American families need a universal-child-allowance system 

THE HILL – In America, child poverty is a chronic problem. Nearly 11 million children in America are poor. That’s 1 in 7 kids. The majority of these children are Black and brown. The grip of poverty is unrelenting — and the more families grow closer to the brink of crisis, the more likely their children are to come into contact with the foster care system like my siblings and I. I’ve seen it in both my personal and professional life — poverty is too often conflated with neglect. If families simply had the financial means to care for their children how they want to, we could circumvent thousands of families entering the child welfare system.