Bruce Lesley is the president of First Focus on Children. In this blog post, he notes that Southern states have a growing child population, and shrinking number for child champions.
omething is happening to the demographic map of childhood, and it should concern every American worried about our future.
First, across most of the country, children are slowly disappearing.
New Census Bureau 2025 estimates, reviewed by Axios, show the under-18 population fell 2.4%, or by 1.8 million children, nationally between 2020 and 2025.
The West lost more than a million children — down 5.7%. The Northeast dropped 4.1%. The Midwest, 3.9%. Classrooms are emptying, maternity wards are quieting, and the median American is now older than ever, at 39.4 years.
Every region is shrinking its child population, except for one: the South.
The South gained 303,969 more children than it had in 2020 — the only region in the country adding kids, and the only region growing across every age group the Census tracks, from newborns to retirees. Its overall population grew 6%, nearly double the national rate. The growth is concentrated in metro counties, which added nearly 362,000 children even as the rural South kept losing them.
This is not simply a story of families relocating. County-level change reflects births and deaths as much as migration, and the data can’t tell us how much of the South’s growth comes from families moving in versus children being born and staying. However, what it does tell us is where the children are, and increasingly, where they are not.
Here is the issue that should worry us all: The one place in America where the child population is still growing is the one place least prepared and least willing to care for them.
The recently released Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2026 KIDS COUNT Data Book tells a second part of this story.
On their index of overall child well-being, 11 of the 15 lowest-scoring states in the country are in the South. Mississippi sits dead last. Louisiana is 48th. Texas and Oklahoma are tied at 44th. Arkansas, Alabama, West Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky all fall among the bottom one-third of states.
Meanwhile, five of the seven highest-scoring states in the nation are in the Northeast — one of the regions hemorrhaging children.