The State of the American Child: Securing Our Children's Future

The subcommittee on children and families has been a vital forum for focusing on the needs of children, and is the only body in the U.S. Senate that has this as its sole focus. When President Johnson introduced Head Start as part of the War on Poverty, he said that 5-year-olds are the inheritors of poverty and not its creators; and unless we act, these children, he said, will pass it onto the next generation like a family birthmark. Passing this birthmark has gone on for far too long. This is not a remote threat. It is real. New Census figures indicate that more than one in five children in the U.S. is living in poverty, rising from 13.3 million in 2007 to 15.5 million in 2009. Parents have lost jobs—we have the highest long-term unemployment rate since the Great Depression. It's time to, again, put a very specific and targeted focus on our children and the future of our world.