The way 'material well being' was measured had 3 criteria, 2 of which were '% of children living in households below 50% of national average', and '% of children in households without jobs'.
The first criteria is worthless because relative poverty is a terrible way of measuring wealth (we've been over this before often enough), and the second one seems fairly dubious too - some people are going to do their best to quit work in order to spend time with their kids if they are in a position to do so.
Anyway, the single most important factor when it comes to the upbringing of children is the intellectual environment in which they are raised. The state schooling system in Britain (and the US afaik) is hopelessly broken and is designed from the bottom-up to engender undesirable characteristics in children (conformity, stupiidty, anti-intellectualism). As such i dont have any a priori problem with a report that states they are terrible places for children to be raised. However this report seems to concentrate on relatively non-essential factors and focuses too much on 'average' children (ie socialist countries are automatically going to come top due to the criteria used).
edit: the 'education' section of the report is a good example of this - all the focus is on the percentage of children who manage to reach a minimum level of literacy/numeracy rather than the extent to which the best are pushed to higher levels. This constant focus on average people makes the report somewhat uninteresting to me.
I did find the following part interesting though, because I've been having a lot of discussions with a friend recently about the extent to which people's in-built expectations about what they deserve from life influences what they end up getting:
Quote:
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The third is the percentage of children who, when asked "what kind of job do you expect to have when you are 30 years old?" replied by listing a job requiring low skills. [...] In countries like the UK, France or Germany, the proportion looking for low-skilled work is more than 30%. In the US it is less than 15% [the lowest in the report]
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American kids apparently have higher ambitions on average than kids elsewhere, regardless of their poor education system. I think that's a fairly strong statement about cultural attitudes and the extent to which a fundamental orientation towards success gets transmitted.
edit2: the metrics used in the 'relationships' section are horribly worthless.
edit3: according to the 'behavior and risks' section a culture in which many children have been in fights and have tried alcohol/weed is intrinsically bad
