Successful social policies for children are critical to America's future. Yet the status of children in America suggests that the nation's policies may not be serving them well. Infant and child mortality rates in the United States remain high compared with those of other western industrialized nations; child poverty rates have worsened in the past decade; and poor health care, child abuse, and inadequate schooling and child care persist.

In this book, a group of renowned scholars presents a new set of social policies designed to alleviate these problems and to help satisfy the needs of all children. The policies deal with the most important domains affecting children from birth through the passage to adulthood: child care, schooling, transition to work, health care, income security, physical security, and child abuse.

Although nearly everyone agrees that children are in trouble, there is considerable debate over what kind of trouble they are in, why this is so, and whether government can or should more actively seek to solve these problems. Americans are evenly divided on the question of whether children's problems are more economic or moral in origin. The seven proposals in this volume both reflect and cut across ideological disagreements.

Some for more government, others for less; but all call for different government methods for achieving socially agreed-upon goals to help America's children.