Gains in Reducing Child Poverty, but RacialEthnic Disparities Persist

In 2015, for the second year in a row, child poverty rates declined in the United States. However, familiar patterns in levels and characteristics of child poverty persist: more than one in five children are poor; children of color are at disproportionate risk for poverty; and rates are highest in the South and West and in rural areas and cities. This brief uses data from the American Community Survey to investigate patterns of child poverty across race-ethnicities and across regions and place types. We also explore changes in child poverty rates since 2014 and since the end of the Great Recession in 2009. The estimates presented in this brief are based on the official poverty measure. Native Americans, Alaskan and Hawaiian natives, and those reporting multiple racial-ethnic backgrounds are excluded from this update because such samples are too small for meaningful analyses. Nationwide, child poverty is highest among black children (36.5 percent), with rates nearly three times as high as those among non-Hispanic white and Asian children (12.5 and 12.1 percent, respectively). Rates among Hispanic children are also higher than those of white and Asian children, at 30.5 percent. These gaps persist despite the fact that between 2014 and 2015 black and Hispanic children experienced some of the largest declines in poverty. In other words, although poverty fell among these groups, thus narrowing the gap in rates between white children and children of color, these groups’ poverty rates are far from converging. For both black and Hispanic children, poverty rates are similar to the levels of 2009, when the recession ended, while rates for non-Hispanic white children remain slightly elevated (although consistently trending downward toward post-recession levels). Regionally, poverty rates are highest for black children in the Midwest and South (43.2 and 36.0 percent, respectively) and for Hispanic children in the Northeast (33.3 percent). By place type, black child poverty is highest in rural places—driven by very high rates in the rural South—and Hispanic child poverty is highest in cities, largely due to its high incidence in the Northeast.

Publication Date: 
2017