MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN'S CHILD WATCH®COLUMN: "THE STATE OF AMERICA’S CHILDREN"
The Children’s Defense Fund has just released a new report, The State of America’s Children® 2011, which paints a disturbing portrait of child needs across our country. With rampant unemployment, housing foreclosures, homelessness, hunger, and massive looming federal and state budget cuts, children’s well-being is in great jeopardy. One in five children is poor and children are our nation’s poorest age group. Child poverty increased almost 10 percent between 2008 and 2009, the largest single year increase since data were first collected. Fifteen and a half million children are adrift in a sea of poverty, and every 32 seconds another child is born poor. As our country struggles to climb out of the recession millions of our children are falling further behind.
Although there are more poor White than poor Black or Latino children, worsening income inequality and continuing racial disparities have an extra harsh combined impact on poor children of color. Many are pushed off the path of healthy development and into the Cradle to Prison Pipeline. Poor children are more likely to live in fragile families, lag in early childhood development, suffer abuse and neglect, be uninsured and in poor health, be denied a quality education, and experience other gaps that put them far behind non-poor peers. Millions of Black children are facing one of the worst crises since slavery, and in many areas, Hispanic and American Indian children are not far behind.
In the face of these deeply disturbing and growing child needs, some of our political leaders are heedlessly and