ABSTRACT
In 1997, some 13.4 million children lived in families in which total income failed to exceed even the spartan thresholds (e.g., $12,802 for a family of three) used to define poverty (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999). The poverty rate among U.S. children (19.2%) was nearly one-third higher than it was 25 years ago and 1.5 to 4 times as high as the child poverty rates in Canada and Western Europe (Smeeding, 1997).
