Child Well-Being in

the United States

UNICEF USA
 INTRODUCTION
The league table of child well-being is designed to measure and compare progress for
children across the developed world. Its purpose is to record the standards achieved
by the most advanced nations and to contribute to debate in all countries about how
such standards might be achieved.

Child well-being is measured using six different headings or dimensions: material

well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours
and risks, and young people’s own subjective sense of well-being.

Although national-level monitoring of children’s lives is the more important task,

UNICEF believes that international comparison can also play a part. It is
international comparison that can show what is achievable in the real world,
highlight strengths and weaknesses in individual countries, and demonstrate that
child wellbeing is policy-susceptible.
 One of the most
powerful forces on
Earth is the prayer
of a child!
 Table Of Contents
01 02 03
Health and Education Material Well
Safety Beings

04 05 06
Family and Peer Behaviour and Subjective Well-Being
Relationships Risks / Housing &
Environment
 01
HEALTH AND SAFETY
1. Health at birth:-
1.1 Infant Mortality Rate (IMR)

The IMR in the United States is about 6.5 deaths per 1,000 live births.

It is possible that the IMR of the US isn't justified: there's an so far unresolved
debate about whether IMR within the United States might include the deaths of
extremely premature and/or low birthweight babies who are kept alive for a time by
advanced neonatal care but who, in other countries, won't be classified as ‘live
births’.

1.2 Low birthweight

The percentage of babies born with low birthweight within the US exceeds 8%.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “The birthweight
of an infant is the single most vital determinant of its chances of survival and
healthy growth.” Low birthweight is additionally known to be related to increased
risk across a variety of health problems in childhood and on into adult life.
 2. Immunisation rates
The US has about 93-94% immunisation coverage for measles, polio
and DPT3 for children aged 12 to 23 months.

3. Child health: the 1 to 19 death rate

There are about 715 deaths per 100,000 children and youth aged
1-19. The causes of deaths transcend disease and therefore the
efficacy of health services to incorporate deaths from
suicide, murder, traffic injuries, drownings, falls and fires.
 02
EDUCATION
 Reasons why children and adolescents are
excluded from education:
POVERTY: poverty remains one of the most obstinate barriers, with children
from the poorest households almost five times more likely to be out of
primary school than those from the richest.
DISABILITIES: Children with disabilities and from ethnic minorities are also
more likely to be left behind.
GENDER INEQUALITY:For girls in some parts of the world, education
opportunities can be especially limited. Only 66 percent of countries have
achieved gender parity in primary education. Harmful gender norms can have
severe effects for boys, too
LOCATION:Children from rural areas are more than twice as likely to be out of
primary school than their urban peers. In conflict zones, 27 million children
are out of school.
 “Schooling does not always lead to learning.
Worldwide, there are more non-learners in school
than out of school.”
UNICEF USA is dedicated to increasing the engagement of those who
care about the well-being of children. UNICEF believes that
during conflict, education should encompass more than just
meeting curriculum objectives. Education delivery should offer a
safe space for children, a means of providing a sense of
normalcy, psychosocial support, protection against harm and
access to other vital services. In response to educational needs,
UNICEF has reinforced its leadership and partnership with the
Ministry of Education and the education-sector partners in the
USA.
 03
MATERIAL WELL BEINGS
This overview of child well-being looks
first at material well-being. Three
different components have been considered
–relative income poverty, children in
households without an employed adult, and
direct measures of deprivation. It brings
these three components into one overall
ranking table of child material well-being.

Deprivation:-
Unfortunately, there are no internationally
comparable measures of material deprivation
or agreed definitions of what ‘the right to
an adequate standard of living’ means. It
is therefore not possible to compare the
proportion of children in each country who
are materially deprived in the sense that
they lack such basics as adequate nutrition,
clothing, and housing.
Relative Income Poverty:-
Relative poverty is when households receive 50% less than average
household incomes, so they do have some money but still not enough money
to afford anything above the basics. Relative poverty is sometimes
described as “relative deprivation” because the people falling under
this category are not living in total poverty, but they are not enjoying
the same standard of life as everyone else in the country.
Unemployment:-
Various studies have found that growing up in a household without an
employed adult is closely associated with deprivation, particularly if the
unemployment is persistent. The proportion of children who are growing up
in households with no employed adult has therefore been chosen as the
second component for building a more rounded picture of children’s
material poverty.The United States, for example, has risen from the bottom
of to fifth place
 04
FAMILY AND PEER
RELATIONSHIPS
Young people’s family and peer relationships
The quality of children’s relationships is as difficult to measure as it is
critical to well-being.
Relationships with family and friends matter a great deal to
children in the here and now, and are also important to
long-term emotional and psychological development.
From the limited data available, three components have been
selected to represent this dimension – family structure,
relationships with parents, and relationships with friends
and peers.
FAMILY STRUCTURE:
➔ The use of data on the proportion of children living in
single-parent families and stepfamilies as an indicator
of wellbeing may seem unfair and insensitive.
➔ There is evidence to associate growing up in
single-parent families and stepfamilies with greater
risk to well-being – including a greater risk of
dropping out of school, of leaving home early, of
poorer health, of low skills, and of low pay.
 Children’s relationships
PARENTAL TIME:
➔ In the lowest ranked countries, almost two-thirds of children still regularly eat the main
meal of the day with their families, with France and Italy maintaining the tradition more
tenaciously.
➔ A much smaller number of children report talking regularly with their parents.
➔ Among its findings are that young people, and especially girls, find it easier to talk to
their mothers than to their fathers and that difficulty in communicating with parents rises
significantly between the ages of 11 and 15.

RELATIONSHIPS WITH FRIENDS:

➔ Relationships outside the family assume ever greater importance as children grow up.
➔ According to the World Health Organization ‘Being liked and accepted by peers’ is
‘crucial to young people's health and development, and those who are not socially
integrated are far more likely to exhibit difficulties with their physical and emotional
health.’
 05
BEHAVIOUR AND RISKS
Health Behaviour:-

-Assessing behaviour and risks

-Eating and exercise

-Risk Behaviours
-Exposure to violence

Several of the measures in this review, eating habits in childhood and adolescence
are indicators of both present and future well-being. Those who eat unhealthily
during the early years of life are more likely to continue the pattern into
adulthood and to be at increased risk from health problems including diabetes,
heart disease, and cancer.

Over-eating

Eating Breakfast

Eating Fruit

Exercise
The second component considered under ‘behaviours and risks’ is the prevalence of a
second set of behaviours that represent immediate dangers to children as well as serious
threats to longer term well-being. Within the limitations of the available data, four such
risk indicators have been chosen:

a)the teenage fertility rate b) the smoking rate c) the alcohol abuse rate d) the drugs
use rate

Giving birth at too young an age puts at risk the well-being of both mother and child.For
most girls growing up in an OECD country, the norm today is an extended education, a
career, a two income household, delayed childbearing and a small family. And it is in this
context that teenage pregnancy has become a significant problem.

The final component of the ‘behaviours and risks’ dimension of child well-being is the
degree to which children and young people experience violence in their lives.
Unfortunately, exposure to violence is difficult to define and the available indicators
are inadequate to the task of reflecting either present misery or future consequence.

Violence against -children in different forms

1.Gender-based 2.School based 3.Online based

 06
SUBJECTIVE
WELL-BEING/ HOUSING
AND ENVIRONMENT
SUBJECTIVE WELL BEING:-

This section attempts to give depth to this

overview of child well-being by taking into
account children’s own perceptions, drawing on
international surveys of children’s and young
people’s opinions.

There are significant relationships between some

of the dimensions chosen. Poverty, for example,
affects many aspects of child well-being in many
well-documented ways: particularly when prolonged,
poverty has been shown to be likely to have an
effect on children’s health, cognitive
development, achievement at school, aspirations,
self-perceptions, relationships, risk behaviours
and employment prospects. Equally clearly,
economic poverty alone is revealed as an
inadequate measure of children’s overall
well-being. A multidimensional approach to
well-being is necessary to improve understanding,
monitoring, and policy effectiveness.
HOUSING AND ENVIRONMENT:-
An acknowledged weakness of the
first UNICEF overview of child
wellbeing was the lack of any
measure of children‘s
environmental well-being. This has
now begun to be remedied by drawing
on recent data from the European
and the World Health Organization.
Two components have been
considered:
a) housing – as measured by
overcrowding
and reported housing problems
b) environmental safety – as
measured by children’s exposure to
crime and pollution.
 CONCLUSION
The five dimensions of child well-being considered here – material well-being,
health, education, behaviours and risks, and housing and environment – contribute
equally to the league table of overall child well-being.

Findings that have been recorded and averaged may create an impression of precision
but are in reality the equivalent of trying to reproduce a vast and complex mountain
range in relatively simple geometric shapes. In addition, the process of
international comparison can never be freed from questions of translation, culture,
and custom.

In addition to these gaps, there is one other weakness in almost all current
attempts to monitor the well-being of children, whether internationally or within
individual countries. That weakness is the lack of data about children’s
developmental well-being in the earliest months and years of life
THANK YOU!
~Jahnavi Nandwani 11-D
Devanshi Singh 11-A
Seema Reddy 11-D
Rimjhim Shukla 11-C
Pakhi Singhal 11-D
Prerna Dutta 11-C
Gehna Jain 11-C