New Zealand ranked 34th out of 41 countries in a recent report on youth wellbeing, and our Children's Commissioner says it shows there's a lot of ignorance amongst Kiwis about child welfare.
"I don't think most New Zealanders know how bad it is at the bad end," Judge Andrew Becroft told The Nation on Saturday.
"There are 30 percent [of Kiwi parents] who do badly, and of that you'd say 10 percent that do very badly - as bad or if not worse than western world counterparts."
Mr Becroft is challenging the Government to tighten their targets, and reduce the rates of child obesity and poverty.
He says child poverty is not hard to measure, and "it's within our ability if we had the will," to fix our child welfare problems.
"Children are people in their own right and they're entitled to have their views heard," he says.
The UNICEF Innocenti Report was published in the middle of June. It provides an assessment of child well-being across country members of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union.
Compared to the other countries assessed, New Zealand ranked in the bottom quarter on many of the measures used.
See the video for the full interview.
Newshub.
