Children's Environmental Health

Posted on 06/27/2011 @ 01:54 PM

In an article in today's New York Times, Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, discusses how environmental risk factors disproportionately affect children from low-income households.

In her article, "Born to Lose: Health Inequality at Birth," Folbre looks at recent findings from the current American Economic Review showing that "children of black mothers who dropped out of high school are three times as likely as children of white college-educated mothers to suffer low birth weight," which is often a predictor of future health problems.

Exposure to environmental toxins contribute to this inequality, with black and Hispanic children much more likely than white children to be born in close proximity to sources of toxic air pollutants and waste dumps.

Read the full article here.

Florida regularly ranks in the bottom half of states in child health, largely due to the high rate of babies born underweight and children who die within their first year of life. Research shows that those with better childhood health earn and save more money, are more productive, and are less dependent on welfare and public subsidies (The State of Florida's Children).
 
Information and resources for parent skill building are very important, especially in areas that we might not expect, such as the environment as it relates to your child’s health.

For more information, you can get the facts about children's environmental health on the EPA's Office of Children's Health Protection website. You can also learn about the special vulnerabilities of children to environmental risks from the Children's Environmental Health Initiative, a program of the Nicholas School of Environment at Duke University.