Abstract

 Children and the knowledge of taking care of them, pediatrics, are faced with growing challenges. With the advancement of medical sciences, pediatrics is becoming a group of subspecialties. This could lead to improving the care and management of pediatric disorders, however, transdisciplinary management should not be ignored. Although the health status of children has improved over the past years, still preventable child deaths are occurring, especially in low-income countries. The increased sexual abuse, discrimination, racism, increased intercountry adoption, malnutrition, environmental hazards like arsenic contamination, pornography, and surrogacy are among the most important current challenges to children’s health. Worldwide vaccination coverage has declined from 86% in 2019 to 83% in 2020, and the number of completely unvaccinated children increased by 3.4 million. Approximately, 1 billion children are dealing with multidimensional poverty all around the world among which at least 356 million of them live in extreme poverty, and 100 million more children plunged into poverty as a result of COVID-19. In this chapter, we will review the most important challenges of children’s health and pediatrics with a focus on social and mental health problems.