Giving Compass' Take:

• The Annie E. Casey Foundation breaks down state trends in child well-being using the most recent data, which they compare with the 1990 version of the same report: KIDS COUNT Data Book.

• How can funders use this information to guide effective giving to help children? Where is the greatest need for children in your state? 

• Read about the importance of support for families in poverty. 

Data over a recent period of seven or so years reveal encouraging trends in child well-being nationally, with improvements in 11 out of the 16 indicators. Data for 2017 show that more parents were financially stable and lived without burdensome housing costs, more teens graduated from high school and delayed childbearing, and gains in children’s health insurance coverage continue to be something to celebrate. Broadly speaking, the nation helped children experience progress in the Economic Well-Being domain, with promising but mixed results in the Health, Education and Family and Community domains.

All four Economic Well-Being indicators improved since 2010. Fewer children were living in poverty, more parents were employed and fewer families were spending a disproportionate amount of their income on housing costs. The most improvement was in the percentage of children living in households with a high housing cost burden, where the rate dropped from 41 percent in 2010 to 31 percent in 2017. Nonetheless, families continue to struggle to make ends meet.

In 2017, nearly one in five children lived in poverty. In 2017, the national unemployment rate was 4.4 percent; it has since declined to 3.6 percent.24 Given this change in unemployment — one of the key factors to improving the financial stability of families — the Foundation expects to see ongoing progress in this area.

Meanwhile, two of the four Education indicators — fourth-grade reading proficiency and high school graduation — showed improvement. Notably, with 85 percent of high school students graduating on time in the 2016–17 school year, the nation’s graduation rate reached an all-time high.

The Health domain saw mixed results. Far fewer children lacked access to health insurance in 2017. The Foundation attributes this drop to expanded public health coverage (i.e., the Affordable Care Act, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Medicaid expansion). Even with these advancements, between 2016 and 2017, the number of children without insurance increased for the first time in the past decade. Data also show that the percentage of babies born with a low birth weight had increased for the third year in a row. These recent trends are something to watch. Trends in the Family and Community domain, for the most part, were encouraging. The teen birth rate continued its decline, reaching a new low, and a smaller percentage of children were living with parents who lacked a high school diploma. The percentage of children living in single-parent families remained unchanged between 2010 and 2017. During this period, more than one-third of children lived in single-parent families, which tend to have fewer resources in terms of time and money and the opportunities those often provide.