The Persistent and Pervasive Challenge of Child Poverty and Hunger in North Carolina
The latest report on poverty in North Carolina from Professor Gene R. Nichol and Heather A. Hunt ’02 seeks to document and explore the state’s twin challenges of child hunger and poverty. They constitute, jointly, one of the state’s most wrenching and most embarrassing problems. They are, as well, massively inadequately attended to, constituting little of our public policy discourse, deliberation and legislative focus. Ignoring the pervasive dignity- and opportunity-denying difficulties of so many of our youngest and most vulnerable members is increasingly impossible to square with our foundational commitments and declarations, our constitutions and our creeds.
About one in five Tar Heel kids (19.5%) live below the federal poverty threshold (about $25,000 a year for a family of four). That is the tenth highest state rate in the nation. Almost ten percent of North Carolina kids live in extreme poverty. The youngest segment of the state’s population is the poorest. Twenty-two percent of children five years old and under are impoverished. Child poverty is also very highly racialized. Children of color are three times as likely as white kids to be poor. And child poverty in North Carolina, in recent decades, has become decidedly more concentrated—with poor kids living in neighborhoods containing higher and higher percentages of other poor kids. Children are thus required to deal not only with the challenges flowing from their own family’s economic hardship, but, often, also those of their close communities. North Carolina children’s economic mobility, as a result, has become increasingly impaired, making it more likely that if you are born poor you will stay that way. Our youngest, most vulnerable members face the most daunting economic challenges.
North Carolina child hunger is similarly crushing. The state’s food insecurity rate is the ninth highest in the nation. In the majority of North Carolina counties, at least one in five children are food insecure. In over twenty counties, the rate is more than one in four. Reflecting the prevalence of poverty, hunger is racially skewed too. While 62% of White households are food secure, that’s the case for only 43% of African-American and Hispanic households. In 2019, over 250,000 households with children in North Carolina (almost 21% of all households with children) participated in SNAP (formerly known as food stamps). And for the 2019-2020 school year, nearly six of ten Tar Heel public school students were enrolled in free or reduced cost school meal programs. Hundreds of thousands of North Carolina children—living in one of the most economically vibrant states of the wealthiest nation on earth—year in and year out, don’t get enough to eat.
