Roos – no birth differences

We also have looked at, because one of the areas we spend a lot of time on is looking at health of these young people. And one of the most interesting things is that despite the fact that we find these huge differences, for example, in educational outcomes. We compare these kids who have all these risk factors at birth, we find very few differences in key health indicators. Overwhelmingly, whether they have 3 risk factors, whether they’re born in poverty, child is eventually taken into care, mother who’s a teen, the children tend to start out, over 90% of them have a normal birth weight, normal gestational age and an Apgar score, which physicians take at 1 minute and 5 minutes after the child is born to say is this basically a normal, healthy, thriving child or not – very few differences at birth. Within a year one finds very big differences in hospitalization rates across these kids with those who are identified as at risk having much higher hospitalization rates than others. One risk is better than two, which is infinitely better than three  

One of the questions, which we’re always asked is, is this inevitable that these kids are just not going to make it? And that’s why those birth characteristics are so interesting because we’re showing that at birth these kids look, in fact, like everybody else.