NCJ Number
236408
Date Published
2011
Length
88 pages
Annotation
This 2011 KIDS COUNT Data Book portrays the status of America's children in terms of their well-being, based on 10 measures related to health, adequacy of income, and educational attainment.
Abstract
A trend analysis indicates that after showing improvement in the late 1990s, overall child well-being has stagnated since 2000. Since 2000, the child poverty rate has increased by 18 percent, meaning that the economic recession of the past few years wiped out all of the gains made in cutting child poverty in the late 1990s. In 2009, 2.4 million more children lived in poverty than in 2000, and many experts predict that the child poverty rate will continue to increase over the next several years. Not all children have the same opportunities to succeed. Some children, particularly children of color, face greater barriers to achieving success as they move through childhood and adolescence. On the whole, non-Hispanic White and Asian and Pacific Islander children continue to have better outcomes on the 10 indicators compared with the other large racial and Hispanic-origin groups. Data are presented for the 10 key indicators for all States, including State-level maps of each indicator. The results highlight the enormous variation among the States. The rates of the worst States are approximately two to four times those of the best States on every indicator. The report includes "family stories" in order to personalize what the data are showing. Extensive tabular and graphic data