Michigan Ranks Low For Safe, Healthy Childhoods

Kids in Michigan experience some of the worst childhoods when it comes to several key factors of student dropouts and being victims of violence. The nonprofit group Save the Children released its "End of Childhood Report" last month and found the U.S. ranks just 36th in the world — between Belarus and Russia — when it comes to what it calls "childhood enders."

In America, Michigan ranks 29 overall in the country based on five childhood enders: infant mortality rate, child homicide and suicide rates, adolescent birth rates, child food insecurity rates and rates of children not graduating high school on time.

Here's how Michigan ranked in those categories:

Child deaths: 33
Malnourished children: 19
Student dropouts: 40
Child victims of violence: 30
Child has a child: 19
Roughly 14 million American children lived in poverty in 2016, the report said. Nearly 12 million of those were in urban areas.

With an overall rate of 19.5 percent, American child poverty levels are higher than nearly every other high-income country in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development group, which includes many of the world's most advanced countries. In fact, American kids are at least twice as likely to be poor as children in Norway, Iceland, Slovenia, Ireland, Sweden and Germany. This is problematic because growing up poor is one of the "greatest threats to healthy child development," the report says.

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