The 30th edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT® Data Book begins by exploring how America’s child population — and the American childhood experience — has changed since 1990.
And there’s some good news to share: Of the 16 areas of child well-being tracked across four domains — health, education, family and community and economic well-being — 11 have improved since the Foundation published its first Data Book 30 editions ago.
The rest of the 2019 Data Book — including the latest national trends and state rankings — rely on a shorter review window: 2010 to 2017.
The data reveal, in the United States today, more parents are financially stable and living without burdensome housing costs. More teens are graduating from high school and delaying parenthood. And access to children’s health insurance has increased compared to just seven years ago.
But it is not all good news. The risk of babies being born at a low weight continues to rise, racial inequities remain systemic and stubbornly persistent and 12% of kids across the country are still growing up in areas of concentrated poverty.
Locally, New Hampshire has claimed the No. 1 spot in overall child well-being, followed by Massachusetts and Iowa. Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico sit at the other end of this list — and among familiar company. In fact, save for California and Alaska, the lowest 18 ranked states call Appalachia, the South or the Southwest home.
View the national data profile (also available in Spanish) or download your state's data profile as a PDF below:
The nation’s child population added more than 9 million kids since 1990. Half of this growth came from three states: Texas (2.5 million), Florida (1.2 million) and California (1.1 million).
In terms of overall child well-being, six of the 10 top-ranked states are located in the Northeast. States in Appalachia, the South and Southwest — where families have the lowest levels of household income — populate the bottom of the overall rankings.
Nearly half of the nation’s child population (47%) are now kids of color. At the local level, every state reported a higher proportion of non-white kids compared to three decades ago.
The nation’s child poverty rate dropped four percentage points to 18% in 2017. Despite this good news, the poverty rate for African-American and American Indian kids remains substantially higher — at 33%.
More than a million youth across the United States are not in school or working. At the state level, kids in West Virginia were most likely to fit this statistic: 11% were out of school and unemployed in 2017.
The likelihood that kids are growing up in families burdened by high housing costs has fallen — going from 41% of all U.S. kids in 2010 to 31% in 2017. At the local level, the share of kids affected varies from a high of 43% in California to a low of 18% in North Dakota and South Dakota.
Massachusetts is the only state with over half of all fourth-graders (51%) reading at grade level. Students in New Mexico fared the worst, with only 25% of fourth-graders scoring proficient in reading.
In 2017, 67% of eighth-graders in American public schools scored below proficient in math. Despite slight improvements for African-American and Latino students, this statistic raises concerns for kids of color. For example: 87% of African-American kids, 81% of American Indian kids and 80% of Latino kids tested below proficient in math.
During the 2016–17 academic year, the share of high school students not graduating on time dipped to a record low, with about one in seven U.S. students (15%) veering off their academic track.
In 2017, the percentage of children without health insurance held steady (5%), but the number of uninsured kids increased for the first time since 2010.
The risk of having a low birth-weight baby runs highest for African-American families (13.4%) and lowest for white families (7%). Among all babies born in 2017, 8.3% had a low birth weight, tying a four-decade high.
Over the past three decades, the share of children without health insurance has shrunk by 62%. Yet there’s still room for improvement: American Indian kids are more than three times as likely as their peers to lack health insurance.
Single parents are raising one in every three kids across the nation — and single-parent households are 4.5 times more likely than married households to live in poverty.
Over the past three decades, educational attainment has improved for parents across the country. Yet in 2017, 31% of Latino kids had no parent who held a high school diploma. Just 5% of white children fit this same statistic.
Across the nation, 12% of children (8.5 million kids) live in high-poverty areas. Locally, this statistic varies widely: Just 1% of kids in Wyoming are growing up amid concentrated poverty while 84% of kids in Puerto Rico call a high-poverty area home.
