What future am I talking about? The future of the children who live in this beautiful state. Arizona has dismal, or the most dismal, rankings on national measurements of child and family well-being.
Children are our future. Children are everybody’s business, even if you don’t have any of your own.
UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre writing about their research on the well-being of children in selected countries: “The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to their 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 in which they are born.” True for states as well.
“It takes a village to raise a child” has a corollary: Without children a village dies.
How we treat the children of our state is a measure of our strength and the direction of our moral compass.
Let’s look at Arizona’s scores.
Children’s Safety
As we all know Arizona is HOT especially in the summer. A child cannot survive in a closed vehicle in the heat. Arizona ranks high in these tragedies and parents must be warned and educated about this danger.
The National Safety Council reports that a average of 37 children die in the U.S. each year after being left in a vehicle. In 2017, 42 children died this horrible way. How does this happen? Parents forget the child is in the car. Child is asleep or quiet when parent leaves. The car is parked and locked so there is no AC. If a car is parked in the sun in one hour the temperature can reach 116 degrees. The child dies; 705 of them since 1988.
Car manufacturers must make it impossible to leave a car with a child left behind. We get beeped if a door is open. Surely we need to be warned about a sleeping child before any more children get cooked.
Vaccinations
Our state was in the “negative but true news” recently. Do you know what an NME is? It stands for Nonmedical Exemptions to vaccinations. Eighteen states allow them, meaning parents can decide whether or not to vaccinate their children. Arizona is one of the states.
This has resulted in “hot spots” which means areas with a large number of unvaccinated children because there is no herd immunity defined as, “the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease within a population achieved when a sufficiently high proportion of individuals are immune to the disease, especially through vaccination.” It varies by disease from 83 to 94 percent of population vaccinated. For example for herd immunity to work to prevent measles in those who have a medical reason to avoid vaccination 90-95 percent need to be vaccinated while polio is less contagious.
Guess what urban area has the highest NME rate in the country? Phoenix! If I were the mother of an immuno-compromised child who had chemo for cancer I sure would not make a family visit to Phoenix.
Poverty
How can people in their right mind not believe that kids count in this wealthy, first world country? An organization called Kids Count Data Center of the Annie E. Casey Foundation has since 1948 been an important source for child and family well being indicators by nation, state, and other divisions.
Arizona ranks 45th from the top in the overall ranking of child well-being. Why? Poverty! Arizona is 49th out of 50 states. Twenty-four percent of our children live in poverty. We also rank 45th in education and 38th in health. Sixty-two percent of our 3 to 4 year olds do not attend preschool compared to 52 percent nationally. I am ashamed for our state and for the short- sightedness of our citizens and legislators.
What can the citizens and legislators of Arizona do? Start with developing the compassion that we lack. Put children at the head of the line for public and private assistance so that they can survive poverty and rise above it to become tax-paying citizens.
Top priorities are providing health care starting with prenatal care, celebrating the two-parent family, legislating pro-family policies like paid parental leave, providing education including preschool to prepare them for a job.
But above all, tackle the root causes of poverty and inequality.
Dr. Heins is a pediatrician, parent, grandparent, great-step grandparent, and the founder and CEO of ParentKidsRight.com. She welcomes your questions about parenting throughout the life cycle, from birth to great-grandparenthood! Email info@ParentKidsRight.com.
