Kevin Sullivan, Jakarta – Eleven-year-old Ipan, a cheerful little beggar in a buzz cut and a dirty T-shirt, knocks on car windows and sings and pleads for money with his 4-year-old sister, Tuti, holding tight to his side in her fading flowered dress. He bangs on his homemade tambourine – a stick with a nail driven through a bunch of jangling bottle caps – and sings to people who mainly ignore him from behind smoked glass windows.

Ipan is part of an army of ragamuffins who fan out when the light turns red at the intersection between the chic Mandarin Oriental Hotel and the gleaming Deutsche Bank tower. It is a scene repeated all over this city of 8 million people every hour of every day. Even after midnight, children knock on car windows; some of these children are too tiny to see over the car door.

Until two months ago, Ipan spent his days in school, learning to read and write and count more than spare change. But his parents, who have lost their jobs, can no longer afford the school fees, so Ipan has joined the growing throng of child street hustlers. Like children around Indonesia, he has seen his world transformed in a matter of weeks: Once on the cusp of stepping out of the slums, he and millions of others now face desperate lives of extreme poverty and malnutrition.

They are the faces of an Asian generation on the verge of being lost. Misery is a difficult thing to measure, but Asia's economic crisis has been cruelest to children. Visits to dumps and slums, villages and cities, homes and workplaces across the region in the past six months paint a bleak portrait of the impact of Asia's economic crisis on its youth, and therefore, on its future.

In Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea, fast-growing economies had meant that millions of poor people enjoyed better living standards, cleaner and safer places to live and work, more and better education, freedom from disease and longer lives. Now Asia's poor, many of whom were just taking their first steps out of poverty, are tumbling back into conditions they thought they had left behind forever.

The situation is worst in Indonesia, a vast nation that has suffered economic catastrophe, violent political upheaval and its most severe drought in a century – all at the same time. But many of the problems being seen in Indonesia – hunger and malnutrition, rising dropout rates, increasing child labor, crime and prostitution, family disintegration – also are increasing in Thailand, South Korea and other Asian nations.

Malnutrition in Indonesia is rising fast as families can no longer afford rice, sugar, flour, vegetables and cooking oil, which have doubled in price. Stephen J. Woodhouse, head of UNICEF's office in Indonesia, said the first cases of marasmus, the severe emaciation seen in the worst African famines, are beginning to show up among children in remote villages of Java, the main Indonesian island. Some estimate that infant mortality in Indonesia could jump by 30 percent, after being reduced by two-thirds in the last 25 years.

Many pregnant women can no longer afford proper prenatal care and nutrition. Child immunization had been nearly universal in Indonesia, but now common vaccinations for measles, mumps, rubella and other childhood diseases are too costly for poor families. Contraceptives, anti-diarrhea medicines and common antibiotics also have become prohibitively expensive and hard to find in many areas. Hospitals and rural health care clinics are starting to reuse syringes, increasing the risk for spreading AIDS. Tuberculosis is a growing problem.

Millions of Asian children already have dropped out of school this year; millions more are on the verge of leaving the classroom for the workplace in the coming months. Asia had greatly reduced child labor in the past decade, but that progress is unraveling as young children are now working long, hot, dangerous hours in glass factories, garment sweat shops and cement plants. Others are turning to street begging and prostitution. Families are marrying off their daughters at increasingly young ages so they have fewer mouths to feed. And some families who believe they can no longer afford to raise their children are leaving them at orphanages.

"We could easily lose a whole generation of kids who are being pulled out of school and put to work; it's almost impossible to recover from," said Scott Guggenheim, the World Bank's poverty coordinator for Indonesia, who just finished a four-year stay in the country. "A whole generation of expectations has vanished."

South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, in a written comment for this story, said he feels "deep sorrow" that Asian children are suffering even more because of the financial crisis. "Economic progress built with the thin, weak hands of children can never be the future of Asia," Kim said. "Forcing children to discontinue their education and making them enter the dangerous labor market robs us of our future."

In Jakarta, a half-dozen small children sit before a television that flickers in the darkness; chickens peck in the garbage pile behind them. Eight lanes of traffic scream along a Jakarta street on the concrete bridge over their heads. But it is quiet here in the damp crawl space beneath the bridge, where nine families live in a warren of wooden rooms they have built on the banks of the filthy Ciliwung River.

Most of these families pick garbage for a living. With prices rising and people being more cautious about what they throw away, people here are having more and more trouble making enough money to buy food.

But now they are getting help from private social workers who bring packages of rice, sugar, soy sauce and soap. In the markets, they would sell for almost $1.50, but they are offered to these poor people for about 25 cents.

"These children are malnourished, and their brains are suffering irreversible damage," says Christine Burns, a volunteer who helps deliver the food. "I feel sorry for the Indonesian people, but now just feeling sorry is not enough."

Mariah, 40, picks up a package of food from Burns and walks back to her dark little room with four toddlers following her in a line like so many ducklings. "For people like us," she says, bouncing the small plastic bag of food on one knee and a skinny infant on the other, "the most important thing is our stomachs."

Health officials say that growing malnutrition is threatening the mental and physical development of millions of Asian children. In South Korea, the government has provided $8 million to feed children who can no longer afford to take decent lunches to school. Hunger is spreading through some areas of rural Thailand.

The Indonesian government estimates that by year's end, 100 million people, almost half the nation's population, won't be able to afford adequate food – which it defines as at least 2,100 calories a day per person – and other basic necessities.

As malnutrition increases and prices soar, programs to provide food to Indonesia's hungry are drawing thousands of people, so many that army troops carrying automatic weapons are used to keep food lines orderly. Anemia, diarrhea and respiratory ailments are becoming more common in rural Indonesia, especially among very young children, because of bad nutrition. "It's extremely difficult to reverse damage done to brain growth because of malnutrition in the first two years of life," said Woodhouse, of UNICEF.

At the same time, Indonesia's health care system is collapsing. A system of 250,000 local health and welfare centers, or posyandu, are no longer working well because many of the million-plus volunteers have had to go to work to feed their own families. Larger public health clinics have doubled their fees recently. Middle-class people who used to visit private doctors now are coming to the clinics, and poor people are being forced to turn to primitive herbal remedies that are often useless, Woodhouse said. In some cases, one official said, antibiotics for respiratory ailments are being replaced by "a glass of water with a spell cast over it."

In Seoul, Kim Min Ah, an apple-cheeked 12-year-old with big warm eyes, hugs her little sister close as they sit cross-legged on the shiny linoleum floor of the Sang Lok orphanage. They giggle at their baby brother's scratchy little voice as he sings a song called "Rainbow," bouncing in the lap of the orphanage director they all call "Dad."

The children's father ran off and left them with their mother earlier this year. But when South Korea's economic crisis hit hard, the coffee shop where she worked went bankrupt. Broke and desperate, she took a job at a restaurant far from Seoul, placing her children – Min Ah; her sister, Min Ji, 8; and brother Tae Jung, 6 – indefinitely at the orphanage.

Now they sleep eight to a room with other children, including almost 20 new faces in the past six months. The girls' room is cheery with stuffed animals and flowers, and bright-colored laundry hanging on a rack. Outside, brothers, age 11 and 8, ride a seesaw. Their mother abandoned them when their father lost his job. The father tried to keep and care for them, but he brought them here when the pressure of single parenthood and driving a taxi at night drove him to thoughts of suicide. Min Ah takes care of her sweet-faced siblings: "Since I'm the big sister, I tell my sister and brother to dress and get to school on time," she says.

She also tries to help the time pass faster: "My mother said, 'I'm coming back in a few years to take you out of here, so please wait.' "

"Economic orphans" are the most extreme cases, but they illustrate how harsh economics are breaking up families. The family has long been the backbone of Asian society, but it is now cracking under the financial stress. Thousands of kids are being sent away from their parents, brothers and sisters as they ride out the crisis with better-off relatives and friends – and in the worst cases, strangers. It hurts, but families are trying to give their children the best chance to thrive.

When there is no family, there are churches, mosques and the government. South Korea has passed a law allowing families who can no longer afford to care for their children to leave them at state-run orphanages, free of charge. There are no firm statistics, but Sang Lok officials alone have received more than 200 calls from parents looking for help. Mosques in largely Muslim Indonesia have been taking in increasing numbers of children.

"This economic crisis has emptied many people's pockets, and also their hearts," said Lim Joon Kyung of the Seoul Counseling Center, which has been swamped with requests for orphanage placements.

The entire region is facing increasing problems with abandoned children. Saini, 15, came last month to the St. Vincentius orphanage in the village of Pringsewu on Sumatra, the Indonesian island just west of Jakarta. She is the daughter of a farmer who could no longer make ends meet for his wife and eight children.

The Catholic nuns who run the home say the krismon – short for the krisis ekonomi, as the economic crisis is called in Indonesian – which came on top of the severe drought, has pressured families to do what they never thought they could – give up their children.

"I like it here," Saini said, smiling. But asked about her family, she burst instantly into big, rolling tears. It has been weeks since she has seen them. It takes a full day to get to her family home, and neither she nor they can afford the bus fare anymore. Saini apologized, wiping the tears away with the starched white sleeve of her school uniform. "If I remember them, I am sad."

"It's a hard decision for the parents, but if the children stayed at home they would have to drop out of school," said Sister Kristiana, a tiny Catholic nun who helps run the orphanage. "It is more important to have an education and a future, and that is why they are here."

Even with the backing of the Catholic Church, St. Vincentius is having a hard time raising the money it needs to survive, Sister Kristiana said. "It is possible that we will have to close," she said. "If we do, what will happen to the children?"

Both of Ipan's parents are blind. Every day, his father goes begging for work, while Ipan guides his mother, Susiningsih, 40, on the bus into the center of Jakarta's financial district. There, not far from a Planet Hollywood restaurant, she sits cross-legged on a pedestrian overpass and begs eight hours every day. Her 2-year-old child, malnourished and shockingly thin, lies in her dirty lap, suckling on her breast without a sound. A cup in front of her contains the donations she has received in the last eight hours: three 1,000-rupiah notes, less than 25 cents. Nearby, her 16-year-old daughter begs with her own baby feeding at her breast. Her cup is empty.

Susiningsih says her family no longer eats cooked food because she can't afford it, and because she had to sell her pots and pans to earn cash.

"I don't know who to blame, but since I was little this is the first time I've had to do something like this," she says. "The first time I sat here, I was really ashamed. But I will not let my family die starving."

The next day, Susiningsih was arrested for begging. She and her two young daughters, as well as her older daughter and her infant, were taken to a jail – which police describe as a rehabilitation center – where they were put in a communal cell with about 40 other women and babies.

There are no blankets, no toys and virtually no sound except babies crying. The women sit and stare and hang laundry on the bars, waiting to get back to the streets to beg again.

"We didn't do anything wrong; we didn't steal," Susiningsih tells a visitor. As she speaks, Tuti, 4, presses her face against the bars, staring out and crying softly.

When the afterburners of Asia's "miracle" rise to wealth were still firing, there were high hopes for the children's future. But as more and more drop out of school and go to work, those hopes are fading.

South Korea, the richest of the countries in crisis, plans to spend about $80 million this year to cover school fees to keep a quarter-million students from dropping out.

Indonesian officials say 2.7 million children may drop out this year. Education and Culture Minister Juwono Sudarsono said only 54 percent of the nation's children are now in school, down from 78 percent last year. He said he has pushed school registration deadlines back from July to this month to allow parents who can't afford fees more time to raise them. He said that in more rural areas, he has also eased requirements that children wear uniforms to school, to spare families that expense. At the Xavier School in the village of Kalirejo on Sumatra, only 50 of the expected 120 junior high school students showed up when classes began in July. Most of the students, age 12 or 13, have gone to work on their parents' farms, as household helpers in more prosperous homes, or in the dangerous business of crushing stones for road construction. The village's corn, rice and other crops have been devastated by drought, and the financial crisis has sent the cost of a kilogram of rice – 2.2 pounds – from 9 cents to about 16 cents – a difference most families here can't pay.

In Bangkok, Jantha Siriprang cast her eyes downward, a look of embarrassment and regret on her face when asked about her two children. She doesn't want them to have to work, but she has no choice. She lost her job carrying cement at a construction site when the baht, the Thai currency, collapsed and the construction industry dried up. And now the little money she makes selling candy and cigarettes on the street is not enough to pay the children's bus fare to school – let alone their school fees.

So for now, her son, Num Siriprang, 12, is still in school but washes dishes in a restaurant for four hours every night for wages paid mainly in food. "It's very difficult now," his mother said. "I don't have any money. If I can find jobs for them, I'll take them both out of school."

Increasing numbers of young dropouts are turning to crime. Courts across the region report increases in juvenile robberies, theft and violent assaults, as children do whatever it takes to feed themselves.

The Geneva-based International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, released a study in August concluding that the sex industry in Asia, particularly child prostitution, is far larger than governments admit – with revenues of up to $3.3 billion a year in Indonesia – and that the economic crisis is driving more children into the flesh trade.

The author of the study, Lin Lean Lim, said in an interview that strong laws against child prostitution in Thailand and Indonesia may stem the increase somewhat. But she said many families suddenly facing poverty will see their children as their only commodity, selling them into prostitution or domestic work that is essentially slavery. Her study says that in some rural areas of Thailand, the going price for a 12-year-old girl is $800 to $1,600, and vanloads of sex-industry recruiters drive to villages to buy girls on sixth-grade graduation day. "When it comes to economic factors, parents will still argue that at least their children are earning an income, and that argument is going to become stronger in circumstances where everyone is suffering," said Lim, who also said devalued Asian currencies may make child "sex tours" an "even cheaper thrill for customers from other regions.

"We have worked so hard for so long to get ahead, not just economically, but socially," said Lim, who is Malaysian. "We were beginning to feel a sense of pride about where we'd gotten. Now the really sad part is that we're seeing poverty again in a way we'd almost forgotten."