At what has been billed the biggest-ever world summit, 70 or 80 world leaders have come to New York City this weekend, and put aside discussions of budgets, armaments and wars. Instead they're talking about the condition of the world's children and discussing the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been hammered out by the United Nations and is awaiting ratification by member nations. They're also debating a set of goals for improving the conditions of children in the 1990s.

Since children are the future of any country, common sense tells us that they should be privileged -- the people, who get the best of everything -- but this is far from the case. Indeed, some of the statistics about the condition of children throughout the world suggest that what many of them get is the worst of everything: the worst health care; the poorest nutrition; the worst in education, if they get any at all; and the least protection from exploitation. And in times of economic and political crisis the social programs that do serve children are the last to be funded and the first ones cut.

Here are a few figures from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Some are undoubtedly
conservative:

  • In developing nations, 15 million children under age five die each year, many from diseases that could easily be prevented or cured. For example 3 million die because they haven't been immunized, and 2.5 million die from dehydration caused by diarrhea, which in most cases could have been cured with sufficient liquids and a packet of minerals that costs about I0 cents
  • Of the children in developing nations who live, 40 percent under the age of five suffer from malnutrition. And 40 percent of rural families have no safe drinking water. 
  • More than I0 million children are refugees, and 80 million live on the streets. I00 million children, many of them so young they would be in primary school -- if they went to school -- work in miserable and often life-threatening conditions. Sometimes they are virtually slaves. And this economic condition is on the increase.
  • A corollary to this, of course, is that I00 million children are not getting even a primary-school education.

What can the World Summit and the Convention on the Rights of the Child do about the conditions that create these staggering figures? The Convention, which will have the force of law in nations that ratify it, sets minimum standards for the treatment of children in a number of basic areas: food, shelter, and health care; protection against violence and exploitation; and education. And the goals for the 1990s that Summit participants are considering include reducing child and maternal mortality and malnutrition by specific percentages and providing universal access to basic education. Achieving these goals will cost money. The program that UNICEF believes would save the lives of 50 million children over the next decade would cost $2.5 billion. But UNICEF also points out that's what American cigarette companies spend on advertising in one year.

We should do our part to make the 1990s the decade of the child by urging President Bush to send the convention to the Senate for approval. Over 100 nations have already signed the document, and the U.S. should delay no longer. And depending on what the world leaders at the Summit approve as goals for the 1990s, we should give these goals as much support as we can, both private and public.

The Summit, with its focus on caring for children, should also encourage us to take a look at some of our own statistics. It would be a mistake to equate the condition of American children with that of the children in poor developing countries, but it would be an even bigger mistake to fool ourselves into thinking that everything is fine:

  • Our infant mortality rate (40,000 per year) is higher than that of 17 other countries, including Hong Kong, Singapore and almost all of Western Europe. The infant mortality rate for African-American babies is higher than that of 27 other countries, including Cuba and Costa Rica.
  • One of four U.S. children under 5 years of age lives in poverty. And despite ten years of what some people call the greatest period of prosperity our country has ever known, the percentage of all children living in poverty has risen from 11 percent to 15 percent.
  • Last year's Education Summit set as a goal that all U.S. children come to school ready to learn. But 12 percent of our children suffer from significant and preventable learning impairment by the time they enter school. The causes are prenatal exposure to alcohol, drugs and tobacco; malnutrition; lead poisoning; and child abuse and neglect.

This is not a good time to be talking about spending money -- here or anywhere. In the U.S. we have the Savings and Loan Crisis, the Gulf Crisis, the Budget Crisis; and other countries have their pressing problems, too. But it's hard to ignore the eloquence of all these figures. Or it should be. And if nothing else moves us, self-interest should do the job because children are the most important resource a country has. Here in the U.S., we worry about being competitive; we watch for signs that our economy is in decline. And yet we save money on programs that would nurture our future citizens. Perhaps the World Summit for Children will help all of us - in the U.S. and elsewhere -- to take a new look on how we must prepare for the future. I hope so.