Thirteen-year-old
Brittanie Potter and her 12-year-old sister Sydney held a bake sale and garage
sale at their Marion, Ohio home this summer with a simple goal in mind: raising
money for their school clothes and supplies. Their father’s unemployment insurance ended earlier this
year, their mother is still recovering from an accident last fall that broke
her leg so badly she needed several surgeries and now gets around in a
wheelchair, and their family has virtually no income. Brittanie worries: “I
hear them talking about bills and it makes me upset. I just think we’re going to be okay…but sometimes, I don’t
think we’re going to be okay.”
New data
just released by the U.S. Census Bureau reveals 46.2 million poor people in
America, the largest number in the last 52 years. One in three of America’s poor were children—16.4 million,
over 950,000 more than last year, and 7.4 million children were living in
extreme poverty. More than one in
three Black children and one in three Hispanic children were poor. Brittanie,
Sydney, and their 15-year-old brother Tre are three of the children behind
these grim statistics. Their
father John’s most recent job was at the local ConAgra snack food plant, and
their mother Brandy’s was at the nearby Marion Industrial Center, which made
minor repairs to new Hyundai cars. “We were making it,” Brandy says. “John made $16 something an hour and I
got $10.50. Between the two of us
it was decent money. The kids had
the things they needed. We were able to pay our bills and do things as a
family. Then it all fell down.”
First,
John lost his job at ConAgra. He
was on a medical leave from ongoing problems related to a serious car accident
years ago when he was let go, Brandy says. Then Hyundai ended its contract with her company and it went
out of business. They were already
struggling to pay bills with their unemployment checks when John’s unemployment
insurance ended in June and they lost even that income. Brandy stopped getting unemployment
insurance when she broke her leg; you have to be able to work to receive
unemployment.
“It’s
just so hard,” Brandy says. She
hates telling the children “no” when they need something, and she regrets that
they can’t do things as a family anymore—“we can’t even afford to go to
McDonald’s right now with the five of us.” Brandy is thankful for the government safety net: “If we
didn’t have food stamps, we would starve. Without Medicaid—oh my God! This morning I went to an appointment to apply for cash assistance
(Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF) because we have no
income. That was hard. But what’s really hard is going from
taking care of your family, and having not a lot of money but making it, to
having to pretty much beg.”
The
Potter family isn’t alone. The new
poverty numbers are grim and shameful, and child and family suffering is
widespread. Twenty-two percent of
children—over one in five—were poor in 2010. Children under five suffered most: one in four infants,
toddlers, and preschoolers—5.5 million—were poor. Shamefully, children are the poorest age group in our
country, are getting poorer, and have suffered more than any other age group
during this recession and slow recovery.
A country
that does not stand for and protect its children—our seed corn for the
future—does not stand for anything.
Sixty-five
percent of poor families with children under 18 have at least one worker. More
than 60 percent of all poor children—nearly 10 million—lived in single parent
families. But as the Potters know
first-hand, married couple families with children aren’t immune: almost nine
percent of all married couples with children under 18 were poor. To give perspective on America’s shame:
The number of poor children is nearly the same as the combined populations of
the states of Michigan and Arizona. The number of poor Black and Hispanic children is slightly more than the
entire population of Michigan, and the number of poor infants, toddlers, and
preschoolers is larger than the entire population of the state of Minnesota.
This is a
national disgrace. Parents like
John and Brandy have no control over the massive joblessness and foreclosures
and misguided tax cuts for the wealthy that have ravished our economy. Congress needs to wake up and change
course to protect children and their families. We must stop this devastation in
our communities and protect children from all budget cuts. We need to invest in the health and
education of our children and create jobs for their parents without a day’s
delay. And every citizen and voter
should demand that they do so in the richest nation on earth where there should
be no poor children at all.
Marian
Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child
Behind®mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair
Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to
adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more
information go to www.childrensdefense.org.
