Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 24, 1992 TAG: 9203240069
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Six of nine indicators of social and medical well-being showed children were worse off at the end of the decade than at its start, according to the KIDS COUNT Data Book issued by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Center for the Study of Social Policy.
"We're in the process of loading this generation of kids with an unprecedented public debt to pay off as they grow up, and the obligation to support a huge generation of retiring Baby Boomers. But we're not giving them the tools and opportunities to meet those responsibilities," said Douglas Nelson, executive director of the Casey Foundation. "Everybody stands to lose."
The data book compared changes in children's status on the nine measures of well-being. Among the findings:
The proportion of children living below the government's poverty line increased from 16 percent in 1979 to 19.5 percent at the end of the 1980s.
Births to unmarried teen-agers climbed from 7.5 percent to 8.6 percent of all births.
More children live in families with only one parent, rising from 21 percent to about 24 percent of all children.
More babies are born at risk because they are underweight, increasing from 6.8 percent of births to 7 percent.
The proportion of young people graduating from high school on time remained steady at about 70 percent.
The chances that a teen-ager will die as a result of an accident, suicide or murder rose from 62 to 69 deaths per 100,000 children ages 15 to 19.
More young people ages 10 to 15 are required by juvenile courts to spend formative years away from their families and communities because they are in trouble, rising from 142 to 156 per 100,000 youths.
Two areas of improvement were infant mortality, which dropped from 12.6 per 1,000 births to 9.8 by 1989. Deaths of children ages 1 to 14 dropped from 39.5 per 100,000 children to 32.4.
Judith Weitz, a researcher at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, said, "It is clear that the children's crisis we see in the figures is really a family crisis."
The KIDS COUNT figures show that the states with the best social indicators for children - not the most improvement since 1980, but the best absolute numbers at the end of the 1980s - were mainly Northern industrial and high-income states. The states with the lowest rankings are mostly in the South, historically the poorest and least-developed area of the country.
The overall national figures showed that in every category in which comparative figures were available, social and health indicators were worse for blacks and Hispanics than for whites.
by CNB