The study also found that there is a lack of information on the status of Black and visible minority children and that information on the situation of youth who are not part of the mainstream is severely lacking, even though the needs and numbers of this group are increasing. O ne of the most significant results of the Atlantic study was a re-thinking of the whole issue of child poverty. And usually it is women-led families that are poorest. W e don t want to think about it this way, but child poverty is simply an indicator of the hardships being experienced by an increasing number of Canadian families. Children are poor because a growing number of Canadian adults are poor.
Children are extremely vulnerable to the impacts of high unemployment and under-employment.
I came to rely on my local food bank to help me feed my children. T he situation described in the letter to the Food Bank is not unusual. The trend shows that more post-secondary students are using our services and we are seeing more of the working poor people working full time for minimum wage who are barely getting by. Fully one-third of the people who benefit from the Vancouver Food Bank s services are children. O ther factors that affect the rate of child and family poverty include cutbacks to federal and provincial social programs such as health care, education, Employment Insurance, and housing.