Four in 10 American children live in low-income families, new report shows
Four out of every ten American children live in low-income families, according to new research from the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. This finding from the 2015 edition of the center's Basic Facts about Low-Income Children fact sheet series underscores the magnitude of the problem of family economic insecurity and child poverty in the United States. Analyzing the latest available U.S. Census data, NCCP researchers find that 44 percent of children under age 18 lived in low-income families in 2013, and 22 percent lived in poor families. Low-income families are defined as those with incomes less than two times the Federal Poverty Threshold (about $47,000 for a family of four with two children) and poor families are defined as those with incomes below the threshold (about $24,000 for a family of four with two children).