WASHINGTON (AP) -- Fewer teenagers are having babies or dropping out of high school since the start of the decade, but slightly more live in poverty with parents who don't work year round.
A report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation charity found that measures of health and income for children and teens are no longer improving as much as they did in the 1990s. Instead, children are "treading water," said foundation President Doug Nelson.
"We're not talking about a catastrophe or the bottom falling out of anything," Nelson said. But, he added, "We've still got to do some poverty-rate reduction. We've got to make improvements from those 2000 numbers."
The findings were released this week as part of the annual Kids Count report on the health and well-being of children and teens. The report measures each state's progress on 10 statistics, including infant mortality, poverty rates, single-parent families and babies born with low birth weights.
States in the Northeast and upper Midwest scored the best. At the top: New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota and Iowa. Southern states did the worst: Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina and Tennessee.
Louisiana was ranked 49th, even before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last year.
"We're a really poor state," said Judy Watts, president and chief executive of Agenda for Children, an advocacy group in Louisiana. "Everything starts to unravel as poverty takes a grip on children and families."
Watts said conditions for children are even worse since the hurricane, even with help from the state and federal governments.
"There's certainly been help, but I do not believe it has been adequate," Watts said.
Nationally, there were improvements in eight of the 10 measurements in the 1990s, when the economy was booming, government-sponsored health care for children was expanded significantly and welfare reform helped move hundreds of thousands of families from welfare to work.
One issue that has continued to improve: teen pregnancies. Teenagers' birth rates fell from 48 per 1,000 females in 2000 to 42 per 1,000 in 2003.
"Every state fell, every racial group fell," said Bill O'Hare, a senior fellow at the Casey foundation. "Teen abortion rates and teen pregnancy rates are both down, so it's not a trade off. Fewer teenagers are having sex, and of those who are having sex, more are using contraception."
The Casey foundation uses the most recent statistics available from the Census Bureau and other government agencies for its report, now in its 17th year.
The U.S. improved in four areas from last year, declined in three and stayed the same in three. Most of the changes were small.