Nation IN BRIEF : NATIONWIDE : Poverty Grips More Children, Study Says

Ineffective government relief programs and low wages pushed 2.2 million more American children into poverty during the 1980s, a children’s advocacy group said. The Children’s Defense Fund said that, contrary to popular notions, its study found that only one of 10 poor children in 1989 was black, welfare-dependent and living in a fatherless household in a big city. It said that in that year, about 12.6 million children in the United States--2.2 million more than a decade earlier--lived in households with incomes below the poverty threshold despite uninterrupted economic growth from 1982 through 1989.