COAHPERD

Baby Steps Made In Well-Being of Children, Data Show

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 25, 2004; Page A01

Children and teenagers are safer now than they have been in three decades, but on many other measures, including school performance and health, their lives are no better, according to a first-of-its-kind national survey released yesterday.

Young people today are less likely to become criminals, crime victims or parents than they were in 1975, the survey's base year. High school seniors are less likely to smoke, drink or use illicit drugs. But children and youths also are more likely to be obese or to commit suicide and far more likely to live in a single-parent home, which brings with it a number of financial and emotional problems.

The report was compiled by researchers from Duke University and the Foundation for Child Development, a philanthropic organization that supports child research. They are trying to create an ongoing index -- akin to the consumer price index -- to evaluate how American children are faring from year to year.

Lead researcher Kenneth C. Land, a professor of sociology at Duke, looked at 28 measures that social scientists consider the gold standard for assessing children's well-being. He then combined them into seven broader categories and charted the percentage change of each starting in 1975, the first year that reliable data became available.

Finally, he averaged the changes to come up with a composite score to compare with the 1975 baseline, which he set at 100. For 2003, the overall score was 105 -- a gain of 5 percent.

Rolling out his report yesterday to a large crowd at the Brookings Institution, Land attributed the stagnancy in children's quality of life largely to a volatile economy, particularly from 1981 to 1994, and to the increase in single-parent families.

"We are now in a no-growth, or slow-growth, era," he said, referring to the economy. "If that continues, we may be seeing another generation of parents raising families in an environment that will negatively impact child well-being."

The index would have been significantly lower -- lower, in fact, than the 1975 score -- were it not for the improvements in child safety and destructive behaviors that began in the mid-1990s, said Donald J. Hernandez, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Albany, who was a consultant on the survey.

Land said in an interview that he finds it "remarkable" that the decrease in juvenile crime continued even after the crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s subsided. It may be that Americans developed a siege mentality, encouraged by media images of violence, that moved courts to be hard on young offenders, parents to start monitoring their children more closely, and schools to offer after-school programs that kept kids occupied and off the streets, he said.

If children's safety showed the most improvement, measures of children's health showed the most slippage. The researchers attributed this primarily to obesity, with children getting fatter beginning in 1983 and 1984. Even if obesity is removed from the general health measure, however, children's health still has not improved since 1984.

"We've spent all this money on health, obesity has gotten worse and everything else is the same," Hernandez said.

He said he also was surprised by the apparent lack of progress in education. Children's performance on national reading and math tests -- a key marker of knowledge and proficiency, educators say -- remained flat.

"When I saw that line, I said, 'Oh, man.' I was stunned," Hernandez said. "We like to think education is improving." On the other hand, he continued, "there has been a big brouhaha in society that schools are failing. They're not failing."

Another area of concern was the category of "emotional/spiritual well-being," which, according to Land's data, plummeted in 1985 and has not completely recovered. Driving that decline was the suicide rate of youngsters ages 10 to 19, which increased for all ages in the late 1980s and only recently started to decrease.

Child advocates have talked for years about coming up with a figure to generate more public interest in the overall welfare of children, much as economists use the consumer price index or the gross national product to track economic health. As Ruby Takanishi, president of the Foundation for Child Development, has said, Americans talk about the CPI and the GNP, so why not have a CWI -- a child well-being index?

A panel at yesterday's briefing, which included members of Congress and child advocates, indicated that an index, updated yearly, might well draw attention and inform debate. But, they added, it is unclear whether it would affect policy -- in part because lawmakers tend to put their own spin on such data.

Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), for example, said he would have expected children to be better off today than the index indicated. What the data tell him, he said, is that "we should be putting more resources into programs," particularly those that increase children's material well-being.

But Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) countered by saying the study showed "if we did spend a lot more, it wouldn't necessarily impact children in the way we would like."

What the index may do, said Wade F. Horn, President Bush's "childhood czar" in the Department of Health and Human Services, is inspire larger cultural shifts in the way Americans respond to certain childhood problems such as teenage pregnancy.

"When we identify a problem and make a concerted effort to address that problem," Horn said in an interview, "generally we're successful."