America's Children: Our Future Is In The Balance
Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, recently wrote a piece entitled: Good luck trying to succeed as a kid in America. In it, she covers a report from the ODEC, a Paris-based organization that collects and monitors statistics on 30 industrialized countries.
ODEC often reports test score. But this time, in a report titled “Doing Better for Children” it examines child well-being with the focus on poverty, teen-parenting, environmental quality, and telling measures like whether kids have desks, calculators and other basic tools to do schoolwork at home.
To give you a hint of what is to come, forty-eight percent of U.S. children do not have the basic tools to do their homework. (The ODEC average is 35.) Overall, the statistics are appalling.
Here is a sampling of ODEC’s numbers: Even though we are a rich nation (only Luxembourg has families with a higher disposable income than the families in the U.S) the U.S. has a sky-high rate of childhood poverty, topped only by Poland, Mexico and Turkey.
Roughly 21 percent of America’s kids are born and raised under the poverty level set by the federal government, when the unrealistic threshold of $22,000 for a family of four. Do the math. You can’t live on that here. A more realistic measure would greatly raise the percentage of children in poverty. The average childhood-poverty rate among the ODEC countries was 12 percent. Unlikely countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic beat the pants off us.
The U.S. has high infant mortality rates, and high numbers of babies born underweight. Particularly alarming is our high rate of teen births, the second worst rate after Mexico. Our rate is 50 births per 1,000; the ODEC average is 15.5. Our babies are having babies, forming new families very likely to be incompetent, and very likely to keep the cycle going.
And education? The educational achievement of our 15-year-olds is the seventh worst among the countries studied. In short, by ODEC’s measures, the U.S. does a wretched job of caring for its children. Of course, not all of its children. If you’re a privileged American kid, you’re on track for a promising future. But for lots of kids, that's not the case. Many children fend for themselves, with poor family support, on track for truly dismal futures. Our burgeoning prisons are only one image of where that track sometimes leads.
The ODEC report shows that we are in crisis. It's vital that we take meaningful steps to support families and children. Other countries have been able to succeed. It is not an impossible or unrealistic goal. But we must be willing and able to put in place family support programs that form the basis for a healthy society and a productive future.
