The proportion of American children who live in poverty began rising during the recession, and it continued rising after the recession officially ended. In 2013, the child poverty rate finally fell for the first time since 2006 — a dip that advocates hoped was the beginning of an enduring trend.
But the child poverty rate did not fall again. Twenty-two percent of U.S. children — or more than one in five — were still living in poverty in 2014, unchanged from 2013, according to new data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
That’s 15.7 million children living under the poverty line, which in 2014 was $24,008 for a family of four.
Minority children were even more likely to be living in poverty, the Annie E. Casey Foundation pointed out. Nearly four in 10 black children and nearly one-third of Latino children live in poverty, compared with 13 percent of white and Asian children.