Recent state legislation directs more money to poor kids, but Pennsylvania's welfare grant levels are still shamefully low.

What does it cost to raise a child? How much does it take each month to keep a child fed, clothed, housed, healthy, educated? A gallon of gas alone costs nearly $4. The price of a gallon of milk is nearing that.

Would $50 per month cover all your child's expenses?

On July 28, the Post-Gazette reported that parents will have an annual $25 fee taken from their child support payments after they have received $2,000 per year ("Cutting Child Support, Even by $2 a Month, Surprises Single Parents").

Any cut in the amount that parents receive to raise their children is painful, and we wish the federal government had not imposed this fee. But the report overlooked the truly good recent changes to laws governing child support that will improve life for many families.

Right now, when noncustodial parents make child support payments for children who need cash assistance benefits, their money is taken by the state's Department of Public Welfare.

Currently, regardless of how many children are in the family, the family receives a maximum of $50 of the child support each month. The rest of the child support is divided between the state and federal governments and the family hardly ever sees a dime of it.

Parents who get cash assistance for their children are either working at very low-wage jobs, participating in welfare-to-work programs or unable to work because of disabilities or family crises, including domestic violence. They are struggling to improve their families' situations while having to choose between buying food for the family or winter clothes for the kids whose coats are falling apart at the seams.

Because of a change in the law that groups including the Women's Law Project urged, beginning Oct. 1, those families will see a lot more of that child support payment -- $100 for one child, $200 for two or more children. The vast majority of families getting cash assistance -- 77 percent -- have just one or two children.

This is heartening for many reasons. Families will have more money each month to raise their children, especially important during the current economic downturn. Noncustodial parents will be encouraged to pay child support, since more of their money will be directly benefiting their children instead of being diverted to the government. And although these families will still be very poor, their lives will be a little bit easier.

In the mid-1990s, Pennsylvania under then-Gov. Tom Ridge tried to eliminate the $50 child support payment for families getting cash assistance. But a bipartisan majority of the Legislature insisted that child support should be primarily for children, not a revenue source for the state, and saved child support for cash-assistance recipients.

Our clients told us how much that $50 monthly payment meant to them and their children, in some cases saving the roof over their heads, or sparing them from returning to an abusive relationship. These mothers told us how worried they'd been that they wouldn't be able to afford shoes for their children, whose feet grew so fast that some needed new shoes every six months. Imagine the difference that doubling, or quadrupling, the money these children receive in child support will make in their lives.

There is more work to be done, however. Cash assistance benefits in Pennsylvania have not increased since 1990. Eighteen years ago, that gallon of milk cost around $2.50, and that gallon of gas cost about $1.20. The cost of living has increased dramatically over the past nearly two decades, yet cash assistance payments have stayed exactly the same. During that period, the number of families getting cash assistance has dramatically decreased, and DPW has imposed stringent work requirements and made it much more difficult to get benefits.

Even the federal government acknowledges that a family of three is living under the poverty line if their monthly income is $1,467 or less. Shamefully, that same family could receive no more than $403 per month in cash assistance in Pennsylvania, a small fraction of the federal poverty line.

If we really believe that no child in Pennsylvania should go hungry or homeless, we need to face the stark fact that our cash assistance grants are only about one-quarter of the federal poverty line, and losing value every year. With food prices climbing and energy costs out of control, our most vulnerable neighbors are struggling to survive.

Anyone who thinks Pennsylvanians aren't compassionate enough to help these families only has to look at the recent child support reforms. Of course it's possible. Let's do it.