How are the kids?

• Position: STATESTATS - Annie E. Casey Foundation's report on the well being of children across the United States - Brief article

Our children's well-being is only slightly better than last year, but still not on par with the gains we saw at the end of the 1990s. Areas that saw some improvement in the last five years are the child death rate, the teen birth rate, high school dropout rate, and teens not in school and not working. The infant mortality rate and the teen death rate also went down slightly since 2000.

Four areas that have worsened include low birth-weight babies, children living in families where no parent has full-time employment, children living in poverty and children in single parent families.

These are findings in the 2007 Kids Count Data Book released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The book tracks the well-being of children and families in all 50 states and Puerto Rico using federal government statistics. For more information and the latest findings on more than 100 indicators of child well-being for your state, go to www.kidscount.org.

THE BEST OVERALL

Data from 10 key indicators are used to develop a composite score of child well-being for each state. The 10 states with the highest scores are:

Minnesota

New Hampshire

Connecticut

Utah

Massachusetts

Vermont

Iowa

North Dakota

New Jersey

Nebraska

...