In a season that celebrates a child, remember the children living in poverty

As the Christmas season unfolds, it becomes impossible not to think of children. Our own, our kin, and more broadly, those of our fellows. “To us a child is born,” Pope Francis explained last yule tide. “In everyone, I see reflected,” he added, “the face of God.”

But for us, in the wealthiest nation on earth, the picture is a complicated and even challenging one. We have, of course, much to celebrate. For many, no time brings us so fully together. And never is our generosity on such full and lavish display. No joy can readily surpass the day’s unfolding. Still, as we survey the landscape, much shames us as well.

The United States is the richest, the poorest and the most unequal advanced nation in the world. The polarization shows its face most boldly in the fate of our children. The United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights has decried the “shockingly high number of children living in poverty in the United States.” We are, he reports, “the extreme outlier in child poverty”.

Nearly twice as many American kids are poor as the average for the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development nations. We rank almost at the bottom of the 38 major free market democracies. Behind almost all the European and British Commonwealth nations, of course. But, more shocking, we also trail Latvia, South Korea, Lithuania, Estonia, Greece, the Slovak Republic, and Mexico. You would think we’d be humiliated.

And bad as the United States is, North Carolina, on average, fares worse. About one in five Tar Heel kids lives below the federal poverty threshold (roughly $25,000 a year for a family of four). That’s the tenth worst state rate in the nation. Ten percent of our kids live in extreme poverty (receiving less than half the federal standard). And the youngest segment of our state population, kids five and under, is the poorest (22%). The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does estimate that the child tax credit in the federal recovery bill will temporarily, but only temporarily, lift137,000 NC kids out of poverty.

North Carolina child poverty is also both highly racialized and gendered. Children of color are three times as likely as white kids to be poor. And the Census Bureau reports that “female householder families” are disproportionally impoverished. In recent decades, our child poverty has become markedly more concentrated – requiring kids to deal not only with the challenges flowing from their own family’s hardship, but, often, also those of their close communities. Their economic mobility in turn suffers, making it more likely that if you are born poor, you’ll stay that way.

North Carolina child hunger is similarly crushing. The state’s food insecurity rate is the country’s 11th highest. In the majority of North Carolina counties, at least one in five children are hungry. In over twenty counties, the rate is more than one in four. Hundreds of thousands of North Carolina children – year in and year out – don’t get enough to eat.

As Tiffany Gladney, the policy director at NC Child, has explained to us:

“North Carolina’s children are suffering. Our poverty rate is staggering. It is incumbent on us to ensure that every baby has an opportunity to thrive. Poverty is the biggest risk factor in a child’s healthy development and growth—mental health, physical health.”

Alexandra Sirota, director of the nonprofit NC Justice Center’s Budget & Tax Center, puts it starkly: “I didn’t sign up for a society that lets kids starve.”

And, as Pope Francis reminds, “the coexistence of wealth and poverty is a scandal, it is a disgrace to humanity.”

Christmas is a time for kids, one and all.

“What child is this?”