Families With Children

A Knight-Ridder News Service graphic published in The Sun yesterday misstated a national child-poverty statistic. In 1989, 4.9 million of 12 million poor children, or about 2 in 5, lived in families with incomes below half the poverty line.The Sun regrets the errors.WASHINGTON -- Contrary to stereotype, only 1 in 10 poor American children is urban, black and living with a mother on welfare, according to a groundbreaking report on child poverty to be released today.Instead, rising numbers of the 12 million poor children in the United States are more likely to be Hispanic or children living in the suburbs, says James D. Weill of the Children's Defense Fund, which published the study.

WASHINGTON -- After 2 1/2 years of work, the National Commission on Children next month will recommend major changes in the nation's health and welfare systems, a hefty tax credit for families with children and some form of parental leave legislation, a member of the panel has revealed.The commission will also recommend the creation of a White House coordinator of family issues, according to Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a Harvard University pediatrician and author who has served on the 34-member commission.

Q: I have two problems centering around the coming holidays.Since my mother's death 11 years ago in a traffic accident, our family's traditional gathering on Christmas Eve has become a tense, overly stressful evening for my two sisters, my brother and me, as well as for our spouses and our father. (He is now in his early 70s and claims that since my mother has been gone Christmas has meant nothing to him, outside of seeing his children and grandchildren.)We have made many changes. We rotate the location, we've tried starting earlier and starting later, going to church and not going to church, and still the evening is filled with tension.

Despite gloom-and-doom predictions, don't write off the American family. The Number News, a Dow Jones & Co. newsletter, reports that most Americans still live in families -- they're just not as likely to be the traditional ones, married couples with children. Balancing a decline in the number of such couples is a rising number of single parents that led to a 6 percent increase in the total number of families with children living with them during the 1980s, the newsletter says.After divorceThinking of getting divorced?

A task force looking into the intractable issue of how to make the city's problem-plagued, high-rise public housing developments more livable has come up with a solution that has great promise: Move families with children to non-high-rise public housing units around the city.In effect the group has gone on record as saying that public high-rises are no place to raise children. Turning them into apartments for the elderly is a one alternative that has worked well in places where it has been tried, including Baltimore.

WASHINGTON -- After telling horror stories about how thei children were abused and killed by unlicensed day-care providers, a group of angry and impatient mothers implored Congress to put a child-care bill on President Bush's desk before adjourning."