The Social Costs of an Empty Lunchbox

Rumblings of the growing crisis of child poverty have become quite loud of late. In March the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC) issued the most comprehensive childhood hunger study ever conducted in the United States, showing that one in four American children suffers from hunger or related problems. In June the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) published facts on child poverty that will blow the lid off most people's view of who is poor and why. And the bipartisan National Commission on Children, chaired by Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), was to release its long-awaited findings just at Sojourners press time and will call for, among other things, strengthened child support enforcement.

The raw numbers describing the plight of American children are alarming:

• Every eight seconds of the school day a child drops out.
• Every 47 seconds a child is abused or neglected (675,000 a year).
• Every 67 seconds a teenager has a baby.
• Every seven minutes a child is arrested for a drug offense.
• Every 36 minutes a child is killed or injured by guns.
• Every 53 minutes a child dies because of poverty.

But perhaps most arresting are new statistics from the Children's Defense Fund report. While public perception is that poor children come from minority communities, live in the inner cities, and are raised in single-parent, non-working households, the truth is that the majority of poor children are white, live outside of cities, and have one or two wage earners in their families. Nearly half live in families that do not receive welfare payments. And while single parenthood drives up poverty rates, an international comparison shows that even if the children in single-parent families were removed from the count, the United States would still have one of the highest child poverty rates among all industrialized societies.

"In 1989 only one in 10 poor children in America was a black child living in a female-headed family on welfare in a central city," the authors of the CDF report note. "Only one in 44 was in such a family where the mother was a teenager when the child was born. Only one in 56 was in such a family where, in addition, the mother did not work during the previous year." Publicizing the fact that so few poor children fit the accepted stereotype may be the first step in overcoming American tolerance for such a high incidence of child poverty, CDF authors say.

The causes of child poverty are rooted in economic trends such as falling wages. Robert Greenstein, director of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, points out that the average hourly wage for private, non-supervisory workers is now lower, after adjustment for inflation, than in any year since 1969. The minimum wage -- which was sufficient to raise a family of three out of poverty in most of the 1960s and '70s if a parent worked full time year-round -- now leaves the same family $2,300 below the poverty standard.

Uneven income distribution has contributed in a big way to child poverty and thus should be the first line of action in solving this shameful problem. Perhaps corporate executive officers, rather than fly to Washington as five of them did in March to plead for more funding of government programs such as WIC (Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children), could raise their workers' pay to a living wage. CDF spokespersons pointedly note that the income of every poor family with children in the United States could be lifted to the federal poverty line for $28 billion, an amount less than what the richest 1 percent of all American taxpayers received in 1990 alone as a result of additional tax breaks approved by Congress and the president since 1979 ($39 billion).

Other adjusting of government programs should include a more humane level of funding for unemployment insurance and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The recent cycles of economic downturn come at the very time the unemployment insurance system is unable to handle increased demands. The AFDC safety net also has seriously deteriorated.

A lesson could be learned from the stark contrast between government anti-poverty efforts toward children and toward the elderly. Currently cash transfer programs lift about 10 percent of all poor children out of poverty. But because of strong political support and because Social Security has been indexed to inflation, 76 percent of all elderly who would have been poor are lifted out of poverty. Clearly a strong political voice on behalf of children is needed.

FAR AND AWAY the best news of recent studies is that child poverty is manageable. It is not beyond our means to tackle and solve. Children's Defense Fund founder and president Marian Wright Edelman (daughter, granddaughter, and sister of black Baptist ministers) asks some provocative questions in CDF's child advocacy guide Welcome the Child, written especially to help those of us in the churches begin work on this issue:

Is it acceptable to you as a person of faith that children are the poorest Americans in the wealthiest nation on earth? ... Do you think the leading world military power lacks the capacity to rank first rather than nineteenth in keeping its infants alive and cannot do better than forty-ninth in immunizing its non-white infants against polio -- behind Botswana and Albania?

We feel confident that we know what to do to alleviate child poverty and suffering. The challenge now is how to create the sense of urgency and the national and political will to give children first rather than last call on national, community, and family interests and resources.

Carey Burkett was assistant to the editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.