U.S. children are safer, healthier

American children are safer and healthier, with fewer getting involved in violence, smoking and teen pregnancy than in previous years, says a new federal report on children’s well-being.

But concern remains about the increasing number of overweight children, said officials with the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics.

In the past 30 years, “we’ve gone from 6 percent to 16 percent of children who are overweight,” said Edward Sondik, director of the National Center for Health Statistics, an agency in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Children’s weight problems “doubled in 10 years and it tripled in 20 years, and it’s a trend that shows no sign of reversing,” said Dr. Duane Alexander, a pediatrician and director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

These findings were released this week in the eighth annual “America’s Children” report, which compiles data from 20 federal agencies about the health, education and social and financial well-being of the nation’s 72.9 million children.

The report showed many favorable developments.

For example, the number of incidents of “serious violence” committed against children dropped to 11 per 1,000 children aged 12 to 17 in 2002, down from 44 incidents per 1,000 children in 1993.

That means that, over the decade, nearly 4.2 million violent crimes and nearly 10,000 killings didn’t take place, says the Department of Justice Statistics.

Teen smoking fell to record lows in 2002 and dipped a little more — although not by statistically significant levels — in 2003, with 5 percent of eighth-graders, 9 percent of 10th-graders and 16 percent of 12th-graders reporting that they smoked cigarettes daily in the past 30 days.

Another highlight was the oft-reported teen birthrate, which fell to a record low of 23 births per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 17 in 2002.

In education, the percentage of high-school graduates who completed high level course work in English rose significantly, from 29 percent in 1998 to 34 percent in 2000.

The number of preschoolers who are read to every day by a family member also grew, from 54 percent in 1999 to 58 percent in 2001.

Trends going the wrong way include infant mortality, low birth weights and child poverty.

The 2002 infant-mortality figure, in which seven babies per 1,000 died before their first birthday — compared with the record-low 6.8 babies dying per 1,000 in 2001, “did surprise us a bit,” Dr. Alexander said.

In addition, the portion of infants weighing fewer than 5 pounds 8 ounces at birth rose from 7.7 percent in 2001 to 7.8 percent 2002.

One possible explanation for these increases are medical improvements in fetal medicine, which are allowing “infants who might have died before or during delivery to survive into early infancy,” Mr. Sondik said.

The death rate for late-term fetuses has declined, Dr. Alexander said. Also, most of the increase in mortality occurred among babies less than a month old.

Economically, the recent recession pushed the poverty rate up for the first time since the early 1990s.

As a result, the number of children living in poverty also grew, from 11.2 million children (15.8 percent) in 2001 to 11.6 million (16.3 percent) in 2002.

Several areas of child well-being appear to have plateaued or stagnated.

These include the percentage of children raised in homes with two married parents — which remains about 68 percent of children — and the percentage of teens who have used illicit drugs in the past 30 days or engaged in binge drinking in the past two weeks.

Details of the report are available at www.childstats.gov.