7 years of top child health concerns in USA

Each year, the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health asks a national sample of adults to identify health topics that are a “big problem” for children and teens.

We looked at the top 10 health concerns from last 7 years and below are some trends which stand out.

We aggregated the top 3 concerns from each year and found some interesting insights.

Number of time a health concern was either ranked 1, 2 or 3 in last 7 years

Childhood Obesity

We clubbed unhealthy eating and not enough exercise for the analysis. This concern has topped the list for first 5 years (2011–15) and has been ranked 2 for last 2 years.

When we looked further, we found children 8 and younger spend an average of 2 hours and 19 minutes a day with screen media. About the time that children are teenagers they’re spending over, let’s say, 6 hours engaged with the screen devices. (source)

Cyberbullying/Bullying

Cyberbullying has topped the list for last 2 years. What is more worrying is the concern is on a increasing trend. You can see this clearly from the fact that the rank as “big concern” has gone up from rank 5 in 2011 to top rank 1 in 2017.

Rank for cyberbullying as top health concern has gone up from 5 to 1 and % of people who think it is a big problem has gone up from 24% in 2011 to 62% in 2017.

This also clearly ties back to the trend that on average, children are getting their first smartphones around age 10, down from age 12 in 2012 (source).

You can find more stats based on poll we did with parents here.

Drug abuse

Drug abuse has been consistently included in the top 3 concerns for last 7 years, but has never been the top concern. The worrying concern here is that even though Drug abuse has been known problem for a while, there is no indication of this slowing down as a concern. This points to either that enough is not being done to solve this problem or whatever has been done has not been effective in making people feel more secure about their kids being safe from drug abuse.

Drug Abuse is consistently ranked in top 3

Smoking and Tobacco Use

Finally a good trend, smoking and tobacco use which was in top 3 concerns for year 2011–12 has not been included in top 10 concerns for last 2 years (2016-17). So whatever we are doing to handle smoking is working!

We created an aggregated list of concerns which have ever been in top 10

Number of times in last 7 years a concern was in top 10 concerns

Internet Safety

Internet Safety has consistently remained in the list for last 7 years but has gained more significance in the last 3 years, mirroring the trend we saw with cyberbullying and bullying.

Internet Safety has gone gone from being ranked 9 in 2013 to be consistency ranked 4 among last 3 years.

Stress

Stress is the only other topic apart from Obesity, Cyberbullying/bullying, Drug Abuse and Internet Safety which has remained on the list consistently for 7 years

School violence

School violence and Gun related injuries appeared on the list for years 2014, 2015, 2016. These coincide with couple of mass shooting which happened during the same time: Umpqua Community College Shooting in 2015, Sandy Hook Elementary Shooting in Dec 2012

A note on methodology and source data.

We clubbed childhood obesity, not enough exercise and not enough opportunity for physical activity into one concern and moved ranks accordingly.

For years 2011–13 the survey was done keeping children of their communities in mind vs for year 2014–17 the data is for kids across USA

Here are the links to reports from the last 7 years: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017

Originally published at blog.trudyapp.com on January 15, 2018.