My Response:
This week on the National Center for Children in Poverty Website, I looked at some outside sources and one that really caught was the article on "Child Poverty and Intergenerational Mobility" , and what was so amazing about this article, was the spectulations that children who are poverty bound as children, are believed to grow-up and have a higher chance of being poverty. The assumption is that a lot of it has to do with the parents and their economics. Children who are believed to have wealthier parents, are thought to be wealthier in their adulthood. Below is the information on the study, which is an outside publication for NCCP.
Child Poverty and Intergenerational Mobility
Authors: Sarah Fass, Kinsey Alden Dinan, and
Yumiko Aratani
Publication Date: December 2009
Findings are based on a working paper by Robert Wagmiller and Robert Adelman,
Childhood and Intergenerational Poverty: The Long-term Consequences of Growing Up Poor commissioned by NCCP. This brief is designed to be a companion piece to this document. The analysis uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a longitudinal data set that follows children as they advance through childhood and into adulthood, and employs a strategy developed by Grieger, Danziger, and Schoeni* to construct poverty indicators comparable to official Census Bureau estimates. In this analysis, childhood refers to the years between birth and age 15; the paper provides more details about findings, data sources and methodology.
* Grieger, Lloyd D.; Danziger, Sheldon; Schoeni, Robert F. 2007. Estimating and Benchmarking the Trend in the Poverty Rate from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Ann Arbor, MI: PSID Technical Series Paper #07-03.
Introduction
The promise of the American Dream is that in our society, anyone can succeed with hard work and persistence. Even in the current economic downturn, the majority of Americans (72 percent) believe that it is possible to start out poor, work hard, and become wealthy. But does this promise hold true for America’s children? How common is it for people who spend part of their childhood living in poverty to experience poverty as adults? How does this vary by how much time children spend living in poverty? And does it vary by race?
Economic mobility, the ability to move up or down the economic ladder during one’s lifetime and across generations, is central to the ideal of the American Dream. But recent research finds that there are limitations to mobility in the United States. For example, one study of families across generations finds that one’s economic position is strongly influenced by that of one’s parents: 42 percent of children born to parents in the bottom fifth of the economic distribution remain in the bottom as adults and another 23 percent rise only to the second fifth, while 39 percent of children born to parents at the top of the income distribution remain at the top, with another 23 percent moving to the second fifth.
This paper focuses on the lower end of the earnings spectrum and highlights findings from a working paper commissioned by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP). In particular, we report how common it is for children to experience poverty throughout the course of childhood – defined as the years from birth to age 15 – and how that relates to the likelihood that they will be poor in young and middle adulthood.
How many children live in poverty today?
Figure 1: Poor children in the United States, by race/ethnicity, 2007
Today, 18 percent of children in the United States live in poverty (13 million children), a figure that is expected to rise given the current economic downturn.6 For 2009, the federal poverty level is $22,050 for a family of four. Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that to cover their basic expenses; under this measure, 39 percent of children live in lowincome families.7
Although the analysis in this brief includes only white children and African-American children (due to data constraints), Latino children represent the largest group of poor children.
Child poverty and economic hardship can have significant consequences for children’s development and life chances. Growing up in poverty can be harmful to children’s cognitive development and ability to succeed in school, to their social and emotional well-being, and to their health. Children who experience hardship when they are young and children who live in persistent and severe poverty are at the greatest risk. Moreover, child poverty costs our society an estimated $500 billion a year in lost productivity and increased spending on health care and the criminal justice system.
We find that although only a small share of children experience persistent, chronic poverty, children who do are much more likely to be poor as adults. We also find that African-American children are more likely than white children to experience poverty, and even when they spend similar amounts of time living in poverty during childhood, they are more likely to be poor as adults. We conclude by making policy recommendations for improving the life chances of children who grow up in poverty by both increasing family income in the short-term and mitigating the impact of poverty on child outcomes.
How common is it for children to experience poverty at some point during their childhood?
About a third of children experience poverty at some point during childhood; most of these children do not experience chronic, persistent poverty.
Figure 2: Time children spent living in poverty from birth to age 15: Children born between 1970 and 1990
- 35 percent of children (born between 1970 and 1990) had experienced poverty by the time they reached age 15.
- Of children who experienced poverty, most (69 percent) were poor for less than half of their childhood.
- A small portion of children who experienced poverty lived in persistent poverty: one in 10 children spent at least half of their childhood living in poverty and 6 percent of children were poor for three quarters or more of those years.
African-American children are significantly more likely than white children to experience poverty.
Figure 3: Time African-American children spent living in poverty from birth to age 15: Children born between 1970 and 1990
Figure 4: Time spent living in poverty from childhood (birth to age 15), by race: Children born between 1970 and 1990
- Less than one third (30 percent) of African-American children never lived in poverty, compared to 72 percent of white children.
- 41 percent of African-American children lived in poverty for more than half of their childhood, compared to six percent of white children.
- 25 percent of African-American children lived in poverty for more than three-quarters of their childhood, compared to three percent of white children.
Are children who experience poverty more likely to be poor as adults?
Those who experience poverty in childhood are substantially more likely to be poor as adults than those who have not.
- Only a tiny fraction of adults who never experienced poverty during childhood were poor in their 20s and 30s.
- Among adults who did experience poverty as children, on the other hand, about 20 percent were poor in young adulthood (at ages 20 and 25) and 13-14 percent were poor in middle adulthood (at ages 35 and 30, respectively).
The risks associated with persistent poverty are particularly severe: the small share of children who spend more than half of their childhood in poverty are much more likely to be poor as adults.
Figure 5: Exposure to poverty from birth to age 15 and the probability of being poor in young and middle adulthood: Children born between 1970 and 1990
- Among 20-year-olds who spent some time in poverty as children, 12 percent of those who spent less than half of their childhood in poverty were poor, compared to 46 percent of those who were poor for more than half of their childhood.
- The same pattern was found for middle adulthood: poverty rates among 30- and 35-year-olds who were poor for some – but less than half – of their childhood range from seven to eight percent, while the rates for those who were poor during the majority of their childhood were several times higher.
African-American adults who experience poverty in childhood are substantially more likely to be poor through early and middle adulthood, compared to whites who experience similar levels of poverty as children.
Figure 6: Exposure to poverty during childhood and the probability of being poor as adult different ages
- Among African-American adults who lived in poverty for more than half of their childhood, 42 percent were poor at age 30, compared to 25 percent of whites.
- Low to moderate childhood poverty appears to have a particularly disproportionate impact on African-American adults: among 30-year-olds who spent less than half of their childhood in poverty (but at least one year), 19 percent of African-American adults were poor, compared to just five percent of whites.
Conclusion and Policy Recommendations
My Response:
I really liked this article from the outside publications. It goes hand and hand with the topic for this week, which is equity of care and education for children and families. The overwhelming issue is accessibility of program and services that promote health, learning and advancement.
Integrated Systems
For low-income young children to
thrive, their families need access to affordable, high-quality services—such as health and mental health care, early care and learning, and parenting support. States and communities can
improve the odds by implementing policies and practices that meet child and family needs in more holistic ways.
States vary greatly in their efforts to integrate services for young children, and much more can be done. One important way that states can make a difference is by maximizing the strategic use of
fiscal resources to promote positive outcomes. States can
analyze their budgets in terms of their effectiveness regarding healthy early development and school success. They also can respond to potential opportunities—and challenges—that emerge from
federal decisions.
In addition to what states can do, integrated
community efforts to support the healthy emotional development of young children and families are also critical, especially for children experiencing the
greatest risk.
Improving Supports for Parents of Young Children
State-level Initiatives
This is an excerpt from the full report.
Introduction
Most states are working to strengthen supports for young children’s health and development across the different systems that affect family and child wellbeing. Increasingly, efforts to support parenting are an important focus of this work. While states’ strategies are varied, most strive to provide families with information and access to programs that help parents keep their children safe and healthy while nurturing their development and promoting their school readiness.
These efforts make a great deal of sense in view of growing evidence that parents and young children can benefit in many ways from parent education, and that children in families experiencing economic hardship are at higher risk of poor health and educational outcomes in the absence of parenting supports. New federal funding for home-visiting programs, along with the cross-systems planning being carried out by states’ Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (ECCS) initiatives and Early Childhood Advisory Councils, create new opportunities for states to strengthen supports for parents with young children.
At the same time, this area of work is likely to pose special challenges for states. One challenge is the still limited evidence concerning effective programs. Another is that stakeholders may lack information about the full array of existing programs in their state and the extent to which these programs are meeting the needs of different types of families. States also face the complex task of identifying resources and opportunities in different systems that could be marshaled to strengthen parenting supports along the continuum from promotion to intervention.
This issue brief presents information that states can use as they address these challenges and opportunities. The following sections present:
- highlights from research that links parenting to child outcomes;
- questions to guide decisions about programs that could address different families’ needs in a state or territory;
- efforts by four states to establish specific goals related to parenting supports and to make progress toward achieving those goals; and
- recommendations for state-level work in this area that reflect current research and states’ experience.
I think this website goes hand and hand with education and the development of children, those most at risk and need a little help to make it. This motivates me as a educator etc to continue to research and explore all the information available to be successful as a educator in the future. The children are our future and our first agenda is to help them reach their full potential. This particular website explore poverty on so many levels, in relation to issues affecting America's poor on a daily bases. This sight is a great source for information and I learn so much each time I get on there.
