Data Show More Children Are Growing Up Poor. Now What?
Posted August 18th, 2011 by Hannah MatthewsStark increases in child poverty and other important indicators serve as colossal warning signs that this country needs to think about how a generation of children will be prepared to succeed in life.
On Wednesday, The Annie E. Casey Foundation released its annual KIDS COUNT study, a compilation of child well-being data. And the news isn’t good. Despite some positive trends since 2000–including decreasing infant mortality and child and teen death rates, decreasing teen birth rates, fewer high-school drop-outs–other indicators of child well being raise concerns about how the nation’s young children are faring.The report analyzed Census data that showed one in five children under 18 lives in poverty. For children under age six, the poverty rate is one in four . Coupled with increasing poverty, KIDS COUNT shows that the Great Recession has had profound effects on the lives of our children:
* 11 percent of children-nearly 8 million children-live with at least one unemployed parent.
* 31 percent of children live in families where no parent has full-time, year-round employment
* 10 percent of children live in single-parent families, and
* 4 percent of children have been affected by the foreclosure crisis.
These are not benign data points. We know from research that children living in poverty are less likely to be successful in school. And the longer a child lives in poverty, the worse their adult outcomes, including employment and earnings. Parental unemployment and single-parent composition are both related household economic instability. It’s clear that the recession took its greatest toll on the most vulnerable-those without assets and wealth to fall back on when they lost jobs or lost homes.The question now is what do we do with this data? Will Congress make policy choices that support the unemployed, create jobs and maintain a critical safety net for struggling families? Or will Congress choose to deal with the deficit crisis by requiring the most vulnerable families to continue to shoulder the burden of our economic situation and reduce critical supports for low-income families.
If we do not make policy choices that change the current course, 20 percent of our children will be ill-prepared for school, for careers and for life. That deficit crisis will be more challenging to overcome than our current one.
3 Comments
August 22, 2011 at 9:27 pm by John SteinsvoldAn Alternative to Capitalism (where everyone is middle class)
Several decades ago, Margaret Thatcher claimed: “There is no alternative”. She was referring to capitalism. Today, this negative attitude still persists.
I would like to offer an alternative to capitalism for the American people to consider. Please click on the following link. It will take you to an essay titled: “Home of the Brave?” which was published by the Athenaeum Library of Philosophy:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/steinsvold.htm
John Steinsvold
Perhaps in time the so-called dark ages will be thought of as including our own.
–Georg C. Lichtenberg
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August 19, 2011 at 7:14 pm by DHFabianNo, no, no. Ending welfare gave people the incentive to get jobs, thereby ending poverty in the US. Can you even remember the last time you heard a politician express concern about US poverty, or an evening news report about this issue? Once we got liberated from the threat of welfare dependency, we truly became a nation of happy, shiny people. We know this because this is what we were told, as far back as the Reagan administration, would happen.
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August 19, 2011 at 5:19 pm by Angela“Will Congress make policy choices that support the unemployed, create jobs and maintain a critical safety net for struggling families? Or will Congress choose to deal with the deficit crisis by requiring the most vulnerable families to continue to shoulder the burden of our economic situation and reduce critical supports for low-income families?”
Why is this Congress’ problem to solve? Wth a growing debt problem that has been in existence for decades, how could that money have been spent differently so as to prevent what we have today? If the policy changes you mentioned above include more debt spending, then that will eventually increase the 20% of I’ll prepared kids for school to higher percentages.
The KIDS COUNT study did state one thing that is clear. The study reported that nearly half of all children under the age of three were living in low income families. Given than nearly half of all births in this country are into single parent families, you can easily correlate that pregnant women without a husband are very likely to raise their child in poverty. The KIDS COUNT study also agreed that children do better when they grow up in a intact 2 parent family, both in terms of economic well being and longer term incomes, such as high secondary school and college graduation. AND, those children growing up in a 2 parent home were less likely to become teen parents!
Given the limited funds, it seems that investments into families has benefits that carry well into the next generation.
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