2011 Kids Count Data Book

Posted on August 17, 2011 by townsend

• National study looks at impact of recession on children, finds poverty up in 38 states, By Cristina Silva (AP), August 17, 2011, Washington Post: “Karla Washington worries how she will afford new school uniforms for her five-year-old daughter. Washington, an undergraduate student, earns less than $11,000 a year from a part-time university job. The salary must cover food, rent, health care, child care and the occasional splurge on a Blue’s Clues item for her only child. ‘My biggest fear is not providing my daughter with everything that she needs to be a balanced child, to be independent, to be safe, to feel like she is of value,’ said Washington, 41. Washington’s economic woes are seen throughout Nevada, where the nation’s highest unemployment and foreclosure rates have combined to devastate families and empty neighborhoods and construction yards. A national study on child well-being to be published Wednesday found that child poverty increased in 38 states from 2000 to 2009. As a result, 14.7 million children, 20 percent, were poor in 2009. That represents a 2.5 million increase from 2000, when 17 percent of the nation’s youth lived in low-income homes…”
• Study: Child poverty up in 38 states in past decade, August 17, 2011, National Public Radio: “Nearly 15 million children, or 20 percent of America’s juvenile population, were living in poverty in 2009, according to a child welfare study released Wednesday. More than double that number were in households where no parent had a full-time year-round job, according to the report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which noted that the child poverty rate grew about 18 percent over the past decade. ‘This is really troubling because we had made so much progress in the 1990s in reducing the percentage of children in poverty,’ said Patrick McCarthy, the foundation’s president and CEO. ‘Essentially the recession has put us back to where we were in the early 1990s.’ In the foundation’s first examination of the impact of the recession on the nation’s children, researchers concluded that low-income children will likely suffer academically, economically and socially long after their parents have recovered. As a result, they are less likely to be gainfully employed as adults…”