America is failing its children.
That is the undeniable takeaway from a report published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Kids age one to 19 are overall dying at a faster rate than they have been in the past half century, found the team of doctors who wrote the report, “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality Among US Youth.”
Between 1999 and 2020, nearly a half million kids in the U.S. died, and many from preventable causes: gun violence, auto accidents, drugs and suicide were among the major killers. More disturbing: Between 2019 and 2021, death rates from all causes jumped by 18.3%, the largest spike in 50 years for children in the U.S., say the researchers.
“Large increases in all-cause pediatric mortality have occurred in recent years, a departure from decades of progress due to improvements in motor vehicle safety, vaccinations, and other medical advances,” reads the report.
This is a tragedy. The death rates for children – who are vastly less likely to succumb to “natural” causes like heart failure, cancer or other diseases of the old – is not supposed to suddenly shift upward in the richest nation in the world.
We can not blame the kids and teens for these deaths. It is the adults who make the laws and the adults who decide how our society operates. But, perhaps most important, it is the adults who are the parents, caretakers, teachers, psychologists and psychiatrists, CEOs, police officers, and government officials. We make the gun laws and we design the streets and cars. We set the age requirements for driving and owning deadly weapons. We run schools. It is our job to care for the young, and yet we are instead upholding and maintaining policies and systems that keep systemic racism and poverty in place.
And we, as the adults, are all responsible for what is happening to our nation’s children. So we should all feel some responsibility for this report’s findings, which are damning. The rise in deaths by homicide among Blacks is damning. The suicides among American Indians and Asians is damning. The increasing fatality rates among Hispanics is damning. It does not matter if you are in the “safe” group; if those around you are in a bad lot, we all are.
Anyone who sees the news knows things aren’t right. We all are reminded that schools are increasingly places of mass shootings – something that was unthinkable before Columbine High School’s nightmare in 1999. We all know that more of our attention is not on our children, but on our smartphones. We all know that the idea of a family in which parents can work and still have time to nurture and care for our children is a thing of the past, as housing prices and the cost of living have risen dramatically. And we all know that our quality of education is often linked to how wealthy or poor our towns or cities are.
The findings of this report are unlikely to make it as a topic in this November’s election. The findings are unlikely to even get more than a passing headline. That’s a shame. If young people are our future, we’re doing very little to invest in either.