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Progress towards the Triple Billion targets and SDGs.

Despite setbacks caused by the pandemic, the world has made some progress towards achieving the Triple Billion targets and health-related indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since 2018, an additional 1.5 billion people achieved better health and well-being. Despite gains, rising obesity, high tobacco use and persistent air pollution hinder progress.

Universal Health Coverage expanded to 585 million more people, falling short of the goal for one billion. Additionally, only 777 million more people are likely to be adequately protected during health emergencies by 2025, falling short of the one billion target set in WHO’s 13th General Programme of Work. This protection is increasingly important as the effects of climate change and other global crises increasingly threaten health security.

“While we have made progress towards the Triple Billion targets since 2018, a lot still needs to be done. Data is WHO’s superpower. We need to use it better to deliver more impact in countries,” said Dr Samira Asma, WHO Assistant Director-General for Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact. “Without accelerating progress, it is unlikely that any of the health SDGs will be met by 2030.”

The latest edition of the World Health Statistics.

Editors’ note: The World Health Statistics report is WHO’s annual compilation of the most recent available data on health and health-related indicators. For inquiries, contact healthstat@who.int

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Increasing obesity and malnutrition.

The world faces a massive and complex problem of a double burden of malnutrition, where undernutrition coexists with overweight and obesity. In 2022, over one billion people aged five years and older were living with obesity, while more than half a billion were underweight. Malnutrition in children was also striking, with 148 million children under five years old affected by stunting (too short for age), 45 million suffering from wasting (too thin for height), and 37 million overweight. The latest edition of the World Health Statistics report further highlights the significant health challenges faced by persons with disabilities, refugees and migrants. In 2021, about 1.3 billion people, or 16% of the global population, had disability. This group is disproportionately affected by health inequities resulting from avoidable, unjust and unfair conditions.

Access to healthcare for refugees and migrants remains limited, with only half of the 84 countries surveyed between 2018 and 2021 providing government-funded health services to these groups at levels comparable to their citizens. This highlights the urgent need for health systems to adapt and address the persisting inequities and changing demographic needs of global populations.

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Noncommunicable diseases remain the top killer.

COVID-19 rapidly emerged as a leading cause of death, ranking as the third highest cause of mortality globally in 2020 and the second in 2021. Nearly 13 million lives were lost during this period. The latest estimates reveal that except in the African and Western Pacific regions, COVID-19 was among the top five causes of deaths, notably becoming the leading cause of death in the Americas for both years.

The WHO World Health Statistics 2024 report also highlights that noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as ischemic heart disease and stroke, cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, and diabetes were the biggest killers before the pandemic, responsible for 74% of all deaths in 2019. Even during the pandemic, NCDs continued to account for 78% of non-COVID deaths.

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COVID-19 eliminated a decade of progress in global level of life expectancy

The latest edition of the World Health Statistics released today by the World Health Organization (WHO) reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic reversed the trend of steady gain in life expectancy at birth and healthy life expectancy at birth (HALE).

The pandemic wiped out nearly a decade of progress in improving life expectancy within just two years. Between 2019 and 2021, global life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years to 71.4 years (back to the level of 2012). Similarly, global healthy life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years to 61.9 years in 2021 (back to the level of 2012). The 2024 report also highlights how the effects have been felt unequally across the world. The WHO regions for the Americas and South-East Asia were hit hardest, with life expectancy dropping by approximately 3 years and healthy life expectancy by 2.5 years between 2019 and 2021. In contrast, the Western Pacific Region was minimally affected during the first two years of the pandemic, with losses of less than 0.1 years in life expectancy and 0.2 years in healthy life expectancy.

“There continues to be major progress in global health, with billions of people who are enjoying better health, better access to services, and better protection from health emergencies,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “But we must remember how fragile progress can be. In just two years, the COVID-19 pandemic erased a decade of gains in life expectancy. That's why the new Pandemic Agreement is so important: not only to strengthen global health security, but to protect long-term investments in health and promote equity within and between countries.”

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World Health Statistics 2024 report urges countries to redouble efforts towards health-related SDGs by 2030.

Facts & figures from the world’s report card on health:

global life expectancy

biggest killer diseases

death toll from the #COVID19 pandemic

increasing rates of obesity, undernutrition

More in the World Health Statistics 2024 report

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How do you feel when you become a parent?

Being a parent is the most important job in the world. But many parents don't get the time and support they need to be with their children. "The Promise of Playful Parenting."  Global Day of Parents 2024.

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Focus on the lack of parental involvement.

A lack of parental involvement, and inappropriate discipline practices make children more vulnerable to mental health disorders, including substance abuse.

The Promise of Playful Parenting. Global Day of Parents 2024.

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Parental involvement.

Parental involvement is widely regarded as an essential factor in children's health and well-being, including academic achievement. "The Promise of Playful Parenting."  Global Day of Parents 2024.

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Intersectional insights and promising policies to support single parents.

Watch the Breaking the Single Parent Poverty Trap (CSW68 Side Event).

Intersectional insights and promising policies to support single parents

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Motherhood in childhood: The Untold Story.

Across the globe, there are encouraging signs of declining levels of motherhood in childhood (17 years and younger) and in adolescence (19 years and younger). Nevertheless, in many ways, the pace of decline has been alarmingly slow – often declining by only a fe w percentage points per decade – and has not kept pace with declines in total fertility.

Key findings from this technical report on the most recent trends across low- and middle-income countries are shown in the Key Findings table.

With a fuller understanding of the timing, spacing and quantity of the adolescent childbearing process – and eventually their proximate and distal determinants – policy and programming can better frame and target their approaches. Promising interventions include:

components of asset building for adolescent girls,

support for families and parents,

comprehensive sexuality education,

health service provision,

community and policy engagement.

This report’s findings on the prevalence of motherhood in childhood and repeat adolescent childbearing highlight that more needs to be done to design, implement and evaluate programmes that target the youngest starters and girls at risk of rapid and repeat adolescent births.

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Uninvolved parenting, sometimes referred to as neglectful parenting.

Uninvolved parenting, sometimes referred to as neglectful parenting, is a style characterized by a lack of responsiveness to a child's needs. Uninvolved parents make few to no demands of their children and they are often indifferent, dismissive, or even completely neglectful.

During the 1960s, psychologist Diana Baumrind described three different parenting styles based on her research with preschool-age children: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive parenting. In later years, researchers added uninvolved parenting.

This article discusses the characteristics of uninvolved parenting and gives examples of this parenting style. It also discusses the effects that this style has on children and how to cope.

Characteristics of Uninvolved Parenting

Baumrind characterized her parenting styles in terms of two key dimensions: parental responsiveness and parental demandingness. People with an uninvolved parenting style are low on both of these dimensions.

They do not respond well to the needs of their children and provide little affection, support, or love. They also make very few demands on their children. They rarely set rules and do not offer guidance or expectations for behavior.

Common Patterns of Behavior for Uninvolved Parents

Act emotionally distant from their children

Limit interactions with their children because they're too overwhelmed by their own problems

Provide little or no supervision

Set few or no expectations or demands for behavior

Show little warmth, love, and affection towards their children

Skip school events and parent-teacher conferences

Free-Range vs. Uninvolved Parents

It is important to note that uninvolved parenting is not the same as free-range parenting. Where uninvolved parents have no interest in their children's lives, free-range parents are loving and attentive but give their kids plenty of freedom to experience the natural consequences of their actions.

Busy Parents

It is also important to note that just because a parent is busy with work or other obligations does not mean they are uninvolved. Intent and caring matter. While parents may work a lot of hours, they are not uninvolved if they spend the free time they have with their kids and make sure their children are cared for when they cannot be with them.

Examples of Uninvolved Parenting

Uninvolved parents have little emotional involvement with their kids. While they provide for basic needs like food and shelter, they are, for the most part, uninvolved in their children's lives. The exact degree of involvement may vary considerably.

Examples of the uninvolved parenting style include:

Ignoring their child when they are upset or crying

Expecting their children to care for themselves 

Not respecting a child's interests

Failing to provide adequate supervision for a child

Some uninvolved parents may be relatively hands-off with their kids, but may still have some basic limits such as curfews. Others may be downright neglectful or even reject their children outright. Kids might be given the bare minimum they need for survival, such as shelter, nourishment, and clothing, yet little or nothing in the way of guidance or affection.

Causes of Uninvolved Parenting

It is important to note that uninvolved parenting is often not intentional. It may arise for a number of different reasons, including things like parental experience and stress.

Parents who exhibit an uninvolved parenting style were often raised by uninvolved and dismissive parents. As adults, they may find themselves repeating the same patterns they were raised with. Other parents who display this style may simply be so caught up in their busy lives that they find it easier to take a hands-off approach to dealing with their children.

In some cases, parents may be so wrapped up in their own problems (i.e., being overworked, coping with depression, struggling with substance abuse) that they actually fail to see how uninvolved they are with their children or are simply unable to provide the emotional support their children need.

Effects of Uninvolved Parenting

Researchers associate parenting styles with a range of child outcomes in areas such as social skills and academic performance.2 The children of uninvolved parents generally perform poorly in nearly every area of life. These children tend to display deficits in cognition, attachment, emotional skills, and social skills.

Due to the lack of emotional responsiveness and love from their caretakers, children raised by uninvolved parents may have difficulty forming attachments later in life.

The complete lack of boundaries in the home makes it difficult to learn appropriate behaviors and limits in school and other social situations, which is why children with uninvolved parents are more likely to misbehave.

What are the effects of uninvolved parents?

Children with uninvolved parents may:

Be anxious or stressed due to the lack of family support

Be motionally withdrawn

Fear becoming dependent on other people

Have an increased risk of substance abuse

Have to learn to provide for themselves

Exhibit more delinquency during adolescence

Learn more

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What does mindfulness mean in parenting?

Managing our own emotions and behaviors is the key to teaching kids how to manage theirs. It is the reason airlines tell us to put our oxygen masks on before you can put on your child’s mask. You need to be regulated before you can model regulation for your child. Unfortunately, when you’re stressed out, exhausted, and overwhelmed, you can’t be available for your child.

Mindful parenting does not mean being a “perfect parent” and is not something you can fail at. It is not easy and it takes practice, but like many aspects of parenting, some days are good and some are bad and you can always try again. You may forget to be mindful, but the second you realize you are distracted, it is an opportunity to make a different choice – the choice to be present.

Mindful parenting means that you bring your conscious attention to what’s happening, instead of getting hijacked by your emotions. Mindfulness is about letting go of guilt and shame about the past and focusing on right now. It’s about accepting whatever is going on, rather than trying to change it or ignore it.

Being a mindful parent means that you pay attention to what you’re feeling. It does not mean that you will not get angry or upset. Of course you will feel difficult emotions, but acting on them mindlessly is what compromises our parenting.

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Benefits of mindful parenting.

You become more aware of your feelings and thoughts

You become more aware and responsive of your child’s needs, thoughts, and feelings

You become better at regulating your emotions

You become less critical of yourself and your child

You become better at standing back from situations and avoiding impulsive reactions

Your relationship with your child will improve

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How to practice mindful parenting?

Think about a situation where you got upset or angry at your child – one where you reacted automatically because that is what most of us do when difficult thoughts, feelings, or judgments arise. In stressful situations when our emotions are easily triggered, it’s hard to be the best version of ourselves. You can expect that your child will find those triggers.

In order to make the choice to change your behaviors, you first have to become familiar with your “hot spots” and emotional triggers. Hot spots are certain times of our days when we are more vulnerable and less emotionally available. We may be feeling stressed, tired, overwhelmed or helpless, or we feel preoccupied with work or marriage.

Emotional triggers are feelings or judgments from your own childhood which may arise when your child does a specific action:

Your child behaves in a way that clashes with your beliefs. Example: Your kid throwing food in a restaurant or grabbing all the toys in a store, which makes you feel embarrassed or shameful.

Your child’s behavior may evoke a childhood memory and response. Example: Your child not being on the academic level you think they should be and you feeling like you failed as a parent because when you got a bad grade, your parents said it wasn’t good enough.

Your child’s behavior may evoke a traumatic state or event. Example: If you broke your arm climbing a jungle gym as a kid and you are scared every time your kid goes to the playground.

Your child’s behavior activates the lens of fears and desires. Example: if one of my kids wakes up the other kid during the night, no one is sleeping and everyone is crying and I fear I have no adult time and I’ve completely lost the old me now that I’m a parent.

In order to feel a sense of control over your emotions, you first have to be able to recognize and anticipate what types of situations are likely to trigger hot spots and emotional responses in you.

Kristin Race, Ph.D. and author of Mindful Parenting: Simple and Powerful Solutions for Raising Creative, Engaged, Happy Kids in Today’s Hectic World states that there are key factors to mindful parents.

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Notice your own feelings when you’re in conflict with your child.

Think about your most recent argument or a frustrating situation with your child. What feelings are triggered? Are you angry, ashamed, embarrassed? Try to experience your emotion or trigger as a wave – coming and going. Try not to block or stop the emotion. Don’t push it away. Don’t judge or reject it. Don’t try to keep the emotion around. Don’t cling to it. Don’t make it bigger than it already is. You are not your emotion and you don’t have to act on the emotion. Just be there, fully mindful of it. Remind yourself that you don’t need to blame yourself or your child for what happened.

Next, try to see the conflict through your child’s eyes. If you can’t see goodness in your child during a tantrum or argument, think of a time when you felt connected with your child and responded with kindness. Try to remember that version of your child when you are triggered.

As you go throughout your day, make an effort to notice when you start to feel anxious or annoyed. That may be a signal that you are being triggered. Once you figure out your triggers, you can move to the next step.

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Learn to pause before responding in anger?

The most challenging and most important part of mindfulness is being able to find that calm space in the heat of the moment. We practice finding this space by focusing our attention on our body and breath because emotions show themselves as changes in body or breath. When we slow down and focus on our body and breath, there is a physiological change that decreases our reflexive responses and increases the abilities of our prefrontal cortex.

All of this leads to a calmer mind where you can find the space to sit with the emotion. When we are able to pause, we can experience the emotions as sensations in our body without fueling them by focusing on the trigger. In that space, we can remind ourselves to breathe and bring our thoughts back to the present moment, and then choose to respond how we want to and not react because we are out of control.

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Listen carefully to a child’s viewpoint even when disagreeing with it.

Your child is going to act like a child! This means they won’t always be able to manage their feelings. Kids are still learning how to regulate (actually, so are most adults) and have different priorities than you do. Their behavior will push your button at times, and that is okay.

The problem is when adults begin acting like kids, too. If, instead, we can stay mindful – meaning we notice our emotions and let them pass without acting on them – we model emotional regulation, and our children learn from watching us.

Learning to pause before responding takes practice and our ability to control our emotions changes depending on what’s going on each day. That is why self-care is so important. We can’t pour out all of ourselves every day and never take the time to fill back up. Many parents feel guilty for taking care of their own needs. That is not selfish – it’s necessary. Make yourself a priority, because the better you feel, the better you will be able to manage the frustrations that arise.

It is important to learn how to help yourself and how to meet your emotional needs. Examples of self-care can range from things like taking a time-out by hiding in the bathroom when you can’t handle your kids (which I did last night), taking a few minutes of deep breathing, or putting the television so you and your kid get a break to writing in a journal, taking a shower, going for a walk, or talking to your partner or a friend.

And, sometimes, we can’t catch ourselves in time and we do react in ways we regret. In those moments, we can apologize to our kids after we yell at them because we are still learning and parents make mistakes, too.