Child poverty has plunged over the last generation, and few places have experienced larger declines than West Virginia, a state that once epitomized childhood deprivation. Poverty among the state’s children fell nearly three-quarters from 1993 to 2019, according to a comprehensive analysis by Child Trends, a nonpartisan research group, conducted in partnership with The New York Times. That compares to a 59 percent drop nationwide.

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The statistical progress is impressive, but children escape poverty one complicated family story at a time. A visit to Huntington, a rusting Appalachian river town where tales of hardscrabble childhoods abound, shows how an expanded safety net offers children protection their parents often lacked and profoundly affects families’ economic and emotional lives.

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A new report from Child Trends, “Lessons From a Historic Decline in Child Poverty,” finds that child poverty rates decreased from one in four children in 1993 to one in 10 children in 2019. 

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Factors associated with this decline include changes in the labor market, like increased state minimum wages and decreased unemployment; changes in demographic factors, like fewer teen births; and changes to government safety net programs. 

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Housing assistance, in particular, has played a growing part in reducing child poverty. In 1993, housing assistance kept 290,000 children out of poverty compared to 790,000 children in 2019. 

Book by Andrea Elliott, Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

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Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolize Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani grows up, moving with her tight-knit family from shelter to shelter, this story goes back to trace the passage of Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. By the time Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis is exploding as the chasm deepens between rich and poor. 

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(See related NYTTimes Magazine article in 9/28/21 listing below)

Inspired by Stephanie Land’s memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, the hit 10-episode series is striking a chord so often left unstruck, a deeply moving exploration of domestic and emotional abuse, generational trauma, and the infuriating catch-22s of government systems built for failure.

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For the listing on Stephanie Land's book, see the entry below dated 1/22/19.

New York Times Magazine article by Andrea Elliott

I first met Dasani in October 2012, when she was an 11-year-old homeless girl growing up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn — a neighborhood where the rich and the poor live within striking proximity. The following year, I published a five-part series about Dasani after spending 14 months with her family. All 10 of them — Dasani, her parents, her seven siblings and her pet turtle — were living in a single mouse-infested room at Auburn Family Residence, a decrepit city-run homeless shelter just blocks from townhouses that sold for millions. Day after day, Dasani would walk through Fort Greene’s streets, seeing into a world that did not see her. “I’m visible,” she later told me. “But society doesn’t see me.”

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Now 13-year-old Dasani is going... to a different place — a boarding school in rural Hershey that tries to rescue children from poverty. “I want to attend the Milton Hershey school because I want to get a better education,” Dasani wrote in her application essay. Among Hershey’s students, Dasani’s struggles are not unusual. About one in five has been homeless, more than half have had a parent incarcerated and about half have been exposed to substance abuse in their families.

Description: Few topics have as many myths, stereotypes, and misperceptions surrounding them as that of poverty in America. The poor have been badly misunderstood since the beginnings of the country, with the rhetoric only ratcheting up in recent times. In “Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty” Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock powerfully demonstrate that the realities of poverty are much different than the myths; indeed in many ways they are more disturbing. The idealized image of American society is one of abundant opportunities, with hard work being rewarded by economic prosperity. What if hard work does not necessarily lead to economic well-being? What if the reasons for poverty are largely beyond the control of individuals? And if all of the evidence necessary to disprove these myths has been readily available for years, why do they remain so stubbornly pervasive?

New York Times Bestseller • Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.

New York Times Magazine article by Anthony Abraham Jack

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Schools must learn that when you come from poverty, you need more than financial aid to succeed.

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Colleges have made racial and class diversity into virtues with which they welcome students during orientation and entice alumni to make donations. But students of color and those from lower-income backgrounds often bear the brunt of the tension that exists between proclamation and practice of this social experiment.

Recommended by a CAC volunteer, Maid is a memoir written by a single mom who suddenly finds herself homeless and unable to find a job. She turns to housekeeping to make ends meet, and to be able to keep her child. In this book she that tells the “stories of overworked and underpaid Americans. Of living on food stamps and WIC (Women, Infants, Children) coupons to eat. Of the government programs that provided her housing, but that doubled as halfway houses. The aloof government employees who called her lucky for receiving assistance while she didn’t feel lucky at all.”

Maid also “explores the secret underbelly of upper middle class Americans and the reality of what it’s like to be in service to them”.​

Study brief from IU Bloomington

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Raising the minimum wage by $1 per hour would result in a substantial decrease in the number of reported cases of child neglect, according to a new study co-authored by an Indiana University researcher.

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"Money matters," Bullinger said. "When caregivers have more disposable income, they're better able to provide a child's basic needs such as clothing, food, medical care and a safe home. Policies that increase the income of the working poor can improve children's welfare, especially younger children, quite substantially."

NYTimes Op-Ed by Emma Ketteringham

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There is a misconception that the child-protection system is broken because child services fails to protect children from dangerous homes. That’s because the media exhaustively covers child deaths, but not the everyday tragedy of unnecessary child removals.

The problem is not that child services fails to remove enough children. It’s that the agency has not been equipped to address the daily manifestations of economic and racial inequality. Instead, it is designed to treat structural failings as the personal flaws of low-income parents.

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. Vance compellingly describes the terrible toll that alcoholism and drug abuse took on his family.