Our children's well-being.

• Position: STATESTATS - Social and demographic conditions - Illustration

More kids are finishing high school. The teen birth rate is dropping. And fewer children live in single-parent households. That's good news.

But 4 million children--an increase of more than 1 million since 2000--live with parents who face persistent unemployment and poverty. More babies are being born at low birth weights and infant mortality and teen death rates are up. These are among the findings of the latest Kids Count Data Book released in 2005 by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The book, in its 16th year, tracks the well-being of children and families in all 50 states and Puerto Rico using federal government statistics. This is the best state-level data available for tracking yearly changes in the categories studied, but some are derived from samples and may contain some random error. For more information, go to www.kidscount.org.

WHERE THE DIFFERENCES ARE The size of the gap between black and non-Hispanic white children varies by indicator, but the outcomes for black children are worse on every one of the 10 measurements. The same is true for American Indian and Alaskan Native children when compared b non-Hispanic whites. Non-Hispanic Total White Percent low-birth weight babies 2002 7.8% 6.9% Infant mortality rate 2002 7.0 5.8 (deaths per 1,000 live births) Child death rate (deaths per 2002 21 19 100,000 children ages 1-14) Teen death rate (deaths per 100,000 2002 68 66 teens ages 15-19) Teen birth rate (births per 1,000 2002 43 29 females ages 15-19) Percent of teens who are high 2003 8 6 school dropouts (ages 16-19) * Percent of teens not attending 2003 9 7 school and not working (ages 16-19) * Percent of children living in 2003 33 26 families where no parent has full-time, year-round employment * Percent of children in poverty * 2003 18 10 Percent of children in 2003 30 22 single-parent...