UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre did a study awhile back: ‘Measuring Child Poverty in the World’s Rich Countries‘. Sadly, the United States, one of the most wealthiest and most powerful nations in the developed world, ranked second on the child poverty list. How is that even possible?

According to the Children’s Defense Fund, one fifth of American children live in poverty. Every day, almost 70 babies die before reaching their first birthday. Add to that the fact that every year, more than 3 million reports of child abuse are made. In fact, current statistics show that a child is reported as abused every 10 seconds. And those are only the reported ones. Many go unreported.

So what are we doing to turn this terrible tide? Well, the answer is: not much. The truth is sometimes a harsh and heartbreaking thing, but there you have it. We are not even making a dent in this enormous problem. As a nation or as a state. But some states are doing better than others in their fight to combat the abuse and neglect of children.

WalletHub, an online team whose usual subject matter is personal finance topics, chose recently to turn their formidable analytical abilities to the subject of child welfare. They examined 16 key benchmark issue, including infant death rates, the number of children in foster care and the percentage of maltreated children per state. The results they came up with don’t make Michigan look very good.

After all of the data was analyzed, each state was ranked according to three criteria: Early Foundations & Economic Well-Being, Health, and Education. The results? New Hampshire, Minnesota and New Jersey were awarded the top three spots.  But where did Michigan come in on the rankings, you may wonder…..

Thirty-first. We didn’t even make the top half of the list. And while it’s comforting to be able to say that we weren’t the worst ranked state when it comes to child welfare, we didn’t even make the rank of “average”. Which, let’s face it, is dreadful. It’s embarrassing.

We didn’t even make it onto any of their sub-categorized lists which tracked figures for the states with the lowest and highest numbers for critical issues. Categories like “Lowest % of children in foster care”, “Lowest infant death rate” and “Lowest number of maltreated children”.

So what do we do about this? Well, the team at WalletHub asked themselves the same question, and decided that they just weren’t up to answering the question. So they went in search of some experts. People who have built their careers and professions on the issue of social welfare and child abuse. And what did these experts have to say on the matter? You’ll have to come back next time, when we will be looking at some of the proposed solutions they had to offer.