October is Health Literacy Month, and Americans are entering the fall following a concerning summer for children’s health that mirrors the decade’s worst trends.
H.H.S. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to express alarm over an “epidemic” of chronic illness in America’s kids. Just what stats to measure for that epidemic have become increasingly split between researchers and the Trump administration. The most recent disagreement: the claim that acetaminophen—the active drug in Tylenol—plays a role in autism birth rates.
Meanwhile, a study released over the summer in the Journal of the American Medical Association by researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and UCLA’s Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities found that children today are unhealthier than they were two decades ago across 170 different indicators. This adds up to “an overall decline in the health of children and youth” in the U.S., according to senior study author Christopher Forrest, a professor of pediatrics at the Philadelphia-area hospital.
Put another way: The kids aren’t doing well.
The study highlights a concerning upward trend in the prevalence of diagnosed chronic diseases and mental health issues among children living in the United States. Through their meta-analysis, the researchers discovered that, across 10 pediatric centers, the percentage of patients between 3 and 17 years old who were diagnosed with at least one chronic condition rose 5.8% from 2011 to 2023. These chronic conditions range across all of children’s health, from obesity to insomnia. The study also identified that early puberty, depressive symptoms and loneliness are all on the rise among this population.
The data on obesity has been especially worrying to pediatricians. Over nearly five decades, the U.S. youth obesity rate has risen from 5.2% to 19.7%, according to the National Obesity Monitor.
Experts are also concerned about another dire health impact on America’s kids: gun violence. Since 2020, firearms have been the number one cause of death for children. According to a 2024 report from Johns Hopkins’ Center for Gun Violence Solutions, firearm-related death rates among children ages 1 to 17 have risen by 106% since 2013. That rise helps explain one of the findings in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia study: between 2007 and 2022, the ratio of gun-related deaths among American youth aged 1 to 19 compared to the peer-country average nearly doubled.
Premature birth is also on the rise, along with the health consequences that can linger into childhood and teenage years. Forrest’s study found that the long-term effects of having been born prematurely are worse in the U.S. than in other countries. The researchers further found that, since 2013, the percentage of preterm babies born in the U.S. increased from 9.4% to 10.4%, with disproportionate impacts on Black Americans.
The survival rate for extremely preterm infants, however, increased between 1990 and 2022, according to a 2024 study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Preterm babies are at higher than average risk of respiratory issues, which experts say is further exacerbated by recent environmental triggers like excessive urban pollution, wildfires and heat waves.
The deteriorating state of children’s health across this “broad spectrum of indicators,” as Forrest of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia put it, could have as many other root causes.
Among them is likely poor childhood nutrition, too. A 2020 study by Tufts University researchers found that more than half of U.S. kids maintain poor-quality diets, which include too few fruits, vegetables, grains, and fish, and too much added sugar, salt, and ultra-processed food.
Ultra-processed foods — defined by Harvard Health as “made mostly from substances extracted from foods, such as fats, starches, added sugars, and hydrogenated fats” — have themselves recently made headlines as a problematic staple of the American diet. They’ve been a regular target of the conservative Make America Healthy Again Movement, of which Kennedy is a key figurehead. A 2024 National Institutes of Health study linked UPFs to over 30 health problems, especially incident cardiovascular disease-related mortality and type 2 diabetes. In 2021, researchers found that UPFs made up around 67% of daily caloric intake among U.S. children aged 2 to 19 — though some experts caution that not all UPFs are bad, as a store-bought loaf of whole-grain bread is healthier than a packaged donut, for instance.
Synthetic food dyes like Red 40, Yellow 5 and Blue 1 could be another source of current children’s health trends. These colorants are found in everything from candy to sausage meat. Linked to hyperactivity, irritability and moodiness, artificial food coloring negatively impacts children’s general health, according to researchers at Ohio State University among many others. The FDA banned Red 3 this January, citing similar findings.
Poverty remains another variable. In 2023, 17.9% of U.S. households with children were classified as food-insecure. Healthy, organic, unprocessed foods are expensive and less shelf-stable for struggling families to rely on — and these same food-insecure households are often healthcare-insecure households. As of 2023, four million children in the U.S. were without healthcare.