USA next to last for child well-being in rich countries

To echo our comments in January's What is Your Quality of Life? piece, UNICEF's 2007 Child Well-Being Report Card revealed some disturbing statistics about children living in the United States.

Overall, the United States ranked 20th out of 21 rich countries (United Kingdom was 21st), in overall child well-being. The report was broken down into six categories (we put the US rank next to it):

Material Well-Being - 17
Health and Safety - 21
Educational Well-Being - 12
Family and Peer Relationships - 20
Behavior and Risks - 20
Subjective Well-Being - insuffiucient data

One would think the most shocking was being ranked dead last in Health and Safety. However, we have seen statisitics over the last few years showing similar futility.

In our opinion, the two most telling categories are:

Family and Peer Relationships - Criteria:
(we italicized major points of emphasis)

Family structure

• Children living in single-parent families - US ranked 21st
• Percentage of children living in stepfamilies - US ranked 21st

Family relationships

• % of children who report eating the main meal of the day with parents more than once a week - US ranked 19th
• % of children who report that parents spend time 'just talking' to them several times per week - US ranked 8th

Peer relationships

• % of 11, 13, and 15 year-olds who report finding their peers 'kind and helpful' - US ranked 19th

Behaviors and Risks - Criteria:
(we italicized major points of emphasis)

Health Behaviors

• % of children who eat breakfast every school day - US ranked 20th
• % who eat fruit daily - US ranked 16th
• % physically active for one hour or more of a typical week - US ranked 3rd
• % between 13-15 overweight - US ranked 21st

Risk Behaviors

• % of 11, 13, and 15 year-olds who smoke - US ranked 3rd
• % who have been drunk more than twice - US ranked 5th
• % who use cannabis - US ranked 17th
• % having sex by age 15 - insufficient data
• % who use condoms - insufficient data
• teenage fertility rate (births per 1,000 women) - US ranked 21st

Experience of Violence

• % of 11, 13 and 15 year-olds involved in fighting in last 12 months - US ranked 7th
• % reporting being bullied in last two months - US ranked 14th

Final comment -

What we can conclude from this report? That we are an embarrassment to the rest of the world. We are the richest country in the world, yet it is painfully obvious that our money is not being put back into our children's well-being. The state of family relationships in this country is subpar and not getting better. The report also shows that lack of physical activity in the US is not on equal footing with diet in causing the obesity problem. Other countries performing much less physical activity are not obese. Diet is the main culprit.