Two reports came out this week that made for grim reading.
One was the Unicef report – the UN Children's Fund rankings that looks at different measures of child wellbeing.
Physical and mental health, basic literacy and numeracy, child abuse, government policies designed to support parents andchildren - it's a comprehensive report.
And what the report says is that we are failing our children. Our youth suicide rate is the second highest in the developed world – more than twice the average among the countries surveyed.
Too many of our young children are overweight or obese; on physical wellbeing, we were 33rd out of the 41 countries surveyed.
More than a third of the nation's 15-year-olds (36 per cent) don't have basic proficiency in reading and maths. On and on it went. Fail, fail, fail.
The only area where we could take some pride was being number one for the quality of the environment, which measures air pollution and water quality. Whoopdedoo.
Another report out, on the same day, from Auckland University, showed that mental health problems among our young people had more than doubled in the past 20 years - and will only get worse as the impact from the response to Covid-19 takes effect.
Experts say the issues around our young people's poor mental health predate the Covid response but Covid has come along and poured "psychological gasoline" on an already vulnerable group.
Nearly a quarter of the young people surveyed were mentally unwell and, overall, nearly 6 per cent of the nearly 8000 13 to 19-year-olds surveyed had attempted to take their own lives.
What a damning indictment on our society.
To be fair, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who is also the Minister for Child Poverty Reduction, had seen the writing on the wall at the last election. She campaigned on improving the lot of children by setting targets designed to shift families out of poverty and last year rolled out the Families Package which gave some households an extra $75 a week and extended free GP visits for children under 14.
A set of ambitious targets were set by the coalition Government but heaven knows how those targets have been affected by the Covid response.
There is no quick fix for any of the issues afflicting our young. The experts say it's poverty that leads to children failing and the stats would support them.
A hungry child can't learn, nor can a child moving from school to school because their parents can't find a secure tenancy.
Kids in households where it's hard to pay the bills are more likely to get sick because of cold, damp conditions and overcrowding, and they are more likely to leave school without qualifications.
But a couple of generations ago growing up poor didn't mean you were destined to fail.
You might have had to wear hand-me-downs to school, the food you ate might have been filling rather than nutritious, but there was never any question that you wouldn't do well in life.
Too many of our young children are overweight or obese; on physical wellbeing, we were 33rd out of the 41 countries surveyed.
There was an expectation among parents who might have minimal English or who had left school before they turned 15 that their kids would do better than they did. And that's by and large what happened.
The families might have been poor in a material sense but there was no poverty of ambition or spirit.
Children really don't need much to succeed and make the most of their potential. A warm, dry home. Ideally, two parents who care for them and love them (but one person will do and it doesn't even have to be a parent).
They will forgive a lot, young people, but I wonder whether this generation will ever be able to forgive us for failing them so badly.
If only the Government responded with the same urgency and with the same free-spending attitude to the public health crisis that is the state of our young people as they have done to Covid-19.
Then the young might start to believe that they are valued.
