times when you were over a mile from school because there was only one road. It would be an hour later and you still wouldn’t have your children.

The cost of living also went up while I was living there. I think it happened in many countries, but especially in Dallas.

We had talked about maybe staying in Texas, but moving somewhere a little more rural.

But I got a job offer and that was really the main motivation for our move to Missouri. My wife has family in Missouri so that helped.

We moved to Sikeston, Missouri in 2022

We moved primarily for work, but location also played an important role. It was a good job opportunity for me, but I wouldn’t have done it if it was in a different location.

We all reacted a little differently to the move. i was good I could move every couple of years and probably be fine. That’s just my personality. I will make new friends anywhere.

Our biggest concern was around our children. Even though we felt that the move could give them a better schooling experience, we were concerned. They were in third, fifth and seventh grade when we moved. These are hard ages to move kids with friends.

When we came and visited before making the decision, we met with a few people in town and they were excited to get a new manufacturer. It got us excited.

Sikeston is on the Missouri heel down in the corner. Everything is grown through real rich agriculture. We are surrounded by fields of cotton and corn.

It’s a town of 16,000 people, so it’s not huge. But there are plenty of smaller communities around. We’re kind of a big city around here.

We lived in Minnesota where it was winter nine months out of the year. Then we moved to Texas and it was summer nine months out of the year. We moved here and finally got four seasons. We like that.

The pace of life here is much slower

Housing costs and the cost of living in general are substantially lower here. We were able to expand our home when we moved to Missouri. We have a swimming pool.

It freed up enough disposable income that we were able to take more family trips. Nashville is just over three hours from us. Louisville, Kentucky, is four years old. St. Louis, Memphis, Springfield, Missouri. I took many day trips to different cities. We also took longer vacations.

We are definitely happier with the school here. We like our kids’ class sizes and that they are not in modular units. We like teachers and administrators. They are in an environment that helps them thrive.

I would estimate that 95% of the people I come into contact with were born and raised here. Everyone knows each other all their life and they don’t know you. They are generally really welcoming, but it can still be a bit of a challenge.

But my kids have made good connections here through sports. I found a good church. My wife made many friends there.

I miss the diversity of Texas food. I like Thai food. And I miss the access that Dallas has. A good car wash seems like a small facility, but all these around here are either the kind where you have to go out and spray it yourself, or where you park and someone comes and washes it. Such things.

We have no plans to move in the near future. We don’t want to move again until the kids are out of school.

But who knows, we might end up living here for the rest of our lives.