Latino Child Poverty Swells, Study Says : Families: More than 1 million joined ranks of poor between 1979 and 1989, according to group. Growth outpaced levels for Anglo, black youths.

The number of Latino children living in poverty in America grew by nearly a third during the last decade, a rate that easily outpaced escalating levels of poverty among Anglo and black children, according to new research findings released Monday.

Across the country, more than 1 million Latino children joined the ranks of the poor between 1979 and 1989, the most recent year for which figures were available, according to the Children’s Defense Fund, a Washington-based nonpartisan advocacy group.

The new findings, based on analysis of Census Bureau figures, add bulk to a mounting pile of private studies and government papers documenting a nationwide rise in childhood poverty. The accumulated research shows that child poverty rates have increased during the last decade for all of the nation’s racial and ethnic groups.

While a larger proportion of black children still live in poverty than Latino children, the report showed that the gap is narrowing. The number of poor Latino children grew at a rate of 29.3% over the 10-year period.

Among blacks, 542,000 additional children fell below the poverty line from 1979 to 1989, a growth rate of 6.1%. Altogether, the number of impoverished white children under age 18 increased by 1.4 million, a growth rate of 25.4%.

Latino children, who are classified in federal data sources as an ethnic group and not a separate racial category, are included among the poverty figures for white children in the Children’s Defense Fund study.

“The growing number of poor Latino children is responsible for much of the growth in the number of white children who are counted as poor in the official poverty data as well,” the study said.

Altogether, 2.6 million, or 36.2%, of the nation’s 7.2 million Latino children were living below the official U.S. poverty line in 1989, the group’s study found. That compares with a poverty level of 43.7% for black children and 14.8% for all whites, including Latinos.

Latino children “represent only one-ninth of the total child population, and yet they accounted for almost half of the total growth since 1979 in the number of children living in poverty,” the study said.

Sponsors of the study said that its findings counter arguments that the growth in childhood poverty among Latinos is attributable to an increasing population of immigrants or to a decline in traditional family units.

The study showed that all categories of Latinos in America, including U.S. natives, are experiencing disproportionately high rates of child poverty, suggesting that immigration is not the principal cause of the phenomenon.

In addition, about half of all poor Latino children, including 57% of poor Mexican-American children, live in traditional families. By comparison, only about a third of poor non-Latino children live in families with both parents present.

“For the Latino community, the idea that the child poverty problem can be solved through a greater adherence to traditional family values ignores the reality of pervasive poverty among Latino married-couple families,” Leticia C. Miranda, the report’s author and an analyst at the Children’s Defense Fund, said in a prepared statement.

“Many Latino children are poor despite their parents’ best efforts to pull their families out of poverty and despite the fact that they are playing by the rules,” Miranda said.

The study noted that Latino families suffered from “declining earnings, continued employment discrimination and decreasing government help” throughout the 1980s, contributing to the poverty gap between Anglo and Latino children. Latino adults are more likely to be undereducated and employed in lower-paying jobs than Anglo adults, the report said.

Calling the impoverished Latino youths “America’s children, America’s future workers, America’s future leaders and America’s ambassadors to a multicultural world,” Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, called on the government to assist Latino parents with tax credits and other policies to guarantee poor families enough income to support their children.

“Most comparable industrialized nations have policies which enable parents to meet their children’s needs through jobs and a ‘children’s allowance,’ ” Edelman said, noting that such programs have been endorsed by the bipartisan National Commission on Children. “It is time for America to catch up.”