Age group Uncheck All. Age group 0 to 4 5 to 11 12 to 14 15 to 17 Total less than Data Type Choose data types Number Percent. Years Choose one: Choose time frame Age group Choose one: Age group 0 to 4 5 to 11 12 to 14 15 to 17 Total less than Which county is performing better on reducing teen dropouts? Detailed Use this view if you have questions like: Are there more black or hispanic children in poverty in my county?
How are three neighboring counties in Texas doing on reducing teen births across three age categories? Child population by age group in the United States Change Indicator.
One particularly egregious example is the federal program formerly known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children AFDC , a New Deal-era cash assistance program targeted to low-income children.
When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act converted it to a more restrictive—and underfunded—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families TANF block grant to supposedly encourage work, participation in the program decreased dramatically.
Such circumstances exist because economic inequality is inextricably linked to other structural inequities in incarceration, education, housing, health, and more. For example, more than 1 in 10 children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, and African American and American Indian children are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to live in neighborhoods that, due to histories of redlining and chronic underinvestment, are less likely to have job opportunities for parents and safe places to play.
The same forces that created segregated neighborhoods of concentrated poverty have also resulted in the segregation of primarily low-income students and students of color into underresourced schools that struggle to meet their needs. In the absence of a strong federal role, the vast majority of states have distributed educational funds through systems that do not target schools with higher rates of student poverty.
In some ways, the institutions charged with supporting children and keeping them safe have contributed to cycles of criminalization and hardship instead. For example, disciplinary practices in American schools disproportionately target low-income, disabled, and Black students and can ultimately lead to incarceration in what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
These examples of the many structural inequities in U. Policymakers need to make sure every child has access to the basics—food, housing, and health care—and ease the financial burdens that families face when raising children. The millions of children living in poverty right now do not have the luxury of waiting for changes that can take decades to fully realize.
Thus the push for more immediate assistance must be paired with a forward-thinking strategy to fix policies that promote inequality, limit economic mobility, and perpetuate marginalization. The following recommendations are just some of the policy solutions that can contribute to ending child poverty in the United States. Both programs have been tied to positive outcomes for mothers and infants, and children with access to the programs can experience significant health gains and improved long-term health, educational, and economic outcomes.
Despite the clear advantage of funding and supporting nutrition assistance programs, 58 they have been the target of regulatory attacks 59 and budget cuts. Lawmakers must also ensure that the WIC program is fully funded and that all of its benefits, including those beyond food assistance such as breastfeeding counseling, are available to all eligible families.
Another vital program for ensuring that children are guaranteed the food they need, the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs serve almost 30 million students each day. Those with family incomes at or below percent of the federal poverty level receive free lunch; those with incomes between percent and percent of the poverty level pay a reduced price 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch ; and all other students pay full price for their meals.
Instead of a means-tested program that can add burdens for both families and school administrators, with complicated paperwork for applications and reimbursements, lawmakers should enact a universal free lunch program at public schools and child care centers. Three-quarters of very low-income families pay more than half of their incomes on rent; 67 in , almost 1. To ensure that all children and their families are housed, policymakers must invest in fair and equitable housing policies.
The program is intended to help very low-income people rent, lease, or purchase safe housing in the neighborhoods of their choice, but its potential is marred in part by widespread discrimination against voucher holders and a yearslong waiting list.
As a result, millions of low-income families are often left with limited options and impossibly long waits for a voucher to become available. Children in low-income families tend to have worse health outcomes than other kids, with even short stays in poverty being associated with higher rates of asthma, malnutrition, trauma, and other chronic diseases.
Health care costs also drive millions of families into poverty, forcing them to make difficult financial trade-offs to afford care. The federal government must ensure that all children, no matter their household incomes, have access to comprehensive and affordable health care.
Doing so would not only create better health outcomes and future opportunities for those children but would also remove a financial burden for parents. And for the many low-wage workers who do not receive health care through an employer, stable coverage for their children is even harder to find. Recent attacks on Medicaid and CHIP have increased bureaucratic burdens, narrowed eligibility, and discouraged immigrant families from applying even when eligible—all of which contribute to increasing rates of uninsurance.
Future changes to the health care system must ensure stable, affordable coverage for low-income children and provide early and consistent screening, diagnostic, and treatment services so that children have access to the comprehensive and preventive health services that they need. While UI programs are intended to help families make up for lost wages, they are often characterized by state variations, burdensome application processes, and inadequate benefit amounts.
Despite its flaws, there is proven evidence that the program works. In , during the Great Recession, UI benefits lifted almost 1 million children out of poverty.
The United States is the only industrialized country without a national paid leave program, leaving many low-wage and part-time workers—who are disproportionately women—without a viable option for paid time off in times of need.
A permanent national paid sick leave law would help workers protect their health and care for sick family members without risking their livelihood. A permanent national paid family and medical leave program, with comprehensive reasons for leave and a progressive wage replacement, would allow workers to take time off to welcome a new child or care for themselves and their families during illness without experiencing a massive decline in income or losing their job completely.
According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis, more than , children would be lifted over the federal poverty line by increasing the minimum wage alone. For poor families, paying for child care can amount to almost one-third of their already limited budgets. Investing in affordable, high-quality child care and universal preschool is a smart decision—not just for the economy and families as a whole but also as a strategy to reduce child poverty in the coming years.
Study after study has shown that cash transfer programs can make a big difference in alleviating poverty. These programs allow people to spend the money where it makes the most sense for their families rather than dictating how or when they can use it. Although it is meant to help offset the cost of raising children, the phase-in structure of the credit means it intentionally excludes the lowest-income families who stand to benefit the most.
To strengthen the child tax credit, lawmakers must pass legislation to increase the benefit and make it fully refundable, disbursed monthly rather than as a one-time lump sum, and indexed to inflation.
Most importantly, they must eliminate the minimum earnings requirement to ensure that the most vulnerable children are able to receive the benefit. This would allow the credit to function much like a child allowance that offers cash benefits to families to help them raise children, a policy used in countries that have more successfully reduced child poverty such as Australia, Germany, and Canada.
Fixing existing programs to better serve families in poverty is necessary, but lawmakers must also commit to tackling the deep-rooted racism and inequity that makes poverty possible. They can do that by building a more equitable public education system with strong federal oversight and emphasis on ending the disparities that exist for low-income students and students of color; 96 closing the racial wealth gap with targeted policies and long-overdue reparations for centuries of structural racism and injustice; 97 ending mass incarceration and disenfranchisement; and other changes that address the many causes of systemic and generational poverty.
The high cost and limited availability of child care also disproportionately affects people of color. Black Americans are nearly twice as likely as non-Hispanic white families to make job sacrifices because of child care challenges.
All of the states for which data were available and complete are included in the analysis. Figure 1 shows the percentage of infants and toddlers in each state included in this report that could be served by licensed child care. The states for which there are no data either do not collect capacity or enrollment data for young children by specific age group, did not respond to requests to make those data available, or provided data that were missing information necessary to include them in the analysis—such as the number of licensed home-based providers.
Some element of the differences in child care supply levels across states is likely affected by differences in data collection and reporting. It is also true for California, which is missing data for the smallest classification of home-based providers. Across states, the population of infants and toddlers is far greater than the number of licensed child care slots.
There are 27 counties with no licensed child care options for infants and toddlers and only 26 counties that could serve more than two-thirds of infants and toddlers.
On average, there are more than four children per slot. Figure 2 displays child care supply and demographic data for each county in the states included in the analysis, as well as statewide totals.
For the District of Columbia, data are available by ward. Proximity to child care is important, especially for parents in lower-wage jobs who often have less flexibility and control over their schedules and who may have to rely on public transportation to get to child care and work. One study estimates that just 8 percent of programs serve children for any amount of time outside of traditional work hours.
Parents of disabled children are also more likely than parents of nondisabled children to be unable to find care—34 percent versus 28 percent, respectively. Child care must match the unique needs of children and families. This relationship holds when controlling for state—whether in a metro or nonmetro county—and the percentage of residents with a college degree.
As shown in Figure 3, counties in the top quintile of maternal labor force participation—those with more than 76 percent of mothers in the workforce—have twice as much infant and toddler child care supply as counties in the bottom quintile, or those with less than 61 percent of mothers in the workforce.
When child care is unavailable, employment declines for mothers. While 77 percent of mothers who do not find child care are employed, that figure jumps to 89 percent for mothers who do find child care. Additionally, there is a statistically significant correlation between counties with less infant and toddler child care supply and counties with higher unemployment in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, as of May Among the 1, counties in this study, the counties with the lowest May unemployment rates—a bottom quintile of about 7 percent unemployed—had While this is not a directly causal relationship, as many factors contribute to unemployment and many job seekers do not have young children, a lack of reliable child care options is one factor that makes it more difficult for parents to work.
As states aim to reduce high unemployment rates, policymakers should consider the child care needs of parents, who will struggle to work if there is not enough child care. This problem is likely to be dramatically worsened as businesses begin to reopen and require employees to work, especially absent federal funds to support child care providers in staying afloat.
While access to infant and toddler child care may vary by race and income, county-level statistics obscure differences that may exist within counties. There are not significant relationships between race and level of infant and toddler child care supply across this sample.
Counties with higher proportions of American Indian and Alaska Native AIAN residents, on average, have less infant and toddler child care supply, but there are few counties in this sample with a large enough population of AIAN residents to draw definitive conclusions from those results.
While this study examines licensed child care, many parents of infants and toddlers prefer informal care settings. Whether a child is in a child care center, a licensed home-based child care program, or in the care of a family member or friend, their development and safety is promoted by engaged caretakers. Informal care arrangements are often preferred because they can provide culturally competent care, ensure a trusted caregiver, and are typically cheaper.
However, licensed programs provide certain advantages, including a guarantee of meeting certain safety standards.
Research indicates higher-quality, more comprehensive child care programs confer the greatest educational and economic benefits to children. Therefore, it is important that families have the option to access licensed child care programs. While a lack of data and unclear policy implementation measures make it more difficult to research and provide actionable recommendations to improve informal child care, children and caregivers should be supported—regardless of the setting in which child care takes place.
The problem of infant and toddler child care shortages is not attributable simply to a lack of facilities. Caring for children is more expensive when they are younger, and neither families nor existing subsidies can cover the increased cost.
These market dynamics make it difficult for providers to afford enrolling infants and toddlers, especially without the support of revenue from preschoolers and with the challenge of recruiting and retaining early educators given paltry wages.
Babies require constant supervision and more intensive physical care than older children. Therefore, more teachers are needed for fewer children, making child care for infants and toddlers particularly costly to provide. Whereas one teacher can supervise up to 10 4-year-olds at once, they can only care for three or four infants simultaneously. Given that two-thirds of the cost of providing child care comes from compensating providers, needing two to three times the staff for the same number of children dramatically increases the cost of providing care.
Parents of infants and toddlers are typically early in their careers and unable to afford the higher tuition necessary to cover the true cost of infant and toddler care. Not only do only 1 in 6 eligible families—by federal income standards—actually receive child care subsidies, but the reimbursement rate is also inadequate to cover the higher cost.
The funding discrepancy worsens as states take badly needed steps to improve compensation and benefits for educators who work with infants and toddlers. While the investment in early childhood educators pays off for children, it requires additional funding. When the higher cost of caring for young children is not met with corresponding financial support, providers are often unable to care for infants and toddlers.
Policymakers must improve reimbursement rates to reflect the cost of caring for infants and toddlers in order to ensure that child care programs can care for infants and toddlers with or without preschool revenue. Infant and toddler child care is not just more expensive and in lower supply, it also pays less for early childhood educators. A study of early educators in Nebraska found a 26 percent annual turnover rate among child care teachers, compared with a rate of 15 percent for pre-K teachers, with 58 percent of child care administrators citing salary as the main reason teachers leave compared with 21 percent of pre-K administrators.
Low wages for infant and toddler educators also contribute to racial inequity within the early childhood workforce, as women of color are more likely to work with the youngest children. A well-trained, experienced child care workforce is important to promote best outcomes for children.
Any solution to the lack of infant and toddler care must include better pay for early educators. In recent years, many states have expanded preschool programs and the idea of universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds has gained significant political traction. Many provider business models rely on serving mixed ages of children so that the losses they might incur serving infants are offset by the revenue they receive serving preschoolers.
When states enact universal preschool programs that are only offered in public schools they remove large numbers of preschoolers from community-based sites, which can have a devastating impact on the financial stability of child care providers. Even when states do fund preschool in community-based sites, this can also harm infant-toddler supply, as providers may face an incentive to serve preschoolers—for whom funding is stable and often able to cover a larger share of the actual cost—rather than serving infants and toddlers and relying on existing, inadequate revenue sources.
Two recent studies have shed light on the ways in which preschool expansion can affect infant-toddler child care supply. While another study looking at universal pre-K across New York state did not find similar results in urban areas, it did find that preschool expansion reduced capacity for young children in nonurban areas, particularly in rural areas.
Other states and cities should consider these lessons when designing and implementing universal preschool programs. Many programs that serve infants and toddlers rely on the higher profit margins from preschoolers to stay in business. When the preschoolers go elsewhere, these programs may be forced to close.
Low-income and rural communities are often hit hardest by these closures. Families in poverty are less likely to be able to pay more to make up for the lost revenue of preschoolers—or they may rely on subsidies, which rarely reflect the cost of providing care for infants and toddlers. Low-income families are also less likely to have access to resources that promote child development outside of a licensed child care facility. Children and families need quality early education and care options from birth until when children enter school.
Preschool provides important benefits and remains underfunded, 49 and policymakers should continue to expand access to affordable preschool programs.
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