In any given year from 1987 to 1996, about one in five of all American children—some twelve to fourteen million—lived in families in which total income failed to exceed even the spartan thresholds used to define poverty. That so many of the youngest citizens of the wealthiest nation in the world are living poor is cause for concern. Indeed, the United States has a higher rate of poverty than most other Western industrialized nations (Smeeding and Rainwater 1995). And that child poverty has increased since the 1970s is also troubling (Hernandez 1993; see chapter 2). This volume explores the consequences and correlates of growing up poor as well as the mechanisms through which poverty influences children. The volume is organized around three key topics, with a primary focus on the research findings and a secondary concern with their policy implications. First, we examine the consequences of income poverty for children and youth and show that children raised in low-income families score lower than children from more affluent families do on assessments of health, cognitive development, school achievement, and emotional well-being. We examine both the effects of longerand shorter-term poverty upon children and the effects of the timing of poverty bouts upon well-being in the first two decades of life. The last two themes have implications for public policy vis-à-vis the timing of income supports to families. A second key topic is whether or not links between income poverty and child well-being are due to income per se or to the other family conditions that often occur with poverty. For example, poor families are also more likely to be headed by a single parent, a parent with low educational attainment, an unemployed parent, a parent in the low-wage market, a divorced parent, or a young parent. These familial conditions might account in large measure for the association between low income and less favorable outcomes for children. Specifically, we ask whether or not the effects of income poverty are due to household structure, parents’ age, or parents’ education. If, for example, family income does not matter