UNICEF Says Dutch Kids Best Off

UNICEF has issued a report with the cumbersome title: “Child Poverty in Perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries. A comprehensive assessment of the lives and well-being of children and adolescents in the economically advanced nations.” According to UNICEF, the Dutch do best by their kids followed by Scandinavia, while the Yanks beat out only the Brits who come dead last.

UNICEF says “The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born.” This isn’t entirely accurate. Another measure is how well its adults are treated and for that matter, just how many opportunities for self-actualization (to use a dreadful pop-psychology term) there are in a society.

And herein lies the need for a grain or several of salt. While UNICEF is largely accurate in how one should look at the care and feeding of the next generation, measuring things like a child’s sense of being loved is a bit dicey. Moreover, the answer will change as the child grows; a two-year-old probably feels much more loved than a fifteen-year-old. Sulkiness hasn’t set in yet. Quantifying all of this is impossible.

Nonetheless, there are some things of value in the report on a qualitative basis. Among the main findings are: All countries have weaknesses that need to be addressed and no country features in the top third of the rankings for all six dimensions of child well-being (though the Netherlands and Sweden come close to doing so) . . . . No single dimension of well-being stands as a reliable proxy for child well-being as a whole and several OECD countries find themselves with widely differing rankings for different dimensions of child well-being. . . . There is no obvious relationship between levels of child well-being and GDP per capita. The Czech Republic, for example, achieves a higher overall rank for child well-being than several much wealthier countries including France, Austria, the United States and the United Kingdom.”

And most interestingly, “In recent years, child poverty has risen in 17 out of 24 OECD countries for which data are available. Norway is the only OECD country where child poverty can be described as very low and continuing to fall . . . . Variation in government policy appears to account for most of the variation in child poverty levels between OECD countries.” It isn’t enough for GDP to grow for kids to be better off. They actually need to see some of it spent on them. A fine thing to consider as the US government runs up a deficit beyond counting and the big domestic worry is saving retirement programs for the elderly.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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