US & UK are worst places for childrens' well-being
 

According to a UNICEF "report card."

An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries

I think this is a valuable springboard for debate and thought; however I also think it's a mistake to make snap judgments based on the headline/conclusion. This is a complex study based on a particular set of judgments as to what constitutes child well-being. The study itself says over and over again there are problems with the data and the interpretation. For instance, age and gender differences are not adequately taken into account.

I will say this: In my personal opinion the US (as I can't speak for the UK) needs to do much, much better in the area of adolescent education and care. My own belief is that our education system sucks, and parents pay less attention to teenagers than young children, when they should be paying more! Teenagers are more vulnerable today than ever to peer pressure and the sheer pace and press of popular culture, and need to be kept close to home. The big difference here than in the less developed countries is that most of those places still have the extended family network in place as a safety net, which most of the industrialized countries have lost.

Finally, may I say, that I thank the heavens daily that I was born in this country in this century (well, okay--last century).

I

Sending my kid to a private school and teaching him to educate himself, as I did.
The above is the blame game and, IMO, sour grapes.

keep in mind that this was produced by a UNICEF funded think tank in Italy, so--I'm not sure who you mean is blaming whom, or whose sour grapes it is

If I had my druthers, I'd home school my children/grandchildren, and keep the teenagers isolated. But that's pretty extreme, and most people would not agree with me.

Take study results with larger than average grain of salt. The UN despises the United States and all we stand for. If they think kids with rickets and no education to speak of have a better quality of life than the average American Child, screw 'em.

Well I want to know why Australia isn't on the list! Why don't we ever get counted???!!!!

Much of the information used in that report is six years old. In the last six years a good deal of progress has been made in cutting levels of teen conceptions, cutting teen smoking and, most importantly, reducing the number of children living below the poverty line. We've still a long way to go, but the progress made is serious progress, we aren't talking shaving a couple of per cent off the figures. Surestart centres, family tax credits and children's forums have all helped a great deal, as have the targeted education programmes for schools with high teen pregnancy rates etc, but the situation was allowed to get very serious before anybody started to tackle it and so it isthe taking a long time to turn the juggernaut around. In 1995, for example, a third (yes 1/3) of children in Yorkshire lived below the poverty line. I believe that is now down to about 1/4 and falling. Though in some urban centres, like Leeds it is still abysmally high.

Another consideration is that this report is based primarily children's own responses to questionaires....some of the sections had a very low take up rate (with significant regional variation) which may have skewed the figures somewhat.

That said this shouldn't be ignored. Large numbers of children still live below the poverty line, lots of children feel unhappy and that's not really acceptable in a wealthy, developed nation. There is still a lot to do.


I have an excerpt from a national study on Households Below the Average Income, conducted by the Dept. for Work and Pensions in 2005:


http://www.cpag.org.uk/info/briefing...AI_2003-04.doc

Australia is included, but not enough data was present in every category.

Although I think it's an interesting study, I'm not going to be sucked into the UK media's breast-beating "we're failing our children!" self pity.

Many of the answers are opinions asked of children/ teenagers at the most turbulent time of their lives. Cultural weighting does not seem to have been taken into consideration, for example the US scored highest on % of 15 year olds who expect to be in a skilled job by the time they are 30. Good for them - that simply shows good self esteem not educational achievement.

The UK scored worst for children's opinion of their own health - to me it sounds more likely that the British kids were simply aware of what could be wrong with them, as opposed to really being a sickly bunch.

30% of Japanese children answered that they were lonely - the report muses that perhaps there was a translation problem, or a cultural issue. Right. Shows how difficult it is to compare teenagers' opinions about their lives across the world.

I think the most positive thing we can do is make time for children, let them know they're loved and stay out of their way as much as possible when puberty turns them into monsters. And not worrying too much about multiple choice quizzes whether they're in magazines or from Unicef.

It's the damn TV commercials convincing kids their not living well. They're missing out on the good life where there are no zits, perfect test scores, fancy cars and beautiful rock star friends. Shows about Biafra's kids eating pebbles should get equal time. :lol:

I just finished three good books:

The Law of Dreams: about a boy in Ireland during the potato famine, growing up, trying to get to America. Wow, what those people went through.

The Glass Castle: a memoir of writer Jeannette Walls, growing up in poverty and in flight with her extremely intelligent and eccentric parents.

The Fortunate Son: a white child and black child are raised as brothers until the black child's father takes him back after his mother dies. Kid ends up on the streets. Rough life.

I think: yeah, I could have lived without the Atari 2600 when I was a kid. :)

Our education truly sucks, that is why no one sends their kids here to get educated, right?
Envy, pure and simple.
I have posted a lot on this in the past, bunch of loser Levi wearin' American bashers who wish they lived here. Self-esteem issues, the root of terrorism and our issues in the UN.

You do realise that the report was about the way children percieved their lives? American children (like British children) live in a country with wealthy and poor living close to each other. They also live in a country where the media and advertising encourages them to be disatisfied.

Wealthy American children do not live close to the poor. They don't watch as much TV as their parents did when young, or pay attention to much media; they IM, play Xboxes, and participate in highly organized activities. They are dissatisfied because they perceive their wealthy American neighbor children to be even better off than they are.

America is one of the best places to be raised and it is also one of the worst. It just depends on where you live, your class, your parents, etc.

Yep. They found exactly the results they were looking for.

So does the UN also despise the Uk?

They are a lot like the US whether they want to admit it or not so yes.

I doubt anybody would deny our cultural similarities. I do doubt that the UN despises us enough to trump up a fake report about how happy our children are.

Dana, I've a report on my desk that says you haven't fed the sheep.
The fact you don't have any sheep does not make my report inaccurate or trumped up.
The value of the report depends on the parameters used to gather data.
I think the UN uses the wrong parameters (and methodology, but that's another case), to determine the results. :(

I don't doubt that they use the wrong parameters....my point is I doubt it's out of malicious intent. UNICEF, who conducted this study, have an ulterior motive, but I suspect their ulterior motive is more to with trying to shock the wealthy nations into action, rather than to slander us out of malice.

"Happy" what a fucking joke... you don't see them moving out of the US and UK to Uganda en-mass do you?
THINK people!

Bad science is malicious by definition. Always view with suspicion the scientist with an agenda. Real science doesn't have agendas or biases other than determining and describing objective truth.

Now having read the report in detail, I find it to be junk science of the tallest order. Ignoring cultural biases, relying on children's self-reporting, telling half the story, examining only a few measures that might or might not be meaningful.

There are some real WTF points in there. As part of material well-being, they actually measure whether a child is in a home that's under their country's national median of income. Thus, a child in the 51st percentile of income in the Czech Republic counts as well-off, while a child in the 49th percentile in the US or UK is at risk.

Minor differences in certain figures are given more meaning. In almost all richer countries, between 8-12% of children report having smoked tobacco. Are the 12% countries really so much worse off, or is it just statistical noise? The UK gets a huge nudge in the "risky behaviors" section because 38% of its 15-year-olds have gotten laid and 32% have gotten drunk. Perhaps, but in a cultural context does it really mean the children are more at risk, or is it simply allowing riskier behavior in a safer environment?

When I was a lad of 14, the parental strategy in America was to not allow any drinking at home, while the strategy in England was to allow drinking ONLY at home. I think the Brits wound up more sauced but more healthily sauced, more safely sauced, with fewer binge drinkers, fewer driving drinkers, and a better overall notion of alcohol. (I'm sure things have changed and this is only an example.) These kinds of cultural subtleties are lost on the report.

As we all instinctively understand, whether children have "well-being" or not is probably very difficult to measure, and picking measurements here and there wouldn't tell us as much as living in the culture and seeing how much children are valued.

By focusing on the children in the cultures where they are valued the most highly, UNICEF has chosen NOT to advocate for the children who are really the worst-off in the world. Watching the UN, you do notice that this is its modus operandi. Pick the "low-hanging fruit" of criticizing the rich countries -- because it's easy and everybody is in favor of doing that -- and not the harder work of getting clean water to the children of Africa, a huge number of whom will die for lack of that simple commodity.

So does UNICEF value children? You have to doubt it.

What about considering the differences between the countries at the top and the ones lower down the list instead of arguing about why the US and UK are where they are in isolation?

What are the cultural and or social differences that influence the results?

Maybe there's something to be said for more liberal societies which is what we see in many western european countries. The same ones that seem to have done well in this study.

The study is identically flawed for all positions. It doesn't matter whether you consider it from the point of view of the bottom or the top.

That may be so UT. I think it's important for everyone to recognise that even if this study were perfect (and of course, no study is ever completely flawless) there aren't any third world countries listed anyway, so arguments about jealousy etc are really pointless because most of these affluent nations listed would generally be considered desirable places to raise children in comparison to the alternative.

And anyway, when they were doing this study, we here in Australia decided not to participate. That's why there's not enough data for us. We did this intentionally so that everyone wouldn't want to move here to bring up their kidliwinkses. Since you're all so wonderful though, I thought I'd share this little secret with you. ;)

A Brit by the name of Neal Asher commented on this report.

That's the first paragraph which sets the tone.
It's worth reading.;)

Yeah, nothing like a bit of anti-poor, thatcherite bile to put one in a good mood.

Hmmmm. Blahblahblah - there are only poor these days because of the current government.... blahblahblah things are worse than they have ever been blahblahblah.....

Obviously never read Dickens or the Bible - the poor are always with us.

It was worth reading though.

That really pissed me off. Yeah, a lot of people living on council estates are unemployed, but not all. Not even most on many estates. Nor are all families broken, all parents dishevelled or all children hopeless. That sort of shit really really aggravates me. It's as prejudiced as saying all black men abandon their children. Prejudice against someone because of their race or colour is unacceptabe in modern western society, but prejudice against people on low incomes is somehow still acceptable.

Dana, have you been living under a rock? Poor people WANT to be poor!*

*The above is total sarcasm

*grins*

I've always enjoyed the lean years far more than the fat ones myself. :)

Race war is politically incorrect but class war remains ok. ;)