54 Children a Day

Lenore Skenazy
Thu, 15 Jan 2026 17:26:12 -0800
Opinion

What would you think of a wealthy country where kids ages 1-19 were 80% more likely to die than if they lived in a different but equally advanced country?

You might wonder what the heck was going on. And by the way — where is that place?

And I'd have to tell you, sadly: You're living in it, and what is going on is complicated and has been going on for a while.
Updated: Thu Jan 15, 2026

What would you think of a wealthy country where kids ages 1-19 were 80% more likely to die than if they lived in a different but equally advanced country?

You might wonder what the heck was going on. And by the way — where is that place?

And I'd have to tell you, sadly: You're living in it, and what is going on is complicated and has been going on for a while.

A recent Children's Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute study, led by Dr. Christopher Forrest, looked at infant and child mortality rates in 19 high-income countries. It tracked the numbers for 16 years and found that American kids' health has been deteriorating steadily all the while.

American babies are now twice as likely to die from premature birth and sudden infant death syndrome as babies in peer countries. As for older kids, homicide, substance use and vehicle crashes killed American children "at rates far exceeding international norms."

American children were also less healthy all around, thanks to soaring rates of depression, anxiety and obesity.

Compared to the per capita rates in peer countries, we are seeing an EXTRA 54 CHILD DEATHS EVERY SINGLE DAY.

I called Forrest to ask what he blamed this on and was quickly told that playing the blame game is not the way to think about (or solve) this crisis. While some variables are obvious — we have more guns than other wealthy countries, for instance, so kids here are 15 times more likely to die by firearm — the other variables are hard to tease apart. Besides, what he prefers to do is to look at the opposite: What factors can make a healthy, happy childhood far more likely? What do children need to thrive?

"The more I've gotten into this work, the more I've realized that a lot of solutions ... are local," Forrest said. And the best solution locally is for people to "engage."

By this he means something as simple as engaging with family members so that loneliness doesn't fester. It also means going beyond that to engage with the neighbors. Visit. Help each other out. And make the neighborhood kid-friendly.

Kids need a place where they can "play outdoors with each other, creating their own games, exploring the physical and social world together," Forrest told the website Study Finds. "Remember that when children learn through their own exploration, they learn better and retain their learnings longer than when they are shown how to do something by an adult. Unsupervised outdoor play is a huge missing ingredient in our children's lives."

When he himself was a boy, Forrest recalled, "We would go to this dirt pile and we were constantly negotiating with each other. And we know from our own experiences, and from the research, that empathy and compassion are built from embodied play."

As we spoke, Forrest looked out his home office window and said he saw no kids. In the Baltimore neighborhood he lived in before this, the neighbors loosely organized a plan to always have one adult keeping their eye on the street so everyone else could let their kids run outside after school.

Obviously, more play is not going to solve infant mortality. But obesity? Depression? Loneliness? It's certainly not going to make things worse, and the price is right.

What's more, "Kids are canaries in the coal mine," Forrest said. As community declines, so does childhood. But as kids come back to the streets — back to life — everyone benefits.

Right now, "55% of girls say they are almost always sad," said Forrest, quoting just one stat from his study. "How can that not be a national crisis?"

How can "go out and play" not be a national prescription?