Children feel stress as poverty rates rise

Eleven-year-old Sarai Camacho of Donna, Texas, tears up when she
tells why her mother let the babysitter go for her and her younger
sister this summer. It's the same reason her father brought the family
to Indiana so he could work the melon fields for a season.

"Last
December, my mom didn't get paid for one month, and we started having
problems," said Sarai at Oaktown (Indiana) First Christian Church, which
hosted free classes for children of migrant workers. "My mom said for
us to come here [to the church] so she doesn't have to give money to the
babysitter because we're running out of it."

For churches, it's
become an all-too-familiar sight: working families that aren't able to
make ends meet. As household resources are tapped out, churches are
often the first to see the changing face of poverty—and it's often a
young one.