[Kids Count Report] Tough times for U.S. youths

from The Houston Chronicle

Health, living conditions of teens, kids leveling off; Texas slips to 39th in national report

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
Associated Press

Fewer teenagers are having babies or dropping out of high school since the start of the decade, but slightly more live in poverty with parents who don't work year round.

A report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation charity found that measures of health and income for children and teens are no longer improving as much as they did in the 1990s.

Instead, children are "treading water," said foundation President Doug Nelson.

"We're not talking about a catastrophe or the bottom falling out of anything," Nelson said. But, he added, "We've still got to do some poverty-rate reduction. We've got to make improvements from those 2000 numbers."

The findings were released Tuesday as part of the annual Kids Count report on the health and well-being of children and teens.

The report measures each state's progress on 10 statistics, including infant mortality, poverty rates, single-parent families and babies born with low weights.

Overall, Texas slipped from 37th to 39th in the national rankings.

Texas is higher than the national average in childhood poverty, child deaths, teen births and teen deaths.

Only Nevada has a smaller percentage of immunized children, and Texas has the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation.

The state's child poverty rate has worsened slightly, from 22 percent in 2000 to 23 percent in 2004, but a lower rate of Texas teens are giving birth, dying and dropping out of school.

"Even though we've seen some improvements, overall for Texas children, things are getting worse," said Frances Deviney, director of the Texas Kids Count. "And that's disconcerting."

States in the Northeast and upper Midwest scored the best. At the top: New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota and Iowa. Southern states did the worst: Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Louisiana was ranked 49th, even before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last year.

"We're a really poor state," said Judy Watts, president and chief executive of Agenda for Children, an advocacy group in Louisiana. "Everything starts to unravel as poverty takes a grip on children and families."

Watts said conditions for children are even worse since the hurricane, even with help from the state and federal governments.

Nationally, there were improvements in eight of the 10 measurements in the 1990s, when the economy was booming, government-sponsored health care for children was expanded significantly and welfare reform helped move hundreds of thousands of families from welfare to work.

One issue that has continued to improve: teen pregnancies.

"Every state fell, every racial group fell," said Bill O'Hare, a senior fellow at the Casey foundation.

The Casey foundation uses the most recent statistics available from the Census Bureau and other government agencies for its report, now in its 17th year.

Chronicle reporter Melanie Markley contributed to this report.