UNICEF report on "Child Well-Being in Rich Countries"

I saw a BBC article trumpeting the UK's last place finish in this UNICEF report (PDF version) and wondered how the US fared. Not well. We finished just above the UK (in the #20 slot out of 21), with education, ironically, being the main thing that kept us out of last place overall. (#12 vs. UK's #17)

I'll admit that I was surprised, and started reading through the report looking for methodological issues. Yes, there were a couple were I would have measured the data differently, but there were a number of interesting factoids as well.

Material wealth

The US was last in "relative income poverty" with 20% of households with children having less than 50% of the median income. This is one of the metrics I'd quarrel with. It's not a measure of absolute poverty. And if income were purely linear, you'd expect 25% of the households to have less than 50% of the median. So, it's a strange metric, and one that points more to the uneven distribution of income in the US rather than children being "poor" in the traditional sense of not being able to afford food, housing, clothing, etc. Figure 1.3a does a better job of capturing that (by asking 4 questions: Does your family have a car? Do you have your own room? How many times did you travel for vacation? and How many computers does your family have?) Here, the US scored 6th.

But in juxtaposition to that "absolute wealth" metric, was the fact that nearly 1 in 8 US households reported having fewer than 10 books. (Figure 1.3c) This put us deep in the bottom quartile. Fewer than 10 books?!? So, top quartile of wealth, but bottom quartile of access to books. Bad sign.

One point that I'm just going to quote straight from the report was interesting:

There is a trend for any increase in social spending in OECD countries to be allocated principally to pensions and health care, leaving little for further investment in children.

Hadn't really occurred to me before, but yes, certainly with medical costs rising, and seniors being voters, and children not, it does seem like a probable outcome.

Health and Safety

The US was also last in the overall category. Again, that struck me as odd, since overall, I'd say that our medical system is pretty good, health awareness generally high, and quite a bit of parental concern. The US was near the bottom for infant mortality rate (at 7 per 1000 live births not making it to a year). The differences in this category were relatively small, and especially given the potential variability in the denominator of "live births", I'm not sure this is fair. (That is, it could be the case that children who would die in childbirth in other countries, and therefore be excluded from this stat, do survive, but are at much higher risk during their first year.) Low birth weight rate is not as easy to explain away, and the US didn't do well here either.
But we're really good at gaining weight. (Figure 5.1d shows 25% of people age 13 & 15 report being overweight, again at the bottom of the list.) Accidental deaths was another area that the US was at the bottom, though here again, differences were small, and the absolute level was low. I'd assume that it probably is fully explained by miles driven per capita (both driven and passenger), and it hardly seems to fair to say children are better off if we prevent them from leaving home.

Education

Here the US was in the middle of the pack. I guess with all of the doomsaying about US education, I was expecting it to be lower. Performance on reading, math, and science was a bit below the rich countries' average. Not good, but not the horrendous showing I'd feared. The percentage of 15-19 year olds in full or part-time education was interesting. The US in the bottom quartile, though if you figure that most 19 year olds have completed high school, this might not be that big a deal. I'm hearing more and more people suggest that students should take a year off between high school and college, so perhaps a metric about how many students eventually earn college degrees is more important. The shocker for me on this metric was the Russian Federation number at 30%. ?!? Less than 1/3 of the 15-19 year olds in school?

Another stat that startled me was the percentage of 15 year olds that "expecting to find work requiring low skills". Here, the optimistic American was at the top, at about 15%. In contrast, more than half of the Japanese were pessimistic.

Family & Peer Relationships

The US was second to last, just above UK. Showings in the "single parent" and "living with step family" were at the bottom. For parental involvement (measured by child's self-reported "eat meals together several times a week" and "just talk to me several times a week") the US was middling (top third on talking, bottom third on eating).

Figure 4.3 was another distressing one. Percentage of 11,13, and 15 year olds who find their peers "kind and helpful". I was surprised at the variation between countries here. I assumed there would be a sort of constant level of "teen angst". But it ranged from 82% "kind and helpful" (Switzerland) down to 43% (UK and Czech Republic). The US was at the lower end, about 50%.

Behaviors and Risks

Here again, US second to last, just above the UK. The combinations of the health ones was interesting: US was among the least likely to eat breakfast (about 50%), not very likely to eat fruit daily, but were top 3 in terms of exercise, and still way more likely to be overweight. So we must be eating something besides fruit and breakfast foods...

In the sex & drugs categories, the US was better than the average in terms of smoking and drinking (measured by having been drunk twice or more), but near the bottom for cannabis usage (about 30% of 11,13 and 15 year olds claimed to have used it in the past 12 months) the UK, Switzerland, and Canada were higher (no pun intended), but Amsterdam's Netherlands only came in at 20%. The surveys were strangely silent on the US results in the sex categories. Perhaps the US government objected to surveys which mentioned condom usage? At any rate, no statistics are provided.

Self-Assessment

The US data were insufficient in this category to be fully reported. So there are interesting bits and pieces (many say that they aren't in good health. Related to obesity?), and another piece that I'll quote directly from the report:

Figure 6.2 shows how many answered – ‘I like it [school] a lot’. And the answer is ‘not many’.

(More specifically, about 39% from Norway, 23% from the US, and just 8% from Finland.)

One final "off the charts" finding from Japan. For percentages of youth that said "I feel lonely", in Japan it was nearly 30%. Runner up Iceland was just over 10%. Though perhaps there's a linguistic difference there, with different shades of meaning for the words in various languages used to render "lonely."

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The biggest unmentioned factor, I think, was population. The US is about 2.5 times the size of the second largest country included (Japan), and more than 50 times more populous than the highest ranked Nordic states. So naturally, there will be higher variation. I think that there's also more diversity, particularly around languages spoken, in the US than any of the other countries included.


Anyway, read the study yourself, and see what you make of it.