Research studies based on statistics for the United States as a whole have documented differences in child and family well-being between children in low-income families and children in more affluent families and between children in single-parent families and children in two-parent families. However, researchers have not explored differences in…

The number of U.S. children living in poverty increased in 2007--continuing an upward trend dating back to 2000: in 2007, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, up from 11.6 million children in 2000. The percentage of children living in families with incomes below the poverty line has increased from 16.2 percent in 2000 to 18.0 percent in…

In this Research-to-Results Brief, the author discusses the importance for policymakers, taxpayers, and the media to recognize the diversity in children's circumstances, because this recognition affects the number of children believed to need varied services and the magnitude of the challenge of meeting that need. Many researchers have developed…

In this paper, we conceptualize and develop an index of sociodemographic risk that we hypothesize will be an improvement over the standard poverty measure as a measure of risk for children's development. The poverty line is widely used in government statistics and in research but is also widely acknowledged to have multiple shortcomings. Using…