These children in poverty will come back to haunt us as unproductive adults overly represented in prisons and mental health facilities. Florida's future depends on its children, but too many of them, more than 400,000, are growing up poor. Study after study has shown that growing up in poverty often results in poor health, bad grades, teen pregnancy and crime. Today, more than a third of all America's poor children belong to families where at least one parent works all year.
Poverty forces people to compromise their health and basic quality of life just to make ends meet.
In Florida, about one in five children and one in 10 senior citizens lives in poverty. Of the 11 largest states, Florida fared worst than most on the percentage of children in poverty and better than most on the percentage of elders in poverty.