If we are to assure the safety and positive developmental experiences for all of North Carolina's children, programs such as mental health and substantive abuse services need to be available for children and youth, particularly for those whose parents are underemployed or not yet in the labor force. If North Carolina is to end social promotion in schools, poor children may need more days per year and intensive remedial help with reading in primary school. Health care must reach all children, if those of the next generation are to grow up to reach their full potential, cognitively and physically. Full funded outreach efforts for NC Health Choice and funding for school clinics would help reach the poorest of our state's children, and improve their health. What is most distressing in these data is that fulltime parental employment does not by itself solve the problem of poverty among children.
Welfare reform focuses on moving single mothers into paid employment.
Even if the state reduced transfer payments to poor parents, and helped those parents find full-time work, many of their children will remain poor. Currently one-third of the children of single parents employed full time live in or near poverty. Parental employment does not erase children's poverty. The absence of a father's income increases a white child's chances of poverty by 24 percent and a nonwhite child's by 48 percent. They are a generation at risk.