Many Teen-Agers Facing Harder Lives, Study Finds : Research: Conditions have improved for infants and children but often are getting worse for the nation’s adolescents. More are dying from violence, and arrest rates for juveniles have jumped 50%.

The battle to improve the lot of America’s 63.6 million children produced significant progress in recent years among infants and young adolescents, but teen-agers were caught in a worsening web of violence, pregnancy and failure to quickly complete high school, a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation has found.

While infant mortality, poverty and the death rates dropped among children ages 1 to 14, the number of teen-agers arrested for violent crimes jumped 50% between 1985 and 1991, teen-agers’ deaths from violence rose 13%, and the proportion of births to single teen-age mothers increased 20%, according to the study, which used government data between 1985 and 1991.

“Kids from the time they are newborn until their early teens seem to be doing fairly well,” said Douglas W. Nelson, executive director of the foundation, which will release the study today. “It is when they begin to make the transition to adulthood that the lack of opportunity and hope translates into bad outcomes.”

Underscoring how shifts in the economy have vastly reduced job opportunities for low-skilled workers, Nelson said: “There are kids growing up in communities where they don’t see any future. Then, they make terrible mistakes.”

Teen-agers fared particularly badly in California, where hopelessness and an ample supply of guns combined to produce a powder keg. Arrest rates for juvenile violent crimes skyrocketed 60% between 1985 and 1991, giving California the fourth-worst ranking for juvenile crime in the nation.

In addition, the proportion of California teen-agers graduating from high school in four years dropped to 62% in 1991 from 67% in 1985. During that time, the percentage of children born to single teen-age mothers in the Golden State rose by a quarter--with 49,000 babies born into such households in 1991, accounting for 8% of all births here.

“In a slow, painful way, we are dragging California’s children down,” said Lois Salisbury, executive director of Children Now, a California child-policy and advocacy group. The state went from spending 121% of the national average per pupil in grades kindergarten to 12 in the 1970s to just 86% of the national norm in the 1990s, Salisbury said.

Welfare--a program where 70% of the recipients are children--was cut also, Salisbury said, adding, “The little canaries are singing in the mine shafts very loudly.”

The study by the Washington-based foundation, which funds programs to help disadvantaged children, found that a quarter of those under the age of 6 live in poverty, with 58% of these in female-headed households. Three-quarter million children live without complete plumbing or kitchen facilities, the study said.

The report said nearly 4 million youngsters, 6.2% of the children in the country, are growing up in “severely distressed neighborhoods”--places where more than half of the households are poor, nearly a quarter of 16- to 19-year-olds have dropped out of high school, and almost 60% of men worked less than half the previous year, said William P. O’Hare, coordinator of the study.

More than 80% of the children in such neighborhoods were African American or Latino, the study said, although those groups account for just one-fourth of the children in the country. Among California’s children, one in 20 lived in distressed neighborhoods, one in six had no health insurance and more than a third lived in overcrowded housing, the study said.

“There are kids in these neighborhoods who turn out great, but in terms of life’s chances, these neighborhoods lower your odds of a successful transition into adulthood,” O’Hare said.

“There is a point at which disinvestment, institutional erosion, service deterioration and demoralization create a negative momentum that is simply too strong for many individuals and families to overcome,” concluded the foundation’s report, which proposed empowerment zones with tax breaks to combat pockets of poverty--zones that will be established in some communities later this year.

Among the findings:

* Infant mortality rates in 1991 declined by 16%--to 8.9 per 1,000 births--down from 10.6 per 1,000 births in 1985. Advances in neonatal medical care, prenatal care and improved public education efforts produced the turnaround, the study said, although infant mortality rates among African Americans remained more than twice those of whites.

* Death rates for children between 1 and 14 improved by 9%, dropping to 30.7 per 100,000 from the 1985 rate of 33.8, mostly because of improved auto safety and accident prevention measures. In 1991, 15,693 children aged 1 to 14 died. Again, however, the death rate for African American children was almost twice that of whites.

* Single teen-agers accounted for an increasing portion of all births, 9% in 1991 contrasted with 7.5% six years earlier.

* Juvenile arrests rates for violent crimes--homicide, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault--increased to 457 per 100,000 people in 1991, up from 305 in 1985. The rate more than doubled in six states.

* The violent death rate among those aged 15 to 19--reflecting deaths from homicide, suicide or accidents--increased 13% to 71.1 per 100,000 in 1991, from 62.8 in 1985. While teen-age deaths from accidents dropped 15%, deaths due to homicide doubled. Every two hours, a child dies of a gunshot wound, the study said.

* While 20% of American children lived below the poverty line in 1991, that was a slight improvement from the 1985 figure of 20.8%. But it still was much worse than in 1969, when 13.8% of children lived in poverty.