ABSTRACT
The statistics on children’s poverty are by now all too familiar. In the United States (U.S), children are more likely than any other age group to live in poverty, and US children are poor much more often than children in most other industrialized nations. Many new jobs are in service industries with low wages and few benefits. Self-sufficiency is such a strong value that it is almost sacrilege to question it as a goal. Programs designed solely to make poor parents “self-sufficient” have little probability of making significant inroads on children’s poverty so long as they focus only on changing those parents and not on their social and economic support systems. Current policies aim at a level of self-sufficiency for the poor that people do not expect of more affluent families. Direct aid for families with children is built into the income tax system, but the benefits are generally greater for middle and upper income than for low income families.
