Why Children Die
3 strategies to keep children alive
One in 25 American 5-year olds won’t live to see their 40th birthday.
Put another way, in every average-sized kindergarten class, one set of parents will bury a child before the child turns 40.
Why the significant spike in children’s death rates?
Guns are responsible for almost half of the deaths annually. Which we already knew from a different data set. Guns kill more children and teens every year than anything else.
How can we keep children alive?
Thoughts and prayers don’t work. Neither does wringing our hands or pointing fingers. Forcing women to have more children to make up the short-fall, knowing that their child has a high chance of dying is barbaric, never mind the reality that a woman in the U.S. is 3 times more likely to die giving birth than women in the UK and Canada. Women (and men) love their children. Having a child die is beyond devastating. But an increasing number of children are dying from preventable causes.
Effective activism can prevent children from dying.
Here are 3 strategies to keep children alive:
1. Address the underlying causes.
Dr. Daniel Bausch spent decades responding to disease outbreaks around the world. In his words, “You realize that’s all on the response side. And do we want to be responding forever? Putting on the band-aid each time something happens, and then the cycle of another outbreak begins?” Increasingly, Bausch says, he’s come to appreciate that, “the impact is with trying to change the system.”
Change the system.
Changing the system involves digging down through the layers to find the underlying causes and fixing them. Politicians and those holding power and wealth do everything in their power to avoid this option. Uganda is criminalizing homosexuality. Convenient culture war diversion when 64% of the youth population is unemployed. The U.S. is in the grip of hysteria over banning books and defunding public education, the better to detract from the reality of 377 school shootings impacting 349,000 students since Columbine, and even a great distraction from the majority of gun deaths which occur outside schools. It’s all bait and switch.
2. Prioritize marketing.
We rarely market social change effectively. We don’t made the issues and impacts relevant to individual parents. In my community of 8,000, with one morning and one afternoon kindergarten at two schools, the gun death statistics translate to one child at each school being gunned down before they are 40. It means that the other 24 children will know a classmate who was shot. In a small community (and every elementary school is a small community of parents and children), every person in that community will be touched by that violence, either directly or knowing it could have been their child. Or their child’s best friend. Or their grandchild. Or their friend’s child.
Yes, yes, if you parse the data you’ll end up with pockets of violence, or horrific events where 20 second graders were slaughtered, statistically devastating one community while ‘sparing’ 19 other communities. This parsing and insistence on painstaking accuracy in reporting statistics and research results is part of the reason nothing changes. It’s so clinical by the time it gets to the public, the impact is diluted. No, we absolutely should not distort the facts, or outright lie, but putting issues in a context which the average person understands is critical.
Effective marketing understands the old adage, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” Rather terrifying that the quote comes from Josef Stalin, who the Russian historian Roy Medvedev estimates killed 20 million of his own people. It’s likely the same reason that President Putin’s most outspoken critic, Alexei Navalny, is still alive while the death toll of Russian and mercenary soldiers in the Ukraine war is estimated to be 60,000-70,000 combat fatalities and 200,000-250,000 combat casualties, with no sign of slowing. Yes, there have been protests against the war, but not enough to topple President Putin. The calculus in killing one outspoken dissident is different, it’s like ripping the curtain off the Wizard of Oz, dangerous to the person behind the curtain what the public might see, whereas large numbers always distort and detract from reality.
Activists need to tell the stories of one person, not the cast of thousands. Make the issue relevant in a personal way, “it could happen to me”, not “it couldn’t happen here”.
3. Put it in writing.
The U.S. is the only country not to have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The treaty is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in human history. It says that childhood is separate from adulthood, and lasts until 18; it is a special, protected time, in which children must be allowed to grow, learn, play, develop and flourish with dignity.
I can not think of a single issue which impacts the lives, health, and welfare of American children that would not be directly impacted by ratifying the treaty. And yet we don’t do it. Opponents argue U.S. sovereignty would be undermined. And yet the most oppressive regimes on Earth have no such concerns about UN interference in their sovereignty. There is concern that the treaty would interfere in the private lives of families, particularly the rights of parents to educate or discipline their children. We know that parents around the world do not all abide by laws designed to protect children, but the signed intent starts the slow but inexorable change to protecting children, it starts the wheels of social change turning.
Social change, every social change, requires action.
To be a more effective activist:
Address the underlying causes.
Prioritize marketing
Put it in writing.