Continued from the previous post.

Money isn't everything when is comes to the well-being of children, so let's look at an angle that has less to do with income and more to do with intent ... the percentage of children living in homes where there are less than ten books. That's right ... it's the total number of books in the home that we're looking at here.

The lowest percentage is in Czech Republic where less than 2% of the households have fewer than 10 books. Hungary, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Finland, all follow with incremental increases. The USA is third from the bottom with about 13% of children living in homes that have less than 10 books in them.

This may seem a silly gauge of anything, but according to the "Convention on the Rights of the Child" ... the Hague ... a child's circumstances are supposed to allow "the development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to the fullest potential", and a lack of educational resources ranks alongside income as an indicator of children's educational achievement. In other words, books are basic.

In health and safety, the US comes out dead last in an assessment that uses infant mortality, low birth weight, immunizations and death from accidents and injuries as indicators.

Significant in itself, the infant mortality rate can also be interpreted as a measure of how well each country lives up to the ideal of protecting every pregnancy, including pregnancies in its marginalized populations, and taking all necessary precautionary and preventative measures – from regular antenatal
check-ups to the ready availability of emergency obstetric care – by which infant mortality rates have been so dramatically reduced over the last 80 years. A society that manages this so effectively as to reduce infant deaths below 5 per 1,000 live births is clearly a society that has the capacity and the commitment to deliver other critical components of child health.

The numbers aren't near what they are in developing countries, but the variations between OECD nations is striking, with infant deaths in Hungary, Poland and the USA twice those in Iceland and Japan.

The US comes close to standing alone in the numbers of children living in single-parent and stepfamilies, and comes in last again when it comes to negative health behaviors, which include eating fruits and veggies as part of the regular diet, eating as a family and such, and among 13- to 15-year-olds, 25% of American kids report being overweight, far and away the most in the report.

And the only country that comes close to matching America's teen pregnancy rate is the non-OECD Russian Federation. As the report card points out:

it is an approximate measure of what proportion of teenagers fall on which side of [the] teenage fertility rate ... [and it] may be an especially significant indicator of young people's well-being.

The scale for violence is startling, as it charts young people who report NOT being involved in fighting or being bullied. The US comes out at basically zero.

What does all this mean? That's an open question with many answers, but the information does help to provide some perspective.


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