From the New York Times, I'm Serbina Tavarnice, and this is the Daily.

The high poverty rate among American children was long seen as an enduring fact of American

life.

But a new analysis shows that in recent decades, it is declined dramatically.

Today, I speak with my colleague Jason DeParle about the remarkable drop in child poverty

and the surprising reasons behind it.

It's Monday, September 26.

Jason, you wrote a series of stories recently about this really remarkable decline in the

number of American children who live in poverty.

Tell us about your reporting.

Sabrina, I started covering poverty issues in the 1980s when more than a quarter of

American children were poor.

The number just didn't move from year to year.

It was stuck.

It seemed like a problem that American society just didn't know how to fix.

Ronald Reagan famously said the federal government declared war on poverty in poverty

1.

So there was a sense of fatalism about the ability to erase this moral stain on American society.

Then one day, I was looking at a graph and I saw something starting to change.

The share of American children in poverty was declining substantially.

I decided to look further to understand what was happening with low-income children

in America and what were the forces behind it.

...