Once you get the hang of it, navigating the newly released 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health—funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics—isn’t nearly as intimidating as you’d think.

The survey is the result of 91,642 completed interviews (conducted by phone in English, Spanish, and four Asian languages). Parents and guardians talked about child care, breastfeeding, reading to their children, TV viewing habits, school attendance, social behaviors, meal time, religion, smoking, their own employment…and even more than that.

It’s not just the scope that makes this survey interesting for the layperson (and vital to children’s health researchers and advocates). This survey is a follow-up to one conducted in 2003, and you can easily compare those results to the most recent survey to see how things have changed.

You can also look at state rankings by topic; visual learners can search a U.S. map and click on individual states for more in-depth results.

The Data Resource Center even has a tutorial to help you start a data query. In a nutshell, it’s user-friendly. It’s also quite revealing.

For instance, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television viewing for children younger than 2 years, and for children older than that to only have an hour or two of “quality programming” a day. Yet the 2007 survey shows that nationally, 54.4 percent of children 1-5 years old watches more than an hour of TV per day.

Meanwhile, the National Children’s Reading Foundation says that parents should read to children at least 20 minutes a day. But the 2007 survey says that 52.2 percent of children five years old or younger are not read to everyday.

The survey also yields interesting information on breastfeeding rates. Nationally, 61.4 percent of babies are breastfed (but not exclusively) for the first 6 months; only 12.4 percent are exclusively breastfed for that amount of time, and 25.1 percent are never breastfed.

Here’s some good news—the top five breastfeeding states all increased their percentages, even if only slightly, from 2003. Washington led the way, with 89.6 percent of children ever breastfed (up from 87.4 percent in 2003). Mississippi had the lowest number, with 52.7 percent every breastfed (up from 51.9 percent in 2003).

It’s tempting to say that the states with the highest rates of breastfeeding also have the lowest rates of overweight or obese children (and vice versa for those states with the lowest rates of breastfeeding). After all, we’ve written about the connection between breastfeeding and obesity before.

Well, let’s look at Washington. There, 85.8 percent of children there are in excellent or very good health (compared to 84.4 percent nationwide), and 29.5 percent are overweight or obese, compared to 31.6 nationwide. That rate is considered to be lower than the national average, but not significantly so.

And now, let’s look at Mississippi. There, 82.2 percent of children are in excellent or very good health, and the obesity rate in Mississippi is 44.4 percent, which is considered to be significantly higher than the national percent of 31.6.

Take a quick glance at the color-coded U.S. maps for obesity and breastfeeding rates. If you look at the states that have “significantly higher” than national rates of overweight or obese children—that would be Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee—all but Georgia also have “significantly lower than U.S.” rates of children who were ever breastfed. (Georgia is marked “lower than U.S. but not significant.”)

If you have about an hour, you can experience (complete with audio) “New Findings from the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health,”  the June 2 DataSpeak Web conference given by the Maternal and Child Health Information Resource Center, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Or, you can read a text or PDF version of both the program transcript and question and answer session here.