Measuring Well-Being of Children

UNICEF's Innocenti Research Center just released a study on the well-being of children in 20 developed countries in which the U.S. came in second-to-last -- after Britain.  I haven't read the study, but according to an L.A. Times report on it:

UNICEF's Innocenti Research Center in Italy ranked the countries in six categories: material well-being, health, education, relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people's own sense of happiness.

The finding that children in the richest countries are not necessarily the best-off surprised many, said the director of the study, Marta Santos Pais. The Czech Republic, for example, ranked above countries with a higher per capita income, such as Austria, France, the United States and Britain, in part because of a more equitable distribution of wealth and higher relative investment in education and public health.

Some of the wealthier countries' lower rankings were a result of less spending on social programs and "dog-eat-dog" competition in jobs that led to adults spending less time with their children and heightened alienation among peers, one of the report's authors, Jonathan Bradshaw, said at a televised news conference in London.

"The findings that we got today are a consequence of long-term underinvestment in children," said Bradshaw, who is also professor of social policy at York University in England.

The study acknowledges that its methodology has flaws, and it's just a first cut at looking at this issues:

The study, for example, measured relative affluence by asking whether a family owned a vehicle, a computer, whether children had their own bedroom, and how often the family traveled on holidays. Some answers might depend on the quality of public transit and real estate prices, making the average child in New York's affluent areas seem equal to one in a less-developed country because of the constraints of city living.

The authors wrote that as the first attempt at a multidimensional overview of children's well-being in developed countries, the survey was "a work in progress in need of improved definitions and better data."

But they said it was nonetheless a first step in providing benchmarks for comparing countries and highlighting poor performance in otherwise rich nations.

But isn't there something very Catholic about this attempt to measure well-being not just according to the more-easily quantified financial measures of wealth, but also by the measures such as the equities of wealth distribution, social investment in children, and -- most interesting -- actual time spent relating to children?