Perspectives on Early Childhood Psychology and Education 2.1

Growing Up Poor: The Negative Sequelae on Child Development "In 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that nearly 15.5 million children and adolescents in the United States live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold. While child poverty rates slightly decreased between 2013 and 2014, the 2016 State of the Union revealed that the United States, in comparison to its peer countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, and the United Kingdom), was an outlier on many measures of inequality. For example, the United States has high levels of income disparity and wealth imbalance, as well as unusually high levels of poverty. Further, the extent of imbalance of inequality in the United States can have extremely detrimental effects on one of its most vulnerable subgroups of the population: children."