Social Issues Affecting America's Children - America's Children: Indicators Of Well-being, Child Poverty, Children's Health
november help adoption families family services program
In proclaiming November 24 through November 30, 2002, National Family Week, President George W. Bush noted that earlier in the year he signed bipartisan legislation:
to expand the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program, which provides States with vital resources to help families stay together and to promote adoption. The program seeks to prevent child abuse and neglect, avoid removing children from their homes, support family reunification services, and help those children who are unable to return home by providing crucial adoption and post-adoptive services.
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The well-being of America's children improved in many respects during the early years of the twenty-first century, according to the seventh annual Federal Inter-agency Forum on Child and Family Statistics report, America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2003. Teenage pregnancies reached a record low and teen violence dropped dramatically over the past decade. The pr…
Poverty was associated with a number of serious problems for children, including inadequate health care and lower educational achievement. In 2003 children were 25.4% of the total population but 35.9% of people in poverty, according to U.S. Census figures. Since the early 1980s, the poverty rates for adults aged sixty-five and over nearly matched those for adults aged eighteen to sixty-four, demon…
While medical science has made great advancements in health care in recent years, the cost of treatment and the price of health insurance escalated. "The cost of family health insurance is rapidly approaching the gross earnings of a full-time minimum wage worker," said Drew Altman, President and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation at the September 2004 release of the organization�…
By the late twentieth century, American teens were more sexually active than previous generations. While sexual activity was rare in young teens, it increased as teens grew older. By the age of seventeen, most teens reported at least one sexual experience. Concurrent with sexual activity were risks of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), pregnancy, and dropping out of school. The 2003 Youth Risk …
The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) tracks vital statistics in the United States. It found that between 1990 and 2002 the birth rate for all women under age thirty declined. For teenagers age fifteen to seventeen the rate dropped by nearly 40%, to 23.2 births per one thousand women. For older teens age eighteen to nineteen the birth rate declined by 18%, to 72.8 per one thousand women…
In 2003 the CDC reported that the leading causes of disease and death among adults were cardiovascular disease (39.4%) and cancer (23.5%). Among youth and young adults aged ten to twenty-four, almost three-quarters of all deaths resulted from just four causes: motor-vehicle crashes (32.3%), other unintentional injuries (11.7%), homicide (15.1%), and suicide (11.7%). As early as 1991 the CDC identi…
According to the HHS report Child Maltreatment 2002, an estimated 896,000 children were victims of maltreatment in 2002. More than half of the reports alleging maltreatment of a child came from professionals—education, legal and law enforcement, social services, and medical personnel. The remainder of reports came from family members, neighbors, and other sources, including 9.6% from anonym…
Indicators of School Crime and Safety, 2002, a joint report by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice, revealed a 46% drop in violent crime victimization rates in schools from 1991 to 2000. According to the report, students were twice as likely to become victims of serious violent crime away from school than at school. However, violence, theft, bullying, drugs, and firearms continued to be …
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