Is Your Neighborhood Healthy for Children?

Approximately 49 million children live in the 100 largest metro areas in the United States—that's two-thirds of America's total under-18 population. But some places are healthier places for children to grow up than others. A new interactive tool rates U.S. neighborhoods on how healthy they are for child development and maps who lives in them.

The tool is a part of a project called diversitydatakids.org run by Brandeis University's Heller School of Social Policy and Management and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. It measures how neighborhoods fare on the "Child Opportunity Index"—a scale that evaluates neighborhoods on all the conditions and resources available to kids for healthy physical, social, and cognitive development, says Dolores Acevedo-Garcia of the Heller School.