Child Welfare Issues
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* Sept. 22 was the third anniversary of the United Nations summit for children. At that summit, a declaration of children’s 10 basic rights was presented to the world’s leaders for their implementation and co-sponsorship. But three years later, we still spend less than 2% of all foreign aid funds on child-related welfare issues and rank 19th out of 20 other nations in the percentage of our GNP which we allocate for such humanitarian work.
Somehow, we as Americans have been led to believe that we hold the welfare of the world’s children in a higher regard than the truth of our spending actually indicates. Besides not actually spending a very high percentage of our GNP on child welfare-related issues, we are still not officially signatory to the original 1990 declaration of those 10 areas of child welfare which are deemed critical.
STEVEN K. THOMAS
San Clemente
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