2023 Child Poverty Rates in Historical Perspective

2023 Child poverty rates in historical perspective

Annual poverty rates are an important indicator of economic wellbeing. Placing current poverty rates in historical context is also crucial for understanding how populations are faring over time and how policy decisions have or have not improved economic wellbeing. Further, different choices related to measuring poverty can affect our understanding of poverty and can yield additional insights when interpreting long-term trends.

In recent work, we examined total population poverty trends from 1967 to 2023 in the United States under four different poverty measures, finding that while measurement choices alter the shape of long-term trends, government taxes and transfers have played a critical and growing role in reducing poverty.

This brief builds on the Center on Poverty and Social Policy’s prior work examining long-term historical poverty trends under various measures by focusing specifically on poverty among children. We examine poverty rates of children who are under the age of 18, both before and after counting resources from government policies and programs. We present poverty rates for children under the four different measures used in our prior work: (1) the historical Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), (2) the anchored 2012 SPM, (3) the anchored 2022 SPM, and (4) a fully relative poverty measure.

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Key Findings

  • Progress in child poverty reduction varies based on how changes in living standards are accounted for over time. When assessed against a fixed standard of living (as in the anchored SPM), children are significantly better off today than in the 1960s. On the other hand, when considering measures that adjust for changing living standards (as in the historical SPM and relative measure), the picture is more nuanced: while children are better off under the historical SPM, relative poverty rates have actually risen slightly since the 1960s.
     
  • Before accounting for government taxes and transfers, child poverty declined from 1967 to 2023 when assessed against a fixed standard of living (as in the anchored SPM). When considering measures that adjust for changing living standards, child poverty remains somewhat stagnant (as in the historical SPM) or has risen (as in the relative poverty rate) before accounting for taxes and transfers. Regardless of measure, government programs and policies have played an increasingly important role in reducing the child poverty rate over time.
     
  • Regardless of measure, the role of government policies and programs in reducing the child poverty rate has grown substantially over time.

Suggested Citation:

Vinh, Ryan, Christopher Wimer, Sophie Collyer, and Sofia Georgianni. 2025. 2023 Child poverty rates in historical perspective. Poverty and Social Policy Brief, vol. 9, no. 7.  New York: Center on Poverty and Social Policy, Columbia University. 

Published on June 12, 2025