The Children’s Commissioner argues that child poverty has doubled since the 1980s. Child poverty is so different by family type, as shown by the chart below, that aggregation of child poverty statistics into a single summary statistic misleads as to what is the problem to be solved.
Source: Bryan Perry, Household Incomes in New Zealand: trends in indicators of inequality and hardship 1982 to 2014 – Ministry of Social Development, Wellington (August 2015), Table H.4.
Child poverty among single-parent households has doubled since 1990 and tripled since 1988. Child poverty among families where there are two parents present is not much higher now than it was in 1988.
Importantly, child poverty rates among single-parent families that live with other adults is half that of single-parent families who live alone. The message here is the driver of child poverty is the absence of a two parent household rather than the absence of income.
The sure fire way to stay out of poverty is finish high school, don’t have children while single, make sure you marry the father of your child and don’t commit crimes. Of course, the reason why this isn’t happening is too few good men.
University educated couples are not called power couples for nothing – their earning power is this stunning compared to going it on your own. The emergence of power couples means that less educated women may prefer to stay single and raise children on their own rather than marry what is left in the marriage pool. That’s a far more intractable problem than poverty is caused by not enough money.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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