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The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) entitles all children to adequate nutrition, accessible medical services, free education, and lives of freedom and dignity. Project Head Start was inaugurated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in Washington, D.C., on May 18, 1965, and as the first comprehensive federal effort at early childhood intervention stands as a significant contribution to the fulfillment of this declaration. Head Start is the product of historical, intellectual, political, and personal influences.

This article will focus on the impact of American government policy on poor children. While childhood poverty is a global concern, the United States, as reported by UNICEF in 2012, has the second-highest rate of childhood poverty among industrialized Western countries. Reasons for the high childhood poverty rate in the United States will be explored. Areas of discussion and analysis include American social and fiscal policies, approaches to defining and measuring the childhood poverty rate, the political economy of American anti-poverty policies and American welfare state, and the present and future impact of American anti-poverty policies on poor children. United States government anti-poverty policies will be explored within the larger context of international anti-poverty policies and initiatives.

Head Start is a US government program established in 1965 to improve the potential for children in disadvantaged households to escape poverty and succeed later in life. The program provides early education and nutritional programs to children between the ages of three and five years old. It is targeted primarily at low-income households and children with disabilities.

Each country has its own definition of the poverty line, or the minimum annual income necessary for an adequate standard of living. In developed countries such as the United States, this is relatively high. However, for billions of other people around the world, living in poverty means living on an income of approximately one dollar a day. This condition affects not only adults, but the children in their care as well. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than half of the children living in developing countries had a severe deprivation of one basic human need and over one third of the children in these countries were living in conditions of absolute poverty in which basic human needs are not being met, including the need for adequate food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education, information, and access to social services (Gordon, Nandy, Pantazis, Pemberton, & Townsend, 2003). The Millennium Development Goals articulated in 2000 by the United Nations addressed these issues with the hope of severely reducing poverty by the year 2015, and subsequent reports have addressed the progress made and the work to be done post-2015 (United Nations, 2015). However, although progress has been made toward meeting these goals in many areas, other areas still show little or no progress. Much more work is still needed.