Homeless Children in the United States: Mark of a Nation at Risk

Abstract

One of the most disturbing im ages to emerge in public conscious ness during the past decade is that of the homeless thild. Public concern grew as stories of homeless families filled the media. Books like Rachel and Her Children, by Jonathan Ko zol, roused the conscience of the na tion. Clearly, emergency shelters and welfare hotels like New York City's Martinique, so vividly de picted by Kozol, were not fertile ground for child development. Various attempts have been made to estimate the magnitude of the problem of homeless Americans, but, as the 1990 U.S. Census takers found, counting the homeless pre sents a host of definitional and meth odological issues. Consequently, es timates varied. Nonetheless, data converged on three conclusions: (1) the number of homeless Americans increased during the 1980s, (2) the problem was significant (even by conservative estimates), and (3) the number of homeless families with children was increasing both in ab solute terms and as a percentage of the total homeless population. The estimate published in 1988 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences rep resented a midrange figure: Nation wide, it was estimated that 100,000 children were homeless on any given night, excluding minors on