Child Poverty, Child Care, and Children’s Rights

Abstract

In this chapter, child poverty and the lack of fundamental rights accorded to young children in the United States are framed within a broader, international, human rights context. Persistent poverty and the lack of access to high-quality child care is a pervasive threat to young childrens well-being and healthy development. In the following sections, brief narratives of homeless children and of mothers desperate for affordable, accessible, child care shadow the cold, statistical realities of poverty and inequalityin order to illuminate what it means for vulnerable children and their families when policy hits the ground. An instrumentalist cost-benefit discourse is juxtaposed against a rights discourse with a specific emphasis on child care as a human rightanchored in international human rights conventions; specifically the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).