Virginia Ranks Among Best For Safe, Healthy Childhoods

VIRGINIA — Kids in Virginia experience some of the best childhoods when it comes to several key factors such as food insecurity and suicide. The nonprofit group Save the Children released its “End of Childhood Report” last month and found the U.S. ranks just 36th in the world — between Belarus and Russia — when it comes to what it calls “childhood enders.”

In America, Virginia ranks eighth overall in the country based on five childhood enders: infant mortality rate, child homicide and suicide rates, adolescent birth rates, child food insecurity rates and rates of children not graduating high school on time. The District of Columbia was not included in the rankings.

Here’s how Virginia ranked in those categories:

• Child deaths: 20
• Malnourished children: 5
• Student dropouts: 20
• Child victims of violence: 19
• Child has a child: 11

Roughly 14 million American children lived in poverty in 2016, the report said. Nearly 12 million of those were in urban areas.

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With an overall rate of 19.5 percent, American child poverty levels are higher than nearly every other high-income country in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development group, which includes many of the world’s most advanced countries. In fact, American kids are at least twice as likely to be poor as children in Norway, Iceland, Slovenia, Ireland, Sweden and Germany. This is problematic because growing up poor is one of the “greatest threats to healthy child development,” the report says.

“When young children grow up in poverty, they are at higher risk of experiencing difficulties later in life – having poor physical and mental health, becoming teen parents, dropping out of school and facing limited employment opportunities,” the report says.

Kids who grow up in the Northeast — states such as New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire — are “far more likely” to see safe, secure and healthy childhoods than children in the South, including Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

The group found that rural child poverty rates were higher than urban rates in the vast majority of states. One in four kids in rural America live in poverty. That number is one in five for urban areas.

Five states – Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina – each had rural child poverty rates of at least 33 percent, the report said.

“Children in rural America are more likely to die in infancy, miss out on meals, become pregnant as teenagers and not attend college,” Mark Shriver, the group’s senior vice president for U.S. programs and advocacy, said in a release. “Rural child poverty rates have been persistently high for at least three generations in the U.S.”

Click here to read the full report.

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