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2010 KIDS COUNT Data Book

Abstract

2010 KIDS COUNT Data BookThe Data Book reveals that Florida improved on five of the 10 measures affecting child well-being since 2000. Florida Data Booklet (pdf).

The 21st annual Data Book is complemented by the expanded KIDS COUNT Data Center, which contains hundreds of measures of child well-being and allows users to create maps and graphs of the data at the national, state, county, and city level. To access information for Florida go to http://datacenter.kidscount.org/fl.

Child mortality continues to improve.
Florida's child death rate in 2007 was 21 deaths per 100,000 children, 13 percent lower than the rate in 2000 and 9 percent below the 2006 rate.

Florida has one of the nation's highest shares of children in single-parent families.
Florida tied for 43rd nationally-among the bottom 10 states-in the percentage of children in single-parent families. In 2008, 36 percent of the state's kids lived in such families-the same share as in 2000.

Rise in low-birthweight babies might be stalling.
The share of low-birthweight babies in Florida remained at 8.7 percent between 2006 and 2007, which suggests that this measure's steady rise since the 1990s could be stalling. The figure was 8 percent in the year 2000.

Child poverty hovers around the national average.
The percentage of children in Florida living in poverty has ranged between 17 percent and 19 percent since 2000. The state's child poverty rate was 18 percent in 2008-the same as the national rate. This represented slightly over 721,000 children in Florida. (A family of two adults and two children were considered poor if their income in 2008 fell below $21,834.)