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Abstract
In the same period that the poverty rate of the elderly has improved most markedly — chiefly because of improved social security programs — the poverty rate of children has seriously worsened. This adverse shift in children's fortunes, part of a broader pattern of adverse changes of younger compared with older age groups, is chiefly due to the concurrence of two conditions since the late 'sixties — a slackening in the growth of aggregate demand and a growth in the supply of younger relative to older adults — that have caused a severe deterioration in the wage and unemployment rates of adults in family forming ages. However, the prospect is that the ige structure of poverty that has recently emerged will be a passing phenomenon.