Far from the ideal. The plight of poor children in the United States.

The child on the cover of this month's issue ofAJDCwas visualized as an ideal by an unknown painter in colonial times. The child is beautiful, well nourished, placid, and obviously well cared for. This is the ideal that many think of when asked to picture our aspirations for our children. Unfortunately, in the United States today, we fall far short of providing that ideal for millions of infants, children, adolescents, and young adults. This issue ofAJDCis devoted to exploring the dimensions of and reasons for the problems as well as offering potential corrective actions that might be applied to the plight of our underserved or unserved youth. We embarked on this issue as part of the family of American Medical Association journals' efforts to highlight what has become a national disgrace: 47 000 000 or more individuals are neglected at a time when many in the