What Is Killing American Children?

And perhaps more importantly, if we have data on the what, then where is the action?

If you want all the data (or a slice of the data) on this, consider this link.

Here is a “nut graf” paragraph:

The first real alarm bells coincided with the pandemic. That’s when the mortality rate among children and adolescents shot up by more than 10 percent in a single year. These children weren’t felled by some spreading contagion; their deaths were sudden and “almost always preventable,” as Dr. Coleen Cunningham, the pediatrician in chief at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, puts it. Deadly car accidents among tweens and teens climbed nearly 16 percent. Murders went up 39 percent. Fatal overdoses more than doubled.

If you want to see the specific categories:

Your big two here would be firearms and drugs, both of which make sense, and almost too much sense. Apparently, per the same data linked above, there was an uptick in youth suicides after the 2008 recession, which also depressingly makes sense. I bet some parents were absolutely down on their luck and showcasing that to kids, and the kids felt guilty, and between that and a combination of other factors, here we are. I also think 2008 would be around the time that Facebook was four-five years old and online bullying was starting to ramp up, only getting worse with Instagram and more in coming years. It’s also near the early stage iPhone and group texts and generalized teen anxiety.

There was a semi-recent case with a 10 year-old committing suicide.

I am pretty sure that “firearms” as a category contains “suicide” as a sub-category, so we need to be clear about that.

In general, we’ve had a decline recently in overdose deaths, although some of that is contextual to COVID and how high they got in early COVID.

But it would make sense that we’d see a rise in youth, because there’s all sorts of factors around peer pressure, socialization, easy to get drugs into a community/high school/etc., and current drugs are often cut with other things to make them more addictive and create repeat customers (provided, of course, that you don’t die from using the cut drugs).

This conversation is generally very tricky to have, because I think most people realize that, unfortunately, some children will die due to horrible circumstances, parental neglect, accidents, disease, etc. No one that I know of personally wants children to die (there are some societal edge cases whereby people do kill children, absolutely).

But then you come to the question of: who is supposed to protect children? The logical answer would be “parents,” and that should be the answer, but it’s also not always possible, especially in an inflation-wrecked capitalist model where some people legitimately work 2–3 jobs, including overnight shifts. Even if you change “parents” to “guardians,” it’s still complicated — because some guardians might be 75, and that’s a different picture than 33 would be.

Alright, so then most people move to “the government,” but I think we broadly understand that the government talks about children, but usually doesn’t do much for children. Look just at the cost of childcare for that one.

Specifically on guns and drugs, people might add “the police,” which is a part of “the government,” but the police are limited in number and cannot be everywhere at once. So while “police” is a good answer, it can’t be the singular answer either.

You can’t protect against everything. Risk is inherently baked into life, and that goes double for children, who are more vulnerable because of age, knowledge, context, and sheer physical size.

But it does beg the question: if we know empirically what is killing children, why aren’t those the first things we are working to stop?