What Are Some Challenges to Child Health Policy?
Unhealthy children grow up to be unhealthy adults, poor health and low income go hand in hand, and both poverty and poor health make large demands on public coffers. Thus promoting children's health is essential for improving the population's wellness; policies to prevent children's health issues can exist wise investments; and policy makers should implement carefully designed policies and programs to promote child health.
U.S. kid health policy is a patchwork of efforts at the federal, state, and local levels. Many of them aim specifically to better kid health, while others accept different goals but could indirectly bear upon the health of children. Some health-related policies target children directly, attempting to treat health bug once they occur or to prevent them from occurring, while others target women during or earlier pregnancy with the goal of improving the health of newborns. Some policies target low-income children, while others are more universal. We commissioned a grouping of experts to review enquiry on how effectively U.S. policies promote child wellness. The manufactures, based on the strongest evidence to date, appraise how best to promote child health and, more specifically, what interventions and strategies work best at diverse stages of children'south evolution. Here'southward an overview of what we establish, along with the implications for public policy:
A wide range of policies affect children'southward health
We tin't think but nearly health care when considering policies to promote child health. Many other types of policy matter besides. A century ago, infectious diseases posed the principal threat to children'southward wellness. As that threat has diminished, others take come to the fore. Many of the most of import threats to children's health today have to practise with the social and concrete environment, broadly defined. For example, injury is now the leading cause of death among children over ane twelvemonth old. Policies to prevent injury range from housing and traffic ordinances to family unit interventions to prevent child abuse. Suicide has go a major cause of decease among adolescents. Policies that focus on children's mental health range from behavioral interventions in schools to rehabilitative mental health handling in the juvenile justice organisation. Whether we are thinking of infectious disease or whatsoever other threats to child health, parents' education and income are amid the virtually important protective factors. Thus, a wide range of antipoverty and other programs may also improve children's health and aid them attain their full potential.
Responsibility for child health is fragmented
A serious obstacle to improving U.S. children's health is the fragmentation of responsibleness betwixt families and multiple layers of government. America presents a unique tension between the idea that child wellness is primarily a family unit responsibility and the view that authorities has a responsibility to ensure the health of its most vulnerable citizens. In the United States, different in other developed countries, the government has no affirmative obligation to promote child health and, more than oftentimes than not, steps in simply after a severe wellness risk has been identified. Moreover, responsibility is fragmented at the federal, country, and local levels, and among entities that control ii different aspects of children's welfare, such every bit health care, education, and juvenile justice. The issue is a largely uncoordinated jumble of resource and services that tin can be extremely hard to navigate and inside which children who live in different places or situations take very different access to resources.
We approach child health with a crunch response mentality
Parents' rights to raise their children as they run across fit, along with the U.S. government's limited responsibleness for promoting children's wellness and the fragmentation of services, have led by default to a organisation that responds to crises rather than marshaling resources to promote child health. Many children's wellness conditions, particularly mental health problems, are acknowledged only later on they produce serious agin consequences, such every bit bookish failure, family disintegration, or school violence. This Rough-and-tumble arroyo makes it hard to develop a coherent strategy for preventing children's health problems and for evaluating the effectiveness of efforts to do so.
We have express data on price effectiveness
Unfortunately, the fragmentation of children'southward health care services and resources in the The states, combined with a crunch-response arroyo to kid health, has produced an inefficient system. Moreover, because this fragmentation results in a lack of information almost the toll effectiveness of various interventions and policies, it's difficult to make informed policy choices. We suspect that, for many dimensions of child health, an ounce of prevention would be worth a pound of cure, just it'due south hard to bear witness this without hard evidence on the costs and benefits of dissimilar approaches.
Poor and minority children are most at take chances
Almost all of the manufactures in this event highlight the fact that poor and minority children face disproportionate threats to health. Health disadvantages start before birth and are reflected in socioeconomic and racial disparities in low nascency weight and babe decease. And the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage accumulate over time: Poor and minority children are more probable to experience conditions that tin harm their health, such as poor nutrition, pollution, and substandard housing. Disadvantaged children are also more likely to be maltreated and more probable to become wards of the foster intendance system or terminate up in juvenile detention. Many of the policies covered in this consequence focus on disadvantaged children and thus have the potential to reduce health disparities.
The Future of Children is a collaboration of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton Academy and the Brookings Establishment. The mission of the FOC is to interpret the best social science research about children and youth into data that is useful to policymakers, practitioners, grant-makers, advocates, the media, and students of public policy.
Source: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-future-of-children-policies-to-promote-child-health/