OUR CHILDREN HAVE SEEN BETTER DAYS

``It's a good time to be a child in America,'' said Tommy Thompson,
secretary of Heath and Human Services, about a new statistical report
on children. Which, given the actual statistics, is like saying,
``Murray has only a little bit of cancer.''

In other words, things ain't great, but they could be worse.

The good news, according to the federal America's Children 2001
report, is that the United States has experienced a slight decline in
child poverty and the country overall is enjoying greater family
wealth.

Children growing up in high-income homes, for example, doubled
between 1980 and 1999 to 29 percent. (High-income means at least
$68,116 annually for a family of four.) This reduction in poverty is
owing to another statistic reported as ``good news'': more parents
are working.

The bad news is that children are still smoking, drinking and using
drugs too much and are not performing significantly better
academically. Although teen pregnancy rates are down to 29 births per
1,000 among girls ages 15 to 17, I can't bring myself to order
balloons. The however part of this cheery news bite is that 88
percent of those teen births were to unmarried girls, up from 62
percent in 1980.

Youth rates of smoking, drinking and drug use, meanwhile, remain steady:

Twenty-one percent of seniors say they smoked daily in the previous 30 days.

Thirty percent of seniors reported having at least five drinks in a
row in the previous two weeks.

Twenty-five percent of seniors reported using illicit drugs in the
past 30 days.

In the dubious news category, though it wasn't reported as such, more
children than ever -- 26 percent -- are living in single-parent
homes. Although the increase is attributed somewhat to the increase
in single-father homes -- from 2 percent in 1980 to 4 percent in 2000
- -- the vast majority of these one-parent homes are headed by a female.

The report mentioned these family trends as casually as one might
note that the District of Columbia is experiencing a curious increase
in the roach population, except that the latter news would evoke an
official response of Chandraesque proportions. The fact that a
quarter of U.S. children are growing up mostly fatherless should not
ignite a patriotic swelling of pride.

Poverty figures also are also cheerfully misleading. While the report
said that only 8 percent of children from married-couple families
experienced poverty in 1999, 42 percent of children in single-mother
families suffered poverty during the same year. In black
female-headed families, about two-thirds lived below the poverty line
between 1980 and 1993; by 1999, just over half were in poverty. It's
a wonder Thompson wasn't trucking in cases of Dom Perignon.

Meanwhile, the fact that more children have two working parents, as
noted in the report, is not necessarily good news to children who, as
a result, may feel isolated or abandoned. As Constance Hilliard, a
history professor at the University of North Texas, recently wrote,
material gains even in two-parent families don't necessarily
translate into emotional well-being.

Although Hilliard was criticizing what she considers the myth of the
superior nuclear family, her conclusion that material indulgence is
often a poor substitute for emotional support and psychological
stability was exactly right.

You have to wonder what Thompson's comment might have been had this
report been released under a Democratic administration. The
continuing erosion of the traditional U.S. family -- and the
well-substantiated connection between father-absent homes, poverty
and adolescent social pathologies -- surely would not have escaped
his notice.

Even slight improvements in children's status are worth our
optimistic attention, but not at the expense of losing sight of
reality. The reality is that while some U.S. children may have more
materially, the high rate and negative effect of divided families
means that emotionally, it's not such a great time to be a child in
America.