A new report released from the U.S. gov­ern­ment tracks the well being of chil­dren in the states. The report called “America’s Chil­dren: Key National Indi­ca­tors of Well-Being, 2009,” tells us how America’s chil­dren are doing in health, edu­ca­tion and socially.

A Wash­ing­ton Times colum­nist gives us some of the results from the report. Cheryl Wet­zstein says there is some “good news and bad news.”

The report, found at http://childstats.gov/ amer­i­c­as­chil­dren, shows sev­eral improve­ments from last year: More chil­dren have health insur­ance (89 per­cent); fewer chil­dren ages 5 to 14 died as a result of injury (seven per 100,000); fewer 10th-graders reg­u­larly smoked (6 per­cent) or binge-drank (16 per­cent); and fewer babies were born pre­ma­turely (12.7 per­cent), had low birth weight (8.2 per­cent) or died before their first birth­day (6.7 per 1,000). Fourth– and eighth-graders scored higher in math and read­ing, and more young adults com­pleted high school (89 percent).

Another wel­come change was a steep drop in the num­ber of youths ages 12 to 17 involved in seri­ous vio­lent crimes. The youth-offender rate fell from 17 per 1,000 in 2005 to 11 per 1,000 in 2007, a “very large dif­fer­ence in a very pos­i­tive direc­tion,” said Edward J. Sondik, direc­tor of the National Cen­ter for Health Statistics.

On the down­side, the num­ber of chil­dren liv­ing in poverty ticked up (18 per­cent), while the num­ber liv­ing with at least one employed par­ent ticked down (77 per­cent) — and these data “pre­date the cur­rent eco­nomic down­turn,” said Dr. Duane Alexan­der, direc­tor of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Insti­tute of Child Health and Human Development.

The num­ber of preschool­ers who have a fam­ily mem­ber read to them reg­u­larly also fell alarm­ingly — from 60 per­cent in 2005 to 55 per­cent in 2007 — which means more chil­dren will be less pre­pared for school. And, of course, far more chil­dren were born to sin­gle moth­ers — in 1980, there were 29 births per 1,000 sin­gle women; by 2007, it was 53 births per 1,000.

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