The Kids Are All Right

Here are a few stats to remember when you hear about the free-range kids getting picked up by police in Maryland. According to this Washington Post WonkBlog post, there's never been a safer time to be a kid in America:

• "In 1935, for instance, there were nearly 450 deaths for every 100,000 children aged 1 to 4. Today, there are fewer than 30 deaths for every 100,000 kids in that age group -- more than a tenfold decrease."
• Most of that change is from vaccines, of course, but "mortality rates have continued to drop in recent decades, too.... Across all three age categories, mortality rates have fallen by nearly half since 1990."
• "As of 2008, the homicide rate for kids under the age of 14 stood at a near-record low 1.5 cases per 100,000... And the homicide rate for teens ages 14 to 17 plummeted from 12 homicides per 100,000 in 1993 to just 5.1 in 2008, another near-record low. Long story short: for a kid between the ages of 5 and 14 today, the chances of premature death by any means are roughly 1 in 10,000, or 0.01 percent."

And that's not even getting into the fact that most of the homicides that do occur among kids are at the hands of someone they know.