Children of Incarcerated Parents

Also notable regarding the rise in juvenile poverty was the concurrent decrease in the
rates of poverty among other vulnerable or "dependent" populations, specifically the
elderly. [2] In 1984 demographer Samuel Preston reported on several statistics that
should have counter-indicated these trends. First a "sharp fertility decline" in the two
decades after the 1957 postwar peak, matched with a "a very rapid decline in old age
mortality", should have indicated "favorable consequences for children and troubling
ones for the elderly. In fact, he writes,
My thesis is that exactly the opposite trends have occurred in the relative well-being of
our two groups of age dependents and that demographic factors have not only failed to
prevent this outcome but have, in many ways, encouraged it. Conditions have
deteriorated for children and improved dramatically for the elderly...
Considering these shifts and anomalous patterns of prosperity, the term "juvenilization
of poverty" was coined to give name to the growing understanding the poverty was
being increasingly and systematically born by children. The term, in both scholarship
and practice, is used to elucidate ways in which children, even in times of economic
gains and despite evidence seemingly to the contrary, are at a disproportionate risk of
living in poverty.
Trends in Child Poverty Up To 2010
Child poverty in the United States has fluctuated dramatically over time, usually in
response to large-scale economic and political events. Estimates of juvenile poverty
during the Great Depression judge that as many as 7 in 10 children, or 70% of all
Americans under the age of 18, lived in poverty. The economic recovery afforded by
World War II and post-war prosperity dramatically reduced both the number and percent
of children living in impoverished homes.
Until the early 1960s however, no official, formalized national attempt was made to
measure a standard poverty rate. In 1963, however, analyst Mollie Orshansky, a Social
Security Administration researcher, worked to develop an official poverty threshold to
standardize poverty measures.
Still used today, the Orshansky Poverty Threshold is an absolute measure of poverty
that uses as its basis a "minimally adequate food budget" for families of varying sizes,
estimating that food costs required approximately one-third of a family's after-tax
budget. Thus a family (of three or more) fell below the poverty threshold if their after-tax
income is less than three times the "minimally adequate food budget". Despite some
changes to the formula, this measure remains at the center of the official measures of
absolute poverty.
Orshansky's calculations determined that in 1960 just under 30% of children lived in
poverty. This rate continued to decline throughout the 1960s and 1970s due to a
combination of economic growth, strong social welfare spending, and a robust labor
market that increasingly included working mothers. Overall rates of child poverty
reached a low in 1974 at, according to varying estimates, between 8-15%. However, in
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