After a century of fairly steady decline, the official poverty rate among American children increased from 14.0% in 1969 to 19.6% in 1989, suggesting that the United States is losing the war on poverty. However, once various defects in the official poverty measure are corrected, it appears that the proportion of children in households with income below the poverty line probably fell between 1969 and 1989 or between 1967 and 1991. Data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey support this claim, and direct measures of material hardship also indicate that things have not been worsening for the low income family, although housing and neighborhood crimes remain serious concerns. The findings suggest that the official poverty statistics are not a reliable guide to poverty in America as most Americans understand the term. Five possible explanations are advanced: (1) official price indices somewhat overstate inflation; (2) children's households include more nonrelatives, whose income is not counted when the Census Bureau decides whether a child is poor; (3) the growth of Food Stamps and rent subsidies during the 1970s raised poor children's material standard of living without raising their income; (4) affluent families' flight from central cities to suburbs made a lot of relatively modern central-city housing available to low-income parents who would not otherwise have been able to afford it; and (5) households with low reported incomes may have had more unreported income in 1989 than in 1969. Despite the spread of single-parent families and the decline in the earning power of unskilled workers, child poverty, as defined by low income, low consumption, and material deprivation, has probably remained constant or fallen slightly since 1969. (Contains 8 tables, 1 figure, and 25 references.) (SLD)