The Relationship Between Children's Health and Intellectual Development

The focus of this paper is on functional health status of children in the population. More specifically, we examine a single aspect of functional health status -- intellectual development of children. In a multivariate context, we examine the relationships between the health indexes and cognitive development of children from six to 11 years of age in Cycle II of the U.S. Health Examination Survey (HES). We present the first set of such estimates for a representative sample of non-institutionalized white children in the United States. We compare them with existing findings for underdeveloped countries, Great Britain, and low income families in the United States.