-Sources: United States Census Bureau
Children Living in Poverty
Children Under Age 18
From 1959 to 1969, the number of children under 18 years old living in poverty fell dramatically, from 17.6 million to 9.7 million. The number of poor children hovered between 9.6 and 10.5 million between 1970 and 1979, and then grew to a peak of 15.7 million children in 1993. Since then, the number of poor children again declined to a low of 11.6 million in 2000, before creeping up in 2001 to 11.7 million.
In 2001, 16.3% of the children in the United States lived in households with incomes below the federal poverty line of $18,104 for a family of four. In 2001, African American and Hispanic children (about 30.2%) were more than twice as likely to be poor as white children (13.4%).
The poverty rate of American children dropped significantly since 1992, from 22% to roughly 16% in 2001. About 11.7 million children were poor in 2001, considerably fewer than the 15.2 million children living in poverty only four years earlier.
Children Under Age 6
In 2001, 28.2% percent of all young children (ages 0 to 6) lived in or near poverty. From 1977 to 2001, the poverty rate for children less than six years of age grew from 18% to 19.3%. In 2001, nearly half (56%) of African American and 45.5% of Hispanic children in this age group lived below 125 percent of the poverty level.
About nine percent of America’s young children live in extreme poverty, that is, in families with incomes below 50 percent of the poverty line. (In 2001, this meant below $6,500 for a family of three.) Among young children, the extreme poverty rate is growing faster than the overall poverty rate.
Two thirds of all poor young children (66.1 percent) live with at least one parent who is employed. The comparable percentage for young Hispanic children (71.1%) is higher than that for white (64.8%) and black (62.4%) children.
References
Prepared by Cassandra Cantave Burton and Roderick Harrison for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. August 2003