Teens Children and Money - Children In Poverty

Children are the largest group of America's poor. In 1975 they replaced the elderly as the poorest age group. (See Figure 4.1.) In 2002 the poverty rate for all children younger than eighteen years of age was 16.7%—about 12.1 million children. In 2002 children under eighteen years old made up one quarter (25.5%) of the population of the United States, but over one third (35.1%) of the people living below the poverty line. Children under the age of six are particularly vulnerable to poverty. In 2002 the poverty rate for families with children under six was 18.5%, higher than the overall rate of child poverty. Among children under six living with a single mother, almost half (48.6%) were in poverty.

While the child poverty rate declined from 1994 to 2000, the rate of children living in poor (100% of poverty line or below) and low-income families (100–200% of poverty line) began to rise again in 2000. (See Figure 4.2.) And the majority of both African-American children (58%) and Latino children (62%) lived in low-income or poor families in 2002. (See Figure 4.3.)

The Children's Defense Fund reported in The State of Children in America's Union: A 2002 Action Guide to Leave No Child Behind (Washington, DC, 2002) that the United States ranks twelfth among industrialized nations in the percentage of children living in poverty, and seventeenth in "efforts to lift children out of poverty." The organization contends that an American child is born into poverty every forty-three seconds, and that one in every three children will be poor at some point in his or her childhood.