References to children suffering from the disastrous effects of the Dust Bowl are a motif that lends pathos to The Worst Hard Time and illustrates the depth of the crisis. Children become victims of either cruel weather conditions, poverty, desperation, or their parents’ emotional trauma. The son of the German Russian immigrant George Ehrlich, Georgie, dies as thick airborne sand blocks a car’s view, and the car runs over Georgie. Both Hazel Lucas Shaw’s baby, Ruth Nell, and the abandoned baby Shaw finds in a coffee-box across the street die of dust pneumonia.  

Other children are abandoned or neglected. In Don Hartwell’s private diary, there is a case of a baby being abandoned: “In Chicago, a man offered to give his baby so he could keep his car and, of course, there is much righteous indignation. But at least he dares to be honest. I’ll bet anything that thousands of others would do the same thing, if only they dared to and could” (275). Many parents are unable to supervise their children, who “[run] the streets, dirty and hungry” (167). Egan gives a detailed account of how a destitute 35-year-old widow is found wandering the streets of Dalhart, babbling incoherently. Her children are separated from their mother when the judge commits her to an asylum. 

In their innocence and vulnerability, these children represent the impact of a crisis that disproportionately impacted the relatively vulnerable and powerless (i.e., ordinary farmers) rather than those who bore the most responsibility for causing it (i.e., the government officials that promoted intensive agriculture in the region). Abandoned children, in particular, come to symbolize the region itself as Egan recounts episodes like Herbert Hoover’s refusal to backstop the wheat production that the government itself had incentivized. The motif thus dramatizes The Failures and Lies of the American Government.