This collection of essays addresses twentieth-century historical and contemporary issues regarding children who are considered to be at risk. The essays explore the language of risk as it is used by the courts, the schools, governmental agencies, and child advocates, those who discover risks and create correctives for children who both need protection and threaten to disturb the social order. The tasks require an exploration of differing, often contradictory, concepts of the child and society that are embedded in public policy debates. Deepening the complexity of the problems, institutions to which we look for solutions are too often faced with conflicts that arise when the needs of the child are at variance with the needs of the institutions themselves. These dilemmas are central to understanding our failure to achieve adequate public policy solutions for children at risk.

The Health and Human Services poverty line for a three-person family in America is $11,8oo in annual income. One in every five American children is growing up in poverty. What does child poverty mean for the economic and societal future of our country? The Children's Defense Fund, widely considered the most powerful force for children in America, has assembled expert and ground-breaking information on how poverty affects health, childhood deaths, low birth weight, and injury; on the insidious connections between low family income and learning disabilities; on links between poverty, abuse, and neglect and self-esteem; and much more. Wasting America's Future is the crucial citizen's handbook as we continue the national debate on welfare reform.

The desire for our children to be free from want and danger and to be able to enjoy their youth in innocence would seem to be universal. Conventional wisdom says that parents in every socio-economic level of society share the dream of preserving their children's innocence. All want to provide a childhood and adolescence that shelters and protects children from the harshness of life and nurtures them until they are able to withstand the onslaught of reality. One need only look at troubled areas of the world, such as Northern Ireland, parts of the Middle East, or any number of other points on the globe, to see how weak is any communion forged out of these universal desires for the welfare of children. Even in the United States, the competition of ideas and values about what represents the "good" society in which to raise our children is fierce-as are differing views about the value of innocence and even life itself. These differing ideas and values affect people's actions even when they have never reflected on them, or have never cared enough to formulate those values into a coherent worldview. Crouse contends that without morals, children are at risk. Moral boundaries, not moral relativism, provide a safe haven for children by preserving their innocence and protecting them from predators and pedophiles. When authentic religious faith has been quashed, children are no longer safe. When the underlying values are wrong, when there are no common values unifying a people, even the best programs and most honorable of intentions are doomed to failure. Well-intentioned programs and policies inevitably fail miserably without an undergirding moral foundation, as is documented by an abundance of data and the social trends in America today.