Barbara J. Hamby

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Levels of Poverty

In a recent article in the New Yorker, the writer listed three criteria for children growing up in poverty today. The first two my sisters and I could have qualified for, i.e. wearing hand-me-downs, and sleeping two to a bed. The third I don’t ever remember happening, that is getting food stamps or welfare. We always had enough to eat, maybe not always what we might have preferred, but plenty of nourishing food that was well prepared by our mother. We certainly never considered ourselves to be poverty stricken.

The standards for defining poverty definitely change from time to time. These days, the measure seems to be annual family income. Often people who are living at “poverty level” in this country today have many more luxuries than we had when we were young. Of course, some of those modern inventions weren’t around in our childhood.

Regardless of definition or standards of poverty, there are definitely far too many children in this country living with hunger and inadequate housing. In a nation as wealthy as ours, one such child is too many.