Children’s Status Falling, Report Says

Facing formidable political and economic obstacles, the Children’s Defense Fund opened its annual convention here Wednesday with a report that large numbers of children are not sharing in the nation’s rebounding economy.

A quarter of a century after the advocacy group was founded, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened to a chasm and children remain the poorest of the poor, according to the group’s annual status report.

In 1996, nearly 20% of all children in America were poor, compared with 14% in 1973. Over that period, young families with children have suffered striking economic losses, with median incomes for families headed by parents under 30 plunging 33%, from $30,000 to less than $20,000.

And the percentage of children living in extreme poverty grew to 9% in 1996 from 8.5% in 1995. The group also noted a sharp increase in the number of children who lack health insurance--11.3 million in 1996, the highest number ever recorded by the Census Bureau.

In California, 26% of children under 18 live in poverty, ranking the state 42nd in the nation, according to the report. In 1996, nearly 19% of the children in the state had no health insurance, ranking the state 44th.

“We’ve made great progress” on many fronts, declared Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, but “we have yet to deal with the growing division between rich and poor.”

The report, called “The State of America’s Children,” is scheduled for release today and is a highlight of the group’s annual conference being held this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center. More than 2,500 are expected to attend.

The participants know they face a conservative Congress, controlled by Republicans, and a Clinton administration willing to compromise with the lawmakers. Edelman publicly broke ranks with President Clinton over his support of welfare reform. Her husband, Peter Edelman, resigned from the administration in protest.

The report noted progress over the years in school access for disabled children, childhood immunization rates and in declining rates for teenage pregnancies and births.

“Our sense is that preventive programs are making a difference,” said Susanne Martinez, director of programs and policy at the Children’s Defense Fund. “More teens are delaying pregnancies and more are using contraceptives.”

One of the report’s more promising findings is a reported decline in the trend of violence by and against juveniles. Gun deaths of children dropped for the first time in a decade in 1996--and by nearly 10% from the previous year, from 5,820 to 5,277.

The arrest rates of young people for violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault also fell in 1996 for the second year in a row.

But this week’s killings in Arkansas, in which an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old are suspected of ambushing fellow students, provides a powerful contrast to those statistics, Edelman said.

“The incidence of violence and availability of drugs and guns are certainly the new things that young children have to deal with compared to 25 years ago,” Edelman said. “It makes me angry when people ask why something like this tragedy in Arkansas can happen when this country glorifies violence. We have to come to our senses and take guns out of the hands of our children.”

And, even as many in Arkansas were calling for the boys to be tried as adults, the report decries the growing movement to invoke harsh punitive measures against youthful offenders.

One legislative bill pending in the U.S. Senate would allow states to put more children in adult jails and reduce the confidentiality of juvenile records. But the report asserts that such measures would do more harm than good:

“Housing children in jails and prisons with adults puts them at greater risk for suicide, rape, assault and murder. . . . Not only are children in adult facilities at greater risk of harm, but their chances for rehabilitation are markedly reduced because they are exposed to precisely the wrong role models and receive no education.”

Edelman said, “We need to stop selling violence in our culture through television, movies and music, and we need to deal with the underlying causes of all this. As a mother, when I heard that one of the boys possibly had broken up with a girlfriend, I had to say, when do young boys start dating these days? We need to start having parents parent. We need to be better examples and deal with the breakdown in our cultural values and the family.”

Edelman acknowledged that the fund faces political opponents and replied strongly to them, particularly those on the religious right. She said she does not understand a “faith-based policy that would take from the poor rather than the rich.”

Indeed, this year’s children’s report asserts that welfare reform legislation enacted by Congress in 1996 has left children in a more precarious position than ever. The law for the first time imposed limits on the duration of government assistance for poor families.

Welfare caseloads have been falling, but in the quarter ending June 30, 1997, states reported that only 15% of closed cases were shut because of increased earnings, according to the report.

The report recommends increasing the minimum wage enough to support families above the poverty line, boosting funding for child care programs and emphasizing community-based measures such as after-school programs, mentoring and parent training to prevent childhood violence.