What 5,610 survey records reveal about how young Americans eat, drink, move, and grow — and the quiet inequalities hidden inside the averages.
Every few years, the Census Bureau asks tens of thousands of American parents the same plain questions. Did your child eat a vegetable today? A piece of fruit? A sugary drink? Did they get an hour of play? The answers, gathered for the CDC's Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, sketch a portrait of childhood that no single pediatric visit can. It is not a flattering one.
The picture that emerges is less a crisis of any one habit than a steady erosion of the everyday: a plate where the vegetables are optional, the sugar is routine, and the playground is increasingly empty. None of these measures moved much between the 2021–22 and 2023–24 surveys. The needle is not falling — but it is not rising either.
The survey tracks eight behaviors and outcomes, grouped into four concerns. Bars show the national share for each; the faint whiskers mark the 95% confidence interval. For physical activity, a longer bar is the only good news on the board — it counts the children who do reach an hour of movement a day.
The clearest signal in the data is absence. More than half of one-to-five-year-olds eat vegetables less than once a day, and roughly a third skip fruit. Meanwhile sugar arrives reliably: well over half drink a sweetened beverage in any given week. Between the two survey waves, fruit avoidance eased slightly while vegetable avoidance crept the wrong way.
Among children aged 6 to 13, 17.5% have obesity and another 15.7% are classified as overweight — together, just over a third of this age group. The two conditions are tracked separately because they carry different clinical thresholds, but stacked, they describe a familiar American silhouette taking shape early.
Where a child grows up shapes the odds. Food insecurity ranges from under a quarter of children in Massachusetts and Virginia to more than half in Mississippi. Switch the lens below to compare obesity, physical activity, and the ability to afford nutritious meals across the fifty states and D.C.
Averages flatten the most important part of this data. Sort the obesity figure by race and ethnicity and a fan opens up: obesity among Non-Hispanic Black children (26.5%) runs roughly two-and-a-half times the rate among Non-Hispanic Asian children (10.5%). The same fan appears for sugar-sweetened beverages. These are not gaps in behavior so much as gaps in the food environments children are born into.
The sex gap is consistent and modest. Boys are likelier to reach an hour of daily activity (26% vs 21%) — and also likelier to have obesity (19.3% vs 15.6%). Girls edge ahead only on early-childhood diet, eating slightly more fruit and vegetables than boys at the same ages.
Survey data is never as clean as a chart makes it look, and the gaps matter as much as the values. Of the 5,610 records in this release, almost two in five carry no number at all — the sample was too small to report. Those blanks fall hardest on exactly the groups already at the margins: Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native children, whose few reported estimates come wrapped in confidence intervals wide enough to drive a truck through.
The measures also come from different survey years and different age bands, so they are read together as a portrait, not stacked into a single index. Everything here is parent-reported, and "less than once a day" is a blunt instrument. Treat the direction as solid and the second decimal as decoration.