Congratulations: Children in the United States do not have the worst quality of life in the developed world. That honor is held by Britain--with the United States a close second. America's infant mortality rate is exceeded only by Hungary's; New Zealand is the only country where more people under 19 meet violent deaths each year. On teenage motherhood, we're way ahead: forty-six births for every 1,000 girls between 15 and 19. The closest challenger (New Zealand again) can manage only thirty. Children born in the richest nation on earth are also the most likely to be noticeably poorer than their neighbors: 21.7 percent of America's children live in households whose income is less than half the national median. Britain, at 16.2 percent, comes second in the inequality sweepstakes.

The statistics come from a new Unicef report, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries, which has been largely ignored in the United States. The report assesses children's lives in twenty-one wealthy nations under a range of headings, from material well-being to family and peer relationships. Like all such studies, this one has its flaws, some of them self-acknowledged. But there is no mistaking the underlying pattern or the weight of suffering and injustice it represents.

The study shows that the two countries with the greatest economic inequality are also failing their children in less tangible ways. British children reported the worst family and peer relationships and the highest incidence overall of risky behavior (smoking, drinking and unprotected sex); American children ranked third from the bottom (above Britain and Poland) in terms of their personal feelings of well-being. Sure, American adolescents drink and smoke less than kids in some other countries. But the cost of the right's attempt to meet teenage sexuality with moralizing and repression rather than education is obvious in the teenage pregnancy rates. The country that came out best overall in the study was the Netherlands, known for its traditions of openness and tolerance.

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