Colorado is ranked 26th out of the 50 states in terms of children’s quality of life, according to a national, research-based report being released today.
The Child Well-Being Index provides the first comprehensive state-by-state comparison of children’s lives, according to researchers at the Foundation for Child Development and Annie E. Casey Foundation.
The best states for children, according to the report, are New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Utah, Connecticut and Minnesota. Those named worst are New Mexico, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Nevada and Arizona.
“When you dig a little deeper, you find a lot of Colorado kids are doing really well and a lot of kids are really struggling,” said Chris Watney, president of Colorado’s Children Campaign. “The true story isn’t that we’re average. It’s really about disparities.”
The index assessed children’s welfare in 2007 across 25 indicators, clustered in seven categories: family economic well-being; health; safe/risky behavior; educational attainment; community engagement; social relationships; and emotional/spiritual well-being.
The study’s key findings are that “states with higher income taxes are better for children,” and public investments in children, such as education spending, matter a great deal.
In each category, Colorado children as a whole generally fared slightly better than the national average, with the following exceptions:
• Only 86.7 percent of Colorado children had health insurance, compared with 89.2 percent nationally. Colorado had the seventh-worst coverage in the U.S. in 2007, but that has been improving in recent years, Watney said, as more children are enrolled in Medicaid and Child Health Plan Plus.
• The suicide rate for children ages 10-19 was 6.19 deaths per 1,000, compared with a national incidence of 3.97.
• Colorado has had a higher incidence of births to mothers ages 15 to 19, with 43.4 such births per 1,000, compared with the national incidence of 42.5.
• Binge alcohol use, at 11.28 percent, and illicit drug use other than marijuana, 5.64, were each about a percentage point higher in Colorado than nationally.
