Hot off the presses, UNICEF's Innocenti Research Center's Report Card 7 is available in its entirety in tidy PDF format at a computer near you.

Like the first six report cards, this one takes a close look at basic indicators of the welfare of children in developed countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the "economically advanced" countries of the world.

"The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born."

Dandy. Shall we see what this looks like in the richest countries of the world?

In order of average rank in the six areas of child well-being assessed in the report card, here's how the fortunate nations line up:

1. Netherlands
2. Sweden
3. Denmark
4. Finland
5. Spain
6. Switzerland
7. Norway
8. Italy
9. Ireland
10. Belgium
11. Germany
12. Canada
13. Greece
14. Poland
15. Czech Republic
16. France
17. Portugal
18. Austria
19. Hungary
20. USA
21. UK

Surprised? If you're not, that's a real shame and means you're aware of just how far down the line of priorities kids are in the US. If you are, it seems a good time to start making some noise about the plight of children in America.

The USA and the UK are in the bottom third of the rankings in five of the six areas assessed. ... material well-being, health and safety, education, relationships, behaviors and risks, and subjective well-being ... and they manage to avoid a full ticket of six out of six because of a lack of data of the subjective well-being of kids in these two countries.

Take the 'relative poverty' ranking, for example, that shows the percentage of children living in households where the income is less than half of the median income for the country.

Denmark has around 3% of kids living under this line, and Finland, Norway and Sweden are all under 5%. The Czech Republic has just a fraction more than Switzerland at around 7%. The UK is close to 16%. The US? About 23% ... almost one-quarter.


Continued in the next post.