When you spend a lot of time reading and writing about American families, it’s easy to focus on the bad news: high rates of family instability, widespread financial difficulties in the wake of the recession, expensive government-supported programs with disappointing results . . . So it’s good to be reminded that despite the negative trends we often document here, families are much better off today than in the past by certain measures. Specifically, they’re far less likely to experience the death of a child than they were a century ago.
As Sara Rosenbaum and Robert Blum document in a newFuture of Children article, improvements in child survival during the twentieth century “are nothing short of breathtaking”:
In 1910, the infant mortality rate was 127.6 per 1,000 live births; by 2012, the rate had dropped to 6 deaths per 1,000 live births. The same improvement is evident in the case of mortality involving children under five years of age. In 1910, mortality among young children stood at 403.6 deaths per 100,000 children; by 2012, this figure had fallen to 7.1.
Similar trends are evident among older kids and adolescents. Thanks to vaccines, antibiotics, better sanitation and access to healthy food, and other forms of progress in medicine and technology, the death of a child in the U.S. is now a mercifully rare event, by historical standards.
[For more of this story, written by Anna Sutherland, go to http://family-studies.org/the-...ut-childrens-health/]
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