Netherlands First in Child Well-Being

02/22/2007

Netherlands First in Child Well-Being

If you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening.
Marge Piercy

The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland are at the top and the United States and the United Kingdom at the bottom of a United Nations score card that provides the first comprehensive assessment of the well-being of children and young people in the world’s advanced economies.

The study, "Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries," produced by the UNICEF Innocent Research Centre in Florence, Italy, is based on six dimensions to measure the well-being of children — material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people’s own subjective sense of well-being. In these six dimensions, there were 40 individual items where nations were rated including such diverse elements as...

percentage of children living in poverty
percentage of children reporting less than six educational possessions
infant mortality rate
mathematics literacy
percentage of children whose parents eat their main meal with them
percentage of children overweight
percentage of students who agree with the statement, "I feel like an outsider."

The report shows that among all of the 21 countries surveyed in the study there is room for improvement. The report finds no strong or consistent relationship between per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and child well-being. The Czech Republic, for example, achieves a higher overall rank for child well-being (12.5) than several much wealthier European countries. Also no country features in the top third of the rankings for all six dimensions.

The report is intended as a first step towards regular and comprehensive monitoring of child well-being. Its scope is limited by the availability of comparable data, which means that key areas such as mental and emotional health and child neglect and abuse are omitted. But UNICEF hopes it will help to stimulate the collection of more comprehensive and more timely data. To read the full report, go to www.unicef.org/media/media_38299.html.

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