10 stats that show American children are the safest they've ever been
Especially for kids.
The statistics say it all.
Writing for New York Magazine, Jennifer Senior collected the following data points:
The physical abuse of children fell by 55% from 1992 to 2011. Sexual abuse fell by 64% from 1992 to 2011. Abductions by strangers fell by 51% from 1997 to 2012. Motor vehicle deaths for children under 13 years old fell by 43% in the past decade.The Washington Post came to a similar conclusion, with a headline "There's never been a safer time to be a kid in America."
As in:
As spotted in the Chicago Tribune, the 2014 National Child and Youth Well-Being Index from Duke University furthered the good news.
As in:
The number of young Americans who were the victims of violent crime fell 59% since 1994
The number of 12th graders reporting binge drinking, smoking, and alcohol use has fallen since 1995.
In 1991, there were 20 teen births for every thousand females aged 10 to 17. By 2013, that number fell to 6.3.
Senior, the author of "All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood," says that it's "hard to think of a safer time and a better place than the United States of 2015 to raise children - but we act as though the opposite were true."
Thus the rise of "helicopter parenting," a trend where adults are constantly attending to and micromanaging their children, and never allowing them to experience being on their own.