کاهش فقر کودک با ترویج کودک رفاه: شناسایی بهترین شیوه در زمان نیاز

Child poverty in the United States persists despite a range of social services designed to reduce poverty rates and improve the economic self-sufficiency of families. The economic downturns resulting in job losses and the housing crisis have converged to create a new group of families who were managing to remain out of poverty prior to the recession but are now slipping into poverty, putting additional strain on services. In light of these pressing issues, this article synthesizes the literature examining child poverty to take a long-range view of the relationship between economic strain, system involvement, and impacts on children and the systems attempting to serve these children. The effectiveness of various policy and program efforts aimed at reducing child poverty rates and/or ameliorating the negative effects of living in poverty is reviewed. The article concludes by suggesting a major shift in focus from reducing child poverty as a singular goal to a comprehensive approach to promoting child and family well-being.

The recent economic downturn has drawn attention once again to the persistent problem of child poverty in the United States. Policymakers and child advocates question and debate solutions to break the vicious cycle of poverty and the impacts on healthy child development. Unfortunately, poverty rates suggest that the situation for children has not sufficiently improved in the last few years. The poverty rate for children in 2009 was 20.7% (15.5 million children), which is a 2.7% increase from 2007 and means that approximately one in five children live in poverty (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2010). Nearly 7 million children (9.3% of all children under the age of 18) live in extreme poverty as their families earn less than 50% of the poverty threshold. Overall, children represented 24.5% of the general population but 35.5% of the population in poverty and 36.3% of the population with income below 50% of the poverty threshold (DeNavas-Walt et al., 2010). Among industrialized countries and using a relative measure of poverty, which is defined as less than 50% of the median income, the United States has the second highest rate of child poverty at 21.9% (UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2005). In response to the current economic crisis, this article synthesizes the multiple literature streams studying child poverty to examine the relationship between economic strain, system involvement, and impacts on child development and the systems attempting to serve these children.