Abby McCloskey, Dallas Morning News, March 18, 2024

We want life to be up and to the right. We want to end up with more money than we started with. We want our families to be less dysfunctional than the one we grew up in. We want better medicines, technologies, freedoms and art — for the world to become a more enlightened place.

Not only do we want these things, we can subconsciously believe they are our destiny — that progress is almost inevitable save for an accident or unexpected crisis. But it hasn’t been up-and-to-the right for our kids for a while now.

Let’s go back a few decades. The last time America had an official, comprehensive pulse on child well-being was the National Commission on Children in 1991. The commission was created by Congress “to serve as a forum on behalf of the children of the nation.” It was a bipartisan body whose 34 members were appointed by President George H.W. Bush, the president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, and the speaker of the House of Representatives. Its final report posited the question: “Are children worse off?”