Childhood Poverty

Childhood poverty can be defined simply as when children receive insufficient material resources, such as food, shelter, clothing, and access to services, for surviving and thriving during the first two decades of life. The measures used tend to vary by context. One 2017 article published in Economics Letters found that globally, 19.5% of the world’s children are estimated to experience the most extreme forms of poverty. Children are also disproportionately affected by poverty, with one out of every two people living in extreme poverty around the world under 18 years old. In high-income countries and using different measures, children are still more likely to be poor than the population as a whole. In the United States, a quarter of the population is children but a ...