October 2008
America’s Health Starts With
Healthy Children:
How Do States Compare?
Executive Summary Page 2
Introduction Page 5
A National Overview Page 13
How Do States Compare? Page 18
A State Snapshot: North Carolina Page 24
All State Profiles: www.commissiononhealth.org/statedata
1
America’s Health Starts With Healthy Children
A ll parents want their children to grow up to live long, healthy lives, yet—unfortunately—not
all children have the same opportunity to be healthy. Factors such as where children live, how
much education their parents have and their race and ethnicity can make a real difference in their
health—as children and as adults.
America’s children are this nation’s greatest resource, yet tremendous health differences exist among them—
gaps that contradict the premise of equal opportunity for all Americans, undermine our economic productivity
and affect our ability to compete globally.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America is examining how we live our
lives and how the surrounding social, economic and physical environment can affect our health. Based on this
inquiry, the Commission will identify specific, feasible steps to improve all Americans’ health.
This chartbook, America’s Health Starts With Healthy Children: How Do States Compare?, examines the health
of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds in every state to document how healthy our nation’s
children are now and how healthy they could be if we as a nation were realizing our full health potential.
Why a chartbook on children’s health? Research has consistently shown that brain, cognitive and behavioral
development early in life are strongly linked to health outcomes later in life, including cardiovascular disease
and stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, smoking, drug use and depression. The right opportunities
in early childhood can put a child on the path to good health.
For most of us—children and adults alike—there are big gaps between how healthy we are and