JAPAN - According to statistics released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, one out of every seven Japanese children under 17 lives in poverty.

Poverty has long been known to adversely effect children's health and education, but there also are concerns now that growing up in poverty tends to lock children into a cycle of poverty that leaves them economically disadvantaged all their lives.

A 20-year-old woman, who works for a private organization in the Kanto region, recalled that until she entered a foster home in her later years of primary school, she had seldom attended class.

This was because her mother was sickly, leaving their home untidy, with broken glass littering the floor. The woman recalls having to shoplift bread and snacks to feed her two younger brothers. Her unemployed father often left home after getting drunk.

"I thought I was different from other children and I tried to believe that life wasn't real," she said.

The plight of children living in poverty can usually be attributed to their parents' unemployment or low incomes.

An official of a municipal government who has worked for 30 years at a welfare office said with the number of parents having unsteady jobs increasing, the number of children affected by their parents' unstable lives has risen accordingly.

Many poor children do not live in a clean environment, do not acquire the habit of going to bed early and getting up early, and do not have any relatives they can turn to, according to the welfare official.

"Such children do not begin their lives from the same starting line as ordinary children do," he said.

Because of the fact that the country suffered devastating postwar poverty and later achieved rapid growth and became an economic powerhouse, there are no clear standards to define poverty in Japan. The government also does not keep statistics concerning poverty.

However, according to a 2000 OECD survey, the child poverty rate in Japan stood at 14.3 percent, 2.2 percentage points higher than the average among developed nations and an increase of 2.3 percentage points from 10 years earlier.

While family environment is not the sole factor that determines a child's future, its importance is confirmed by numerous studies.

One area of the child's life affected is education. The Osaka city government compiled a report in March 2004 on the state of single-parent families in the city.

Asked what level of education they aspired to for their children, the report stated that more than half of parents in households earning 6 million yen or more a year cited university, while less than a quarter of parents making less than 2 million yen had similar hopes.

Takeshi Tokuzawa, an official at Tokyo's Edogawa Ward office who started offering free tutoring to children of families on welfare 20 years ago, said, "Many children would often give up on going to university because of family problems or because their parents didn't go to university."