Photo: Ryan Orr (flickr)

Congratulations: Children in the United States do not have the worst quality of life in the developed world. That honor is held by Britain — with the United States a close second.

— editorial in The Nation

Because the focus of alleviating child poverty is usually the developing world, it is easy to forget there are poor kids in rich nations, too. In fact, according to the UN’s 2007 overview of child well-being in rich countries, “there is no obvious relationship between levels of child
well-being and GDP per capita.”

It may be of a surprise that despite America’s vast wealth, the country has one of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world. In fact, the total number of children in the country in poverty has increased by one million from 2000 to 2006. According to Kids Count, a national and state-by-state effort to track the status of children in the United States, between 2000 and 2006 child poverty increased in 32 states and the District of Columbia.

The numbers are no better in the United Kingdom – recent figures showed that 2.9 million children in the U.K. are officially living below the poverty line – up 100,000 since 2005-06.

Although these children bear no responsibility for living in poverty, they are penalized by their governments’ neglect and disinvestment in poverty-reduction policies. As The Nation observes:

One can talk about military as opposed to social spending; about pro-business, oil-driven economies; about the distractions of patriotism and the culture of aggression; about valuing the imperatives of power above the duty of care. But however one chooses to name it, the deep, intractable connection between military adventurism abroad and the neglect of needs at home has never been more starkly evident. The pity is that it's so difficult to fight the problem, so hard to focus on a pregnant teenager too scared to ask for help or a child hungry at school when the casualty figures from Baghdad demand our attention. The fog of war may be most blinding for the folks back home.