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There are to mail in forms, and early indications show that people have been responding at a high rate. But the Census has undercounted children since it first began in 1790, and this year, the challenges to getting an accurate count of children from birth to age 5 could be greater than they were in 2000.

When members of the population are undercounted in significant numbers, they risk getting less than their fair share of $400 billion in federal aid that is distributed to states and municipalities based on data from the Census. In the case of children, this means less money for Head Start, the S-CHIP health insurance program and special education, among several critical programs.

Young children are undercounted at a higher rate than any other age group, according to the Census Bureau. During the 2000 Census, more than 750,000 children under age five were missed, or about four percent of that population group.

Minority children fare even worse, according to a December 2009 report for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Black boys under age 5 were missed at a rate of 5.3 percent in 2000, compared to 3.3 percent for non-black boys of the same age, the report said, and black girls under age 5 were missed at a rate of 5.4 percent, compared to 3.8 percent for their non-black counterparts. The undercount can be determined by comparing Census figures with national records from birth and death certificates for children over a certain period.

Why do people go uncounted? Many people, especially the undocumented, don’t believe the Census is confidential and refuse to fill out the form. Some new immigrants don’t know what the Census is and just throw out the envelope, said Mario Prieto of the Community Action Agency of Southern New Mexico. Low-income families tend to be renters and may move around to such an extent that they never get the forms, and Census workers have a hard time tracking them down.

The form also provides room for only six immediate family members, and given that people usually fill out the form from oldest to youngest, the smallest children in large families sometimes get left off, according to demographer William P.  O’Hare, the author of the Casey Foundation report.  O’Hare points out that this misses, of course, children who might be born in one place but perhaps died in another part of the country. The hectic lives of families with young children may just make it hard to complete the form, he suggested. Also, when families double up during tough stretches, there might be confusion about who to count if you think the living arrangement is temporary, O’Hare said.

In his report, O’Hare warns that the troubled economy heightens the risk of undercounting young children. More families are doubling up because of the foreclosure crisis, which is expected to affect 2 million children. More children live in families with undocumented immigrants, 5.5 million in 2008 compared to 3.9 million in 2003. And a greater percentage of American children under age five are members of a racial minority than 10 years ago, placing them at greater risk of being missed.

O’Hare said the Census Bureau, historically, has not done a good job of pinpointing the reasons behind the undercount of young children, and he said there is no accurate count of the money communities fail to get because their children are undercounted. He credits the new administration for being more attuned to the issue, but he said that with new Census leadership arriving only last year, it wasn’t able to do as much as it could have. For instance, the Census Bureau launched a program early this year to address the undercounting of children, called “Children Count, too!” But O’Hare believes it would have been better to start it last summer, which would have given the Bureau the chance to reach out to a lot more childcare centers, to create more materials to distribute and to better target its outreach.

Still, as part of “Children Count, too!,” Nickelodeon, at no cost to the Bureau, is running public service announcements, at least through April, that show Dora the Explorer mailing in her family’s Census form, said Megan Kindelan, a spokeswoman for the Census. Dora is also on a bright, simple flyer that parents, preschool teachers and daycare providers can print out in several languages from the Census website. The bureau has bought advertising in 28 different languages in a variety of media, mostly in local markets, Kindelan says, so that it can fine tune its message for different communities. And it can home in neighborhoods whose returns are lagging because the bureau has created an that updates response rates in real time.

Advocacy groups like the National Head Start Association have spread the word to members about the importance of talking up the Census in their towns. The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) has launched a wide-ranging effort with Spanish-language media and hundreds of community-based organizations called Hagase Contar to spread the word about the Census, the fact that confidentiality is guaranteed and the importance, in particular, of counting children.

It’s hard to tell how many organizations at the grassroots are getting the word out, but O’Hare mentioned Mario Prieto’s organization in New Mexico as a good example of outreach. New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the Union, and Prieto’s Community Action Agency of Southern New Mexico works in some of the poorest counties, with high populations of Latinos and the undocumented. His organization has worked for years to help people, including the undocumented, prepare tax forms, and they tell clients about the Census during tax preparation meetings. Moreover, many local women provide in-home childcare, and the Community Action Agency uses its regular workshops for its network of 2,000 providers to talk about the Census and disseminate materials the caregivers can then give clients.

We’ll find out how successful these efforts to count children have been only after December, when the bureau provides the final count to President Obama and the analysts can start examining the numbers.