Publisher's Synopsis
Children's health, or pediatrics, focuses on the well-being of children from conception through adolescence. It is vitally concerned with all aspects of children's growth and development and with the unique opportunity that each child has to achieve their full potential as a healthy adult.
Children are vital to the nation's present and its future. Parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles are usually committed to providing every advantage possible to the children in their families, and to ensuring that they are healthy and have the opportunities that they need to fulfill their potential. Yet communities vary considerably in their commitment to the collective health of children and in the resources that they make available to meet children's needs. This is reflected in the ways in which communities address their collective commitment to children, specifically to their health.
In recent years, there has been an increased focus on issues that affect children and on improving their health. Children have begun to be recognized not only for who they are today but for their future roles in creating families, powering the workforce, and making American democracy work. Mounting evidence that health during childhood sets the stage for adult health not only reinforces this perspective, but also creates an important ethical, social, and economic imperative to ensure that all children are as healthy as they can be. Healthy children are more likely to become healthy adults.
Within this context, it is reasonable to ask what it means for children to be healthy and whether the United States is adequately assessing and monitoring the health of its children. Do available surveillance and monitoring approaches provide the information necessary to ensure that common priorities and shared resources are aligned with children's needs and deployed to optimize their health? Are there ways to improve methods to better guide policies and practices designed to make children healthier? This report addresses these questions.
