Last year, America placed next to last in a ranking of child well-being in 35 developed countries, barely beating out Romania. A recent report by the Children’s Defense Fund helps explain how the US earned that distinction. According to the report, 1-in-5 American children live in relative poverty. Close to half of poverty-stricken kids live in extreme poverty, which means their families earn less than half the poverty level of $11, 746 per year for a family of four.

Since the Great Recession began in 2009, there’s been a 73 percent jump in student homelessness and a 23 percent increase in child hunger. The so-called ‘jobless recovery” has not helped.

‘Our key finding is that four years after the end of the recession, children have not seen any relief,” says Caroline Fichtenberg, Director of Research at the Fund. ‘The recession has not ended for them.”

It’s even worse in Southern states, where 1-in-4 kids is poor. ‘We call it the geographic lottery,” Fichtenberg says. ‘Depending on where the child is born, there’s a much higher or lower chance they’ll be poor.”

Their findings square with recent research that shows your chances of doing better than your parents depend on where you grow up. When […]