Understanding the Root Causes of Child Poverty
And Doing Our Part to Fight It

There are so many children in our country, in our community, whose futures are being robbed of opportunity, peace of mind, and self-respect!  Surprisingly, much too often the robber's name is POVERTY. The irony is that people suffer of poverty in the midst of plenty and children go to bed hungry while there is so much waste and so many unused resources!  Certainly, the cost of breaking the cycle of poverty among American children would be high; however the cost of doing nothing is immensely higher.

Each brilliant mind not fully harnessed, each great future wasted, is a heavy penalty we as a society pay and will continue to pay, unless each and every one of us decides to do our part in fighting this impoverishing waste.  However, to fight it, we first need to understand it.  We, the people, as well as the government need to focus and understand the main causes of child poverty, specifically, the low levels of parental work and the high levels of single parenthood.

In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year, which amounts to 16 hours of work per week.  If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year--the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week through the year--nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.

The decline in marriage is the second major cause of child poverty. Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.3 million children are born out of wedlock. Increasing marriage would substantially reduce child poverty: If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three-quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

As to my part, I decided to join this important fight through volunteering.  When I donate my time to the Care-On-The-Corner free daycare center, moms can go to work and earn money to buy food, cloths, books and backpacks for their children.  When I volunteer for the English as a Second Language class, I help a parent learn enough English to find employment and start providing for his children. Last, but not least, when through my Website work, I raise money to fight teen pregnancy, I know I am helping reduce the number of unwed mothers, one of the key causes of child poverty in our nation.

In recent years, the US has established a reasonable record in reducing child poverty. Successful anti-poverty policies were partially implemented in the welfare reform legislation of 1996, which replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with a new program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

A key element of this reform was a requirement that some welfare mothers either prepare for work or get jobs as a condition of receiving aid. As this requirement went into effect, welfare rolls plummeted and employment of single mothers increased in an unprecedented manner. As employment of single mothers rose, child poverty dropped rapidly. For example, in the quarter-century before welfare reform, there was no net change in the poverty rate of children in single-mother families; after reform was enacted, the poverty rate dropped in an unprecedented fashion, falling from 53.1 percent in 1995 to 39.8 percent in 2001.

Without a doubt, our nation can readily reduce poverty among children.   We just need to have the courage and the imagination to do it.

Tiffany Amariuta

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