The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight goals related to poverty, education, gender equality, health, environmental sustainability and development set in the year 2000 at the UN Millennium Summit, and adopted by 189 nations. The eight MDGs are associated with 21 quantifiable targets, tracked by 60 statistical indicators in annual reports issued by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The goals target attainment in the year 2015. Country-by-country data is also available.

This chart shows a key indicator for malnutrition—underweight children from birth to five years. In developing regions, the proportion of children under five years old who are undernourished declined from 33 per cent in 1990 to 26 per cent in 2006, but 140 million children in developing countries were recorded as underweight in 2006. According to public health experts, undernourishment among young children is a sound indicator of inadequate nutrition in the population as a whole. As the 2009 MDG report states, "Adequate nutrition is vital for building children's immune systems and for their motor and cognitive development…The consequences can be fatal: more than one third of child deaths worldwide are attributable to undernutrition." (p. 12) Eastern Asia, and China in particular, reduced the percentage of underweight children between 1990 and 2006 by more than half. In Southern Asia, despite progress since 1990, almost half of young children are underweight. In Sub-saharan Africa, there has been insufficient progress, where more than a quarter of the region's children are underweight. Urban children are half as likely to be underweight as rural children in the same country. In Eastern Asia, where improvement has occurred, inadequate nutrition is still almost five times as high in rural areas. Notable in these statistics is the progress recorded for Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern Africa, and parts of Asia. There has been no significant progress in Western Asia, a likely result of the large number of refugees and conflict.

Overall worldwide progress is already insufficient to achieve the MDG goal to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. In developing regions between 1990 and 2007, a 5 percentage point decline in the proportion of underweight children under five years of age was achieved, leaving over a quarter of all children in these regions underfed. Progress in reducing hunger is being slowed or reversed by rising food prices due to changing diets, economic growth, a population increases, urbanization, poor agricultural policies, and use of food crops for biofuel.

Aztec children were valued creations. Language used in rituals compared infants to precious stones and feathers, flakes of stone, ornaments, or sprouts of plants. The duty of parents and society, however was not to indulge but to socialize the child, so that they would not become "fruitless trees," as an Aztec proverb stated. According to sources written shortly after the Spanish conquest, such as the Codex Mendoza, society placed a high value on conformity, obedience, and decorum. The section of the Codex Mendoza that depicts daily life shows gender-specific punishments used in raising children. The image seems to show a sequence of punishments, first threatening the boy and the girl with three maguey thorns, the spike of the agave plant. In the second image, the woman is administering punishment to the girl by piercing her arm with the maguey thorn; the boy is pierced more severely in the neck, flank, and hip, and he is bound at the wrists and ankles. In the third image, the punishment of striking the child with a stick or rod is being carried out. In each case the image shows the children weeping profusely as the threat or the punishment is administered.

Annotation written by Susan Douglass.

Six children of the Seri indigenous people slide down a hill using the shells of sea turtles as sleds, illustrating the universal ability of children to create play activities including equipment out of things in their environment. These children belong to a group that has been indigenous to the area for many generations, so it is likely that this game has a long heritage on the beaches where sea turtles come to breed. The place is Tiburón Island in the Gulf of California, the state of Sonora, Mexico. The island is named Tahéjöc in the language of the Seri, which is a linguistic isolate, or language distinct from all others in the region. Clans of Seri lived in the area of Tiburón Island for many centuries if not millennia. Their heritage was recognized by a decree of the Mexican government in 1975, granting them a title of communal property ("reconocimiento y titulación de terrenos comunales). Today Tiburón Island is a nature reserve.

The photograph was taken in 1924 by Edward H. Davis (1862-1951) who owned a ranch near San Diego, California. He explored the vicinity, photographed its indigenous inhabitants, and collected native objects. Through his knowledge of the region and familiarity with the people, he was able to capture this revealing, unusual image. George Heye, founder of the Museum of the American Indian, hired Davis in 1916 to help add to his collection.

Father Alberto Maria De Agostini, a missionary, took this postcard image on Isla Grande, Tierra del Fuego, on the southernmost tip of South America. The photograph, taken circa 1930, shows a man, woman, and two children walking through a clearing surrounded by thickets. The man and boy are carrying bows and arrows, and the younger child walks close to his or her mother, who is carrying bundles on a frame on her back. The family members wear robes made of guanaco hide, a South American animal similar to a llama. The woman and children are barefoot. The man wears shoes of fur-covered hide and a cone-shaped hat.

This family belongs to the Ona tribe, or Selk'nam, whose existence in the area near the Strait of Magellan can be traced back at least 9,000 years. The Ona, one of several distinct tribes in the region, lived as hunter-gatherers. Europeans have known of this group since Magellan named the land after their fires, which he saw burning on the coast. Charles Darwin described them in the journal of his voyage on the Beagle. Since then, missionaries have visited and lived among them, settlers have displaced and even hunted them, and anthropologists have attempted to study them to understand life in the Stone Age. Death from diseases brought a sharp drop in their population, which had numbered in the thousands. According to the last census of native populations in 1965, only 300 Onas remained. The last full-blooded Ona person died in 1995 in Argentina.

After the Rosas regime ended in 1852, hundreds of families throughout Argentina hoped to make claims on property and wealth that had been taken away from them during the Rosas years. However, many heads of these families were elderly or deceased. This left the younger generation to continue their family's efforts. This restitution suit, first filed in Córdoba province in 1852, pitted the young sons of Vicente Ferreyra against Pedro Sueldo, an ex-judge who accused the Ferreyra family of being Unitarians during the early 1840s. Sueldo jailed many of the family's older male members, confiscated their lands and animals, and liquidated their assets.

In 1852, the Ferreyra sons faced numerous challenges in recovering their family's property. Legally, they were not adults and had very little standing in the civil actions. In addition, most of the witnesses that they brought forth could not remember important details of the case. They did the best they could under the circumstances to gather their documents and submit lists of property attesting to what and how much they owned, but the height of the political purges during the Rosas era was, by 1852, a distant memory. Nevertheless, their tenacity paid off. The judge presiding over the civil suit awarded damages to the Ferreyras, and Sueldo was ordered to pay restitution. Sueldo, however, filed endless appeals in an effort to take advantage of the Ferreyras' lack of experience.

The story of Camila O'Gorman (1828-1848), the daughter of a prominent merchant in the Buenos Aires community, is one of the most famous cases of a young person challenging both parental and state authority. In 1847, at the height of Rosas's power, 19-year-old Camila and Ladislao Gutiérrez, a young Catholic priest from Tucumán, fell in love. On December 12, 1847, they eloped and fled to Corrientes, a neighboring province to Buenos Aires. Eight months later, they were captured, imprisoned at Santos Lugares, and put to death by a firing squad. History has been more kind to Camila than to Gutiérrez. The young priest was condemned for violating the Church's code of conduct and the social order. Many eyewitnesses, including Camila's father, Adolfo O'Gorman (see document 9), blamed the beleaguered priest for manipulating an impressionable young woman.

Camila O'Gorman's execution in August 1848 had repercussions long after her death. Her death touched off a series of international protests against the caudillo dictator. Before the execution, exiled Unitarians in Uruguay taunted Rosas in their newspapers for not doing enough to put an end to Camila's unlawful and illicit behavior. After Camila's death, however, they used Camila's story to show that Rosas was cruel and bloodthirsty. After Rosas was overthrown in 1852, strong feelings about Camila's death sentence remained. In 1856, the Uruguayan author, Heraclio Fajardo (1833-1868), wrote a six act play simply titled "Camila O'Gorman" in her honor. In the play, he also dedicated a poem to her, "To the Spirits of Camila O'Gorman," as an impassioned plea for future generations of Argentines to not repeat the mistakes of the Rosas era.

In 1847, at the height of Rosas's power, 19-year-old Camila O'Gorman, the daughter of a prominent merchant in the Buenos Aires community, and Ladislao Gutiérrez, a young Catholic priest, fell in love. On December 12, 1847, they eloped and fled the city. As reports surfaced about the actions of Camila and Ladislao, Adolfo penned the following letter to Juan Manuel de Rosas as a plea for his daughter's life. Adolfo portrayed his daughter not as an accomplice or an active participant in the elopement but as a passive young girl who was seduced by Ladislao.

Camilla's father, Adolfo O'Gorman y Perichón Vandeuil, has often been portrayed as a cruel and overbearing patriarch. María Luísa Bemberg's movie Camila (1984) perpetuated that image. However, modern scholars have re-evaluated his actions, seeing in this letter his effort to save his daughter's reputation, as well as his own. The patriarch's letter to Rosas was not the only request to spare Camila. Antonio Reyes, the prison warden, listened to her confession and advised her as she appealed for clemency. Even Manuelita Rosas, the dictator's daughter, reportedly made a plea to her father. All of these efforts failed, however, and Camila and Ladislao were executed on August 18, 1848.

The story of Camila O'Gorman (1828-1848), the daughter of a prominent merchant in the Buenos Aires community, is one of the most famous cases of a young person challenging both parental and state authority. In 1847, at the height of Rosas's power, 19-year-old Camila and Ladislao Gutiérrez, a young Catholic priest from Tucumán, fell in love. On December 12, 1847, they eloped and fled to Corrientes, a neighboring province to Buenos Aires, where they tried to survive in the hopes of escaping to another country. Eight months later, they were captured, imprisoned at Santos Lugares, and put to death by a firing squad.

Although both were punished in the same way, one could argue that history has been more kind to Camila than to Gutiérrez. The young priest was condemned for violating the Church's code of conduct and the social order. Many eyewitnesses, including Camila's father, Adolfo O'Gorman, blamed the beleaguered priest for manipulating an impressionable young woman. Camila was a more sympathetic figure, too, because she was reportedly eight months pregnant at the time of her death. News of her (and her unborn child's) demise spread quickly throughout the province and beyond. Even Rosas's staunchest supporters could not defend the death of what they saw as an innocent, unborn child. For them, the "Restorer of the Laws" had gone too far.

This lithograph by the French Brazilian-born artist Juan León Pallière (1823-1887) is one of many representations of Camila. This is an idealized portrait intended to memorialize Camila as a decent and innocent young woman. The hairstyle, necklace, and clothing all suggest that she was a member of a respectable and prominent family. Since he was living in Buenos Aires in 1848 (the same year that Camila met her death), Pallière must have been deeply affected by the talk surrounding the event. However, he would not have dared to paint such an image while Rosas was still in power. The painter waited to finish this portrait after the regime was overthrown in 1852, and it often accompanied official and popular histories of the post-Rosas era.

Children frequently turned to the courts in seeking greater independence from their parents, especially in matters related to marriage choice. Dozens of petitions asking the state for permission to marry were filed at a time when the state was attempting to socialize young people as citizens of the new nation-state and patriarchy was in decline.

In this document, José Antonio Juárez petitioned a judge for permission to marry Candelaria Portillo. Argentine law legally defined "manhood" at age 25, after which males were allowed to marry without permission from their parents, but Juárez had to prove that he was actually 25. An exception was made if the parents were deceased. Young people had to collect evidence, affidavits, and eyewitnesses to prove either case. Although many lost their legal battles, these experiences likely helped young people in 19th-century Argentina develop a sense of rights and entitlement.

This document also raises the issue of race. José Antonio was a pardo, a term that described someone who was a free, mixed race person. Candelaria, his fiancé, was a slave, and they had to ask permission of her owner. This couple challenged various types of social restrictions.

Manuela Rosas (1817-1898), the daughter of Juan Manuel de Rosas, emerged as one of the most important political symbols of the early 19th century. In 1838, her mother, Doña Encarcación, died, and her father proclaimed his daughter as the nation's first lady. At the age of 21, Manuela was thrust into a new political role. By all accounts, she was very popular. She regularly participated in gatherings and festivals in honor of her father. Foreign visitors were impressed by how much responsibility was delegated to her. In 1848, one English observer noted: "His daughter is his real minister and secretary, and through her it is easy to convey any communication that it may be wished to make. She is amiable, apparently kind hearted and affectionate. Her manners and appearance are graceful, though she is no longer pretty. Her adoration for her father amounts to passion."

In 1840, Prilidiano Pueyrredon (1823-1870), an Argentine artist known for painting images of everyday life, was commissioned to paint Manuela as the embodiment of her father’s brand of Federalism. One thing that is striking about this painting is the use of the color red. All citizens of Argentina, especially young people, were expected to wear red as part of their clothing in order to symbolize support for the regime. Those who did not often faced public scorn, imprisonment, and fines. This stood in stark contrast to Unitarians, who advocated wearing celestial blue. Interestingly, Manuela also became an important symbol for Unitarians. Propagandists often depicted her as an unwitting political tool for the regime or a victim of her father’s sexual abuse. In his scathing 1851 essay, "Manuela Rosas," José Mármol argued that Manuela, like many young supporters of the Rosas regime, could actually be redeemed through education. In 1852, she accompanied her father in exile in Great Britain and later died there in 1898.