Voices for Children in Nebraska is pleased to join the Annie E. Casey Foundation as a 2011 KIDS COUNT Data Book outreach partner. The annual Data Book is a comprehensive resource on the status of U.S. children, featuring state-specific data on ten key indicators of child well-being.
Please visit the Data Book home page to download the report and create maps, graphs, and charts at the national, state, and local level.
The new mobile Data Center offers hundreds of measures of child well-being available on any smartphone:http://mobile.kidscount.org.
According to data in the 22nd annual KIDS COUNT Data Book the economic and social gains for children that occurred across the 1990s stalled, even before the economic downturn began. This year’s Data Book reports an 18 percent increase in the U.S. child poverty rate between 2000 and 2009. This increase means that 2.5 million more American children are living below the federal poverty line ($21,756 for a family of two adults and two children) and effectively wiping out the gains made on this important measure in the late 1990s. The number of Nebraska children living in poverty increased by more than 20,000 to 66,349 – marking a worrisome 45 percent change in the past decade.
In an ongoing effort to track the impact of the recession, there are two new indicators in this year’s report – the number of children impacted by foreclosure and households with at least one unemployed parent. In Nebraska, 17,000 or 2 percent of the state’s children have been impacted by foreclosure since 2007. In 2010, an estimated 27,000 or 6 percent of children in the state lived in households where there was at least one parent who was eligible for and or seeking employment, but was unemployed at the time the data were collected.
“Nebraska has in many ways weathered the recession better than other states,” said Voices for Children in Nebraska’s executive director, Carolyn Rooker. “However, we have seen a striking increase in child poverty through the decade – 20,000 more children were growing up in poverty in 2009 than in 2000. This is troubling not just because more kids are struggling right now, but also because of the lifelong impact of poverty they face as they grow into adults. Our state’s future prosperity depends on how our children are faring now.”
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