Imagine what life is like for an 8-year-old whose home is his mother’s car. Or, consider the plight of the 10-year-old suddenly forced from her home into an apartment shared by eight children and adults.

Plenty of children living in every town in southeastern Connecticut face such traumas and stresses, and very often far worse scenarios.

Yet even as data shows an increasing number of children are suffering, state and local officials do not always step up to provide enough support, including options such as school-based health centers, accessible and affordable mental health services and quality preschool.

It’s long been no secret that poverty exists in the state’s urban centers. State Department of Education data also now shows the number of children living in poverty in suburban towns increased steadily and sometimes dramatically between the 2004 – 2005 and 2013 – 2014 school years. In Groton, for example, the number of students qualifying for free or reduced lunches increased from 26.8 percent to 46.1 percent and the increase has not gone unnoticed by school officials there. A family of four earns less than $31,000 annually to qualify for free school lunches and no more than $44,000 to qualify for reduced-priced meals.

Groton Superintendent Michael Graner said the financial struggles manifest themselves in a variety of ways. He said, for example, there is a dramatic increase in the number of financially struggling families sharing sometimes crowded housing. In January alone, more than 50 such Groton children moved to doubled-up quarters. Administrators also knew 19 Groton children were effectively homeless — living in hotels, shelters or cars.

Even in smaller towns throughout the region, including communities traditionally labeled wealthy, the number of children in poverty also rose between 2004 and 2013: from 13.6 percent to 30.5 percent in Montville, from 15.1 percent to 38.1 percent in Griswold, from 11.3 percent to 21 percent in Stonington and from 6.8 percent to 17.2 percent in Waterford.

State education officials say they noticed a spike in poverty rates as the state’s recession deepened. With Connecticut lagging behind the rest of the country in recovery from the recession, and the southeastern region lagging behind the state, the numbers are improving only slightly.

While not every child in poverty struggles in school and not every student who struggles lives in poverty, there’s ample evidence that children living in the midst of family trauma benefit educationally and emotionally from counseling and other supportive programs.

Groton school officials should be commended for striving to address the need by planning for three more school mental health care workers next year and securing a grant allowing an increase to 12 this summer in the number of free summer lunch sites in town.

But more communities need more programming and services and some of the smallest do not have the local means to cover these costs. Only a handful of southeastern Connecticut towns now have school-based health centers and state funding for the centers is threatened. Free summer meals are not available in every community. Considerable state resources were used to study children’s mental health services following the Sandy Hook School shooting in 2012, but the system remains a chaotic quagmire with an extreme shortage of care providers. The governor’s promise to make free universal preschool has proven elusive.

Ultimately, social services cannot fix the problem. That will require robust economic growth and increased opportunity.

However, our most vulnerable children need support. They are the future and the societal cost to losing them because they did not have the support necessary to succeed at a young age will prove far higher than the cost of investing in their future. The state and every community must strive to do better.