Next To Last

And Nobody Cares

Out of 21 affluent countries, the United States came in next to last in a report on child well-being released last week.

UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, advocates internationally for the rights of children. In a first, the report card looked only at rich countries, the ones that should be leading the way and setting the standards.

The report, entitled Report Card 7, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries, analyzed 40 separate indicators using an array of existing data.

The U.S. media has ignored this report; I’ve only seen one news item about it. That was an Associated Press story that doesn't even come up anymore in a Google search, so here's a link to a UPI International story.

Great Britain, which ranked worse than the U.S. by two-tenths of a percent, saw a furor last week in its news over the issue.

The British are taking their government to task for failing its young as well as the country’s future.

We apparently just shrug our shoulders and move on.

The Netherlands ranked number one, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Spain. We were bested also by Switzerland (6th), Italy (8th), Ireland (9th), Germany (11th), Poland (14th), the Czech Republic (15th) and Hungary (19th), among others. Hungary!

The best ranking for the U.S. was in education, where the country came in 12th out of 21. In material well-being, we came in 17th; in family and peer relationships and in behaviors and risks we ranked 20th on each, and we were dead last at 21st in health and safety.

I was raised to think that the U.S. is the best country in everything, and that means that no matter how you manipulate the stats, we ought to come out on top. We’re the wealthiest of nations with the brightest brains. We work harder and longer and take fewer vacations than anybody.

And this is all we have to show for it? We can’t even crack the top 10 for in a run-down of industrialized nations and the way they care for their kids?

The six large categories are broken down by individual questions listed in charts in the back of the report. Among those statistics, the U.S. has 21.7 percent of its children living in poverty, the largest percentage of any of the 21 countries.

In the one Associated Press report I found on this report, a federal official with the Department of Health and Human Services took issue with it because UNICEF measures poverty differently.

We think $20,650 a year is poverty level for a family of four; UNICEF believes an income of $35,000 is more appropriate. Which begs the question, why do we set the poverty bar so much lower than the rest of the world?

The number is disgraceful number any way you look at it.

Being an avid reader, I was shocked to learn that 12.2 percent of children age 15 reported having less than 10 books in their house in 2003. That too was the largest percentage in all of the countries.

That is not a lot of books. That's a Bible, a cookbook, and a couple of romance novels.

Other bad things: the U.S. has the second-highest infant mortality rate, with only Hungary faring worse. We have 22.9 percent of our children under the age of 19 dying from accidents and injuries; only New Zealand fared worse. We have 75.4 percent of our kids participating in education at the age of 15; Belgium has 93.9 percent of its children in school at that age.

We have more 15-year-olds living in single-parent families and fewer students eating their main meal with their parents than any other affluent nation.

Our teens also have more babies than any other affluent nation: 46 percent of adolescent women ages 15-19 have had a baby. No other nation comes close to that.

More bad stuff: U.S. kids don’t eat much fruit (they eat a lot in Portugal and Spain), less than half eat breakfast every morning, and a quarter of them are overweight. That last is also the highest percentage among the 21 nations; they’re quite fit in the Netherlands, where only 7.6 percent battle the bulge.

Good things? Most of the U.S. households with children have a working parent (which is good insomuch as there is income to purchase necessities). Most kids get their measles shots, DPT3 shots, and polio shots. Only 14.4 percent of our students aspire to low skilled work when they are 15; in Japan, 50.3 percent have such aspirations (“low skilled” is not defined).

About 67 percent of U.S .parents talk to their children; not as high as Hungary, where 90.2 percent do, but better than Australia, where only 51.3 percent have family discussions.

Only 7.3 percent of U.S. kids ages 11, 13, 15 are smoking cigarettes, the lowest rate of the 21 countries. But 11.6 percent of kids those ages have been drunk; still, that beats the United Kingdom’s 30.8 percent by a long shot.

Also, our kids fight and are bullied, but not much more than most countries. They also exercise 4.4 days of the week.

UNICEF, which works in 191 countries, says the report shows no relationship between child well-being and GDP per capita. Many countries without the wealth of the United States, Britain or France scored higher in the rankings.

The report indicates that the European countries are consistently taking better care of their children than we are. While no indicator can tell the whole story, this seems to point out that we’re not moving in a good direction.

If nothing else, this report shows there is a need for improvement. It’s good that our kids aren’t smoking but they’re also not eating right, for example.

Both the U.S. and Britain were in the bottom two-thirds of five of the six major categories. One of the study's researchers said in the AP article that children fared worse in the U.S. and Britain because of greater economic inequality and poor levels of public support for families.

Now what can we do to change it?

The report is online at http://unicef.org/media/files/ChildPovertyReport.pdf.