cause and effect essay growing up in poverty

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Robert Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, is one of the researchers studying the link between poverty and social mobility.

Rose Lincoln/Harvard file photo

Unpacking the power of poverty

Peter Reuell

Harvard Staff Writer

Study picks out key indicators like lead exposure, violence, and incarceration that impact children’s later success

Social scientists have long understood that a child’s environment — in particular growing up in poverty — can have long-lasting effects on their success later in life. What’s less well understood is exactly how.

A new Harvard study is beginning to pry open that black box.

Conducted by Robert Sampson, the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, and Robert Manduca, a doctoral student in sociology and social policy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the study points to a handful of key indicators, including exposure to high levels of lead, violence, and incarceration as key predictors of children’s later success. The study is described in an April paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“What this paper is trying to do, in a sense, is move beyond the traditional neighborhood indicators people use, like poverty,” Sampson said. “For decades, people have shown poverty to be important … but it doesn’t necessarily tell us what the mechanisms are, and how growing up in poor neighborhoods affects children’s outcomes.”

To explore potential pathways, Manduca and Sampson turned to the income tax records of parents and approximately 230,000 children who lived in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, compiled by Harvard’s Opportunity Atlas project. They integrated these records with survey data collected by the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, measures of violence and incarceration, census indicators, and blood-lead levels for the city’s neighborhoods in the 1990s.

They found that the greater the extent to which poor black male children were exposed to harsh environments, the higher their chances of being incarcerated in adulthood and the lower their adult incomes, measured in their 30s. A similar income pattern also emerged for whites.

Among both black and white girls, the data showed that increased exposure to harsh environments predicted higher rates of teen pregnancy.

Despite the similarity of results along racial lines, Chicago’s segregation means that far more black children were exposed to harsh environments — in terms of toxicity, violence, and incarceration — harmful to their mental and physical health.

“The least-exposed majority-black neighborhoods still had levels of harshness and toxicity greater than the most-exposed majority-white neighborhoods, which plausibly accounts for a substantial portion of the racial disparities in outcomes,” Manduca said.

“It’s really about trying to understand some of the earlier findings, the lived experience of growing up in a poor and racially segregated environment, and how that gets into the minds and bodies of children.” Robert Sampson

“What this paper shows … is the independent predictive power of harsh environments on top of standard variables,” Sampson said. “It’s really about trying to understand some of the earlier findings, the lived experience of growing up in a poor and racially segregated environment, and how that gets into the minds and bodies of children.”

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The study isn’t solely focused on the mechanisms of how poverty impacts children; it also challenges traditional notions of what remedies might be available.

“This has [various] policy implications,” Sampson said. “Because when you talk about the effects of poverty, that leads to a particular kind of thinking, which has to do with blocked opportunities and the lack of resources in a neighborhood.

“That doesn’t mean resources are unimportant,” he continued, “but what this study suggests is that environmental policy and criminal justice reform can be thought of as social mobility policy. I think that’s provocative, because that’s different than saying it’s just about poverty itself and childhood education and human capital investment, which has traditionally been the conversation.”

The study did suggest that some factors — like community cohesion, social ties, and friendship networks — could act as bulwarks against harsh environments. Many researchers, including Sampson himself, have shown that community cohesion and local organizations can help reduce violence. But Sampson said their ability to do so is limited.

“One of the positive ways to interpret this is that violence is falling in society,” he said. “Research has shown that community organizations are responsible for a good chunk of the drop. But when it comes to what’s affecting the kids themselves, it’s the homicide that happens on the corner, it’s the lead in their environment, it’s the incarceration of their parents that’s having the more proximate, direct influence.”

Going forward, Sampson said he hopes the study will spur similar research in other cities and expand to include other environmental contamination, including so-called brownfield sites.

Ultimately, Sampson said he hopes the study can reveal the myriad ways in which poverty shapes not only the resources that are available for children, but the very world in which they find themselves growing up.

“Poverty is sort of a catchall term,” he said. “The idea here is to peel things back and ask, What does it mean to grow up in a poor white neighborhood? What does it mean to grow up in a poor black neighborhood? What do kids actually experience?

“What it means for a black child on the south side of Chicago is much higher rates of exposure to violence and lead and incarceration, and this has intergenerational consequences,” he continued. “This is particularly important because it provides a way to think about potentially intervening in the intergenerational reproduction of inequality. We don’t typically think about criminal justice reform or environmental policy as social mobility policy. But maybe we should.”

This research was supported with funding from the Project on Race, Class & Cumulative Adversity at Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, and the Hutchins Family Foundation.

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Children in Poverty – Poverty and its Effects on Children

Children in poverty – effects of poverty on children.

It’s no question that poverty and its effects harms communities and even entire countries, but did you know that socioeconomic status directly impacts children as well? Children living in poverty experience a wide variety of risk factors, ranging from health concerns to increased difficulties at school. Unfortunately, about 15 million children (approximately 21% of all children!) in the United States live in low-income families (incomes below the federal poverty line or poverty threshold), a measurement that has been shown to underestimate the needs of working families. Research shows that on average, families require a household income of about twice that amount to cover basic expenses. It is no secret that poverty in America is an epidemic that needs to be confronted head-on! Besides having difficulties meeting basic, everyday needs, here are just a few of the many other ways child poverty harms children of all ages:

The Health Risks of Childhood Poverty

Most are unaware of just how greatly low-income households & extreme poverty can influence child health and cognitive  child development . However, poverty does indeed impact growth from early childhood, starting with brain development and other body systems. Poverty itself can negatively affect how the body and mind develop, and economic hardship can actually alter the fundamental structure of the child’s brain. Children who directly or indirectly experience risk factors associated with poverty have higher odds of experiencing poor health problems as adults such as heart disease, hypertension, stroke, obesity, certain cancers, and even a shorter life expectancy.

In addition to brain development and health risks associated with holding low-socioeconomic status, a child’s mental health is at risk of being greatly affected as well. Low-income parents and children are more likely to be affected by challenges with mental health and mental illness. These mental health problems often impair overall academic achievement and the ability of children to succeed in school. The effects of poverty can place these children at a higher risk of involvement with child welfare and juvenile justice agencies.

Growing Up in Impoverished Neighborhoods

Unfortunately, children who are poor are more likely to be raised in impoverished neighborhoods. These types of neighborhoods that have concentrated poverty levels are often associated with difficulties in academics, behavioral and social issues, and worsening health. Additionally, these children are more likely to live in neighborhoods where they are exposed to environmental risk factors. These socioeconomic risk factors may include malnutrition, pollution, food insecurity, housing instability, economic hardship, led exposure, violence, and crime.

In regards to violence, even indirect exposure (such as witnessing a violent act or simply knowing of its occurrence) has shown to leave adverse developmental outcomes. As a result of family income inequality, poor children are also disproportionately more likely to attend schools in districts with fewer resources, less funding from local tax dollars, less parental involvement due to longer, lower wage working hours, facilities that are inadequate, and with school leadership that has a much higher turnover.

Poverty and Academics

In addition to these macro-level factors that influence neighborhood schools, poverty affects the way children learn as well. For starters, children who directly or indirectly experience risk factors associated with poverty or low parental education have higher than a 90% chance of having 1 or more problems with speech, learning, and/or emotional development. Also, kids who are experiencing poverty at home often have difficulties focusing at school. (You cannot learn well on an empty stomach!) There are also often higher levels of stressors and issues that these young children are worried about after school, in addition to having to worry about completing their homework.

The Impact of Children in Poverty Within The Family

Because children grow within the context of a family unit, it is important to recognize how poverty affects the household as a whole. Firstly, parents living below the poverty level often have difficulties meeting basic economic needs for their families, such as paying for rent, food, utilities, clothing, education, accommodations, health care, health insurance, transportation, and child care. Living in poverty often means having limited access to health care, food and housing security, greater risk of school drop-out for children, homeless, unemployment due to lack of education or child care and, unfortunately, not reaching one’s full potential.

Poverty Status and Stress

Additionally, stress and alienation have negative impacts connected to having little or no income. For parents, financial uncertainty is their major stressor when trying to meet their family’s basic needs. According to the “Stress in America” survey conducted by the American Psychological Association (2017), the proportion of adults who reported that stress impacts their physical and mental health and overall well-being is significantly growing.

Unfortunately, poverty status and stress are two markedly consistent factors among perpetrators of  child abuse , and they are intrinsically intertwined. While there are multiple causes of child maltreatment (such as mental illness, intimate partner violence, substance abuse, poor parenting skills, unmanaged anger, lack of coping strategies, or other individual issues), the correlation between poverty and stress, abuse, and neglect cannot be ignored. Children that experience these traumatic events (also known as  adverse childhood experiences ) are more likely to develop a variety of health problems, behavioral issues, or even substance abuse disorders down the road. The negative effects of adverse childhood experiences  will only lead to further problems as the child develops from teen to adulthood.

Multiple studies have found environmental complexities and material deprivations to be causes of serious physical abuse. For example, low income, uneducated caregivers, single parent households, an incarcerated parent, teen pregnancy, unemployment, and living in the midst of community violence are macro-level socioeconomic factors that undoubtedly lead to stress in the family.

Additionally, inadequate  bonding between the child and their caregivers , intimate partner violence in the home, a physical or mental disability (either the parent or the child), and other health problems (such as being born prematurely), are micro-level issues that place parents under tremendous mental stress, which may translate into abusive behavior. Younger children are more vulnerable to abuse as well, as 46.5% of child abuse fatality victims were younger than one year old, and 34.5% were between the ages of one and three (“Child Welfare Information Gateway,” n.d.).

Furthermore, poor families living in poverty may not have access to adequate resources. Family income inequality creates high risk for neglect, criminal activity, and physical abuse due to additional stress in the home. While it is significant to note that most parents living in poverty or under stressful circumstances will not abuse or neglect their children, kids who grow up in poverty are at a greater risk for maltreatment overall.

The Cycle of Poverty

You may have heard the term, “The Cycle of Poverty.” The cycle of intergenerational poverty refers to the idea that poor parents raise their children in poverty, who are then more likely to become poor parents themselves. It is important to keep in mind that children are more vulnerable to negative consequences of poverty, than adults. While various types of risk factors exist for impoverished households (such as including single parent or single income households and low parental education), the best protection against further increasing the child poverty rate is access to the labor market, quality childcare, and adequate employment and education for parents.

In fact, according to Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, it is best and more useful to intervene right at the start of development, rather than to try to fix things later. In other words, if we provide the right tools for parents and poor families in need, their children will have greater chances to get out of poverty and become successful as adults. Children who live in poverty are affected by one or more risk factors that have been linked to academic failure and poor health, a perfect combination for remaining in the cycle of poverty. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty (2017), between three and 16 percent of children are affected by poverty in combination with another risk factor. An example of a risk factor may include single parent households or parents with no or low education (1.7 million). These alarming numbers will continue to rise if no adequate intervention is used.

So, what can be done?

Today, the leading strategy to break the cycle of poverty in families is the two-generation approach, which aims to improve the family’s economic growth and circumstances by supporting parents both as workers and as parents. If low-income parents are provided with the opportunity to receive higher education, then they will be given the chance they need to compete for higher pay.

Furthermore, if low-income parents are provided with quality child care and access to resources like children’s therapy , then their children’s development will improve. Additionally, while we mentioned the numerous health outcomes that can arise from growing up in poverty, studies have shown that ending intergenerational poverty can greatly reduce these odds. Overall, by helping both generations reach their highest potential, we are helping multiple generations reach economic growth in order to escape the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

Parental Education as Protective Factor

Children who attend child care at an early age and whose parents have a high educational attainment, experience positive developmental benefits at a higher rate, compared to children who do not, including:

• By age 18 months, there is a significant difference in vocabulary between children whose parents have a high educational attainment and attend a high-quality child care, compared to children whose parents have a low educational attainment and low income. By age 3, children whose parents have a college degree have a vocabulary 2-3 times larger than children whose parents did not earn a high school diploma.
• By age 3, children with employed parents have a vocabulary of about 575 words compared to children with unemployed parents, who have a vocabulary of about 300 words.
• Children with educated parents have someone in their own home who understands the struggles associated with academics and can help them push through the everyday obstacles.
• Overall, parental education is indeed a significant predictor of child achievement. For example, in an analysis of data from several large-scale developmental studies, researchers concluded that maternal education was linked significantly to children’s intellectual outcomes even in the face of poverty. Additionally, an examination of the direct effects of parental education, but not income, on children’s standardized achievement scores found that both parental education and household income exerted indirect effects on parents’ achievement-fostering behaviors, and subsequently children’s achievement, through their effects on parents’ educational expectations.

By helping parents gain the resources and support needed to pursue an education, we can not only help them and their children, but their entire family and community for generations to come.

School as a Protective Factor

Likewise, it is no mystery that children’s own education is a tremendous protective factor in poverty as well. However, you may be surprised to learn that even school attendance alone can help change the course of their lives! Primarily, it has been said that “Every child is one caring adult away from a success story.” Attending a school in which there is at least one adult who cares — whether that is a teacher, school social worker, counselor, principal, or administrative assistant — can cultivate resilience in children.

What you can do – TODAY!

Along these same lines, you can choose to be that positive, caring adult in a young child’s life! You can volunteer to be a mentor, classroom aide, a CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocate) for foster youth, work at an after school club, invite your own child’s friends over more often, volunteer in your  communities child abuse prevention program , or even be a foster or adoptive parent! You can truly make a difference in a child’s life.

Another big way that you and your family can help a young child, family, or even whole community is by giving, both of your time and finances! Donate to an organization that serves children in poverty, or sign up to volunteer at an event. Some individuals have even gone to their local school district and paid overdue lunch fees for students! Remember, it’s hard to learn when you’re hungry, and food insecurity disproportionately impacts low income families living below the poverty line! To make an effort towards poverty reduction, donate to local food banks, free clothing closets, and diaper banks. Tutoring children in need is also a huge way to help children’s lives and make a difference in reducing the growing poverty rate!

Additionally, we can help achieve extreme poverty reduction by spreading awareness of the effects of poverty on children! Talk to your friends, family, government representatives, school officials, and community members about the harmful effects and impacts of growing up in poverty. Be an advocate for children’s lives by supporting children’s rights, change, and hope in your own community and neighborhood! Share this article on social media, as well as factsheets, and other information about childhood poverty and how widespread it truly is in the United States. No child should grow up in poverty – let’s all do our part to help!

https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/five-numbers-to-remember-about-early-childhood-development/

http://people.auc.ca/brodbeck/4007/article9.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27244844

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26787551

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9299837

https://www.samhsa.gov/capt/practicing-effective-prevention/prevention-behavioral-health/adverse-childhood-experiences

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15982107

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How Poverty Can Follow Children Into Adulthood

Prolonged exposure to poverty in childhood can have long-term consequences in educational outcomes, physical health and brain development that follow a child into adulthood. (Andrea Morales/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

At the height of the recession in 2012, nearly one in four American children were living in poverty.

Today, five years after America went through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, children are still more likely to live in poverty than adults. In fact, while the national poverty rate sits at 14 percent, for children, it’s 18 percent.

The problem is particularly acute for children of color. While white children experience poverty at a rate of 11 percent, around 27 percent of Hispanic children, 31 percent of black children and 34 percent of Native American children in America today are growing up poor .

There are the obvious side-effects of growing up in poverty: deprivation, worry, and sometimes hunger and the risk of homelessness.

But just as troubling, experts say, is that growing up in a poor household is linked with long-term consequences in educational outcomes, physical health and brain development that can follow a child well into adulthood. Here are just a few ways how:

Children who grow up poor are more likely to be poor as adults

Studies show that children who grow up poor have a harder time escaping poverty as adults. For example, in one 2009 study by the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University, researchers found that children who grew up poor were not only more likely to experience poverty as adults, but that the likelihood of being poor in adulthood went up with the number of years spent in poverty as a child.

According to the study, around five percent of adults who never experienced poverty as children were poor at ages 20 and 25. If they were poor anywhere from one to seven years as a kid, that number went up to approximately 13 percent. For those who spent eight to 14 years in poverty as children, 46 percent were poor at age 20, and 40 percent were poor at age 25.

The longer you grow up in poverty, the harder it is to graduate

One factor at play for why poor children go on to struggle as adults is education. Whether it’s because they didn’t have access to good schools, or their parents didn’t have the time or resources to help them, children who grow up in poverty often start at a disadvantage that can make it harder to achieve later in life.

In a 2017 report from the Urban Institute, researchers found that 62 percent of children who spent at least half their childhoods in poverty went on to attain a high school diploma by age 20. By comparison, that number was 90 percent for those who never experienced poverty.

The gaps only widen when it comes to college. A 2015 report from the Urban Institute found that 23 percent of children who spent at least half their childhood in poverty enrolled in postsecondary education by age 25, compared to 70 percent of children who were never poor. While roughly 37 percent of children who were never poor completed college by age 25, only 3 percent of children from persistently poor backgrounds were able to do the same. The study found that poverty played a role, even when race, gender, parent’s education, and other factors were taken into account.

Overall, the Urban Institute found that only 16 percent of kids who spent half their childhoods poor were either consistently working or in school and mostly out of poverty by their late 20s.

Growing up poor can carry long-term health implications

Poverty itself can be dangerous. Children growing up poor are more likely to be injured in accidents, and five times more likely to die due to accidents, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Poor families are more likely to reside in homes without functional smoke detectors and with open fires, unprotected windows and unsafe roofs or stairs,” an AAP report from 2016 noted. “Children in poor neighborhoods are at increased risk of cycling accidents, pedestrian injuries, falls, burns, poisonings and chemical burns.”

But the risks go deeper than that. Research shows that children who grow up in poverty are also more likely to develop chronic illnesses such as asthma or obesity — the latter can lead to further health problems, including diabetes and heart disease. Poor children are also more likely to be sedentary and exposed to tobacco, which in turn may increase the risk of heart and lung problems when they grow up.

Poverty can also harm a child’s brain development and lifelong mental health

“There are definite impacts [of poverty] on physical health,” said Benard Dreyer, former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in an interview with FRONTLINE. “But in addition, and perhaps more importantly, there’s an impact on brain development and the ability to succeed in life.”

Dreyer was referring to a growing body of research that shows exposure to “toxic” stress can actually impact a child’s brain development.

All children experience stress, and caring adults or support networks can help them cope and figure out how to respond. However, the constant stresses of living in an impoverished household — and in some cases, dealing with abuse or neglect — can create a toxic stress response.

Such levels of stress “impact children’s brain development in the first couple of years of life,” said Dreyer, and can result in permanent changes to brain structure and function. These changes can manifest as increased anxiety , impaired memory and mood control – making it harder to learn, solve problems, follow rules and control impulses. The release of stress hormones can also create a “wear and tear” effect on the child’s organs, including the brain.

How toxic stress effects a child may depend on their innate ability to cope with the stress, and on whether or not they have a support system, Dreyer said. “It doesn’t doom all children, but on the average, it causes a very significant problem in their ability to react to other stress, their ability to behave, to pay attention and to learn cognitively.”

Priyanka Boghani , Digital Editor , FRONTLINE

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2.4 The Consequences of Poverty

Learning objectives.

• Describe the family and housing problems associated with poverty.
• Explain how poverty affects health and educational attainment.

Regardless of its causes, poverty has devastating consequences for the people who live in it. Much research conducted and/or analyzed by scholars, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations has documented the effects of poverty (and near poverty) on the lives of the poor (Lindsey, 2009; Moore, et. al., 2009; Ratcliffe & McKernan, 2010; Sanders, 2011). Many of these studies focus on childhood poverty, and these studies make it very clear that childhood poverty has lifelong consequences. In general, poor children are more likely to be poor as adults, more likely to drop out of high school, more likely to become a teenaged parent, and more likely to have employment problems. Although only 1 percent of children who are never poor end up being poor as young adults, 32 percent of poor children become poor as young adults (Ratcliffe & McKernan, 2010).

Poor children are more likely to have inadequate nutrition and to experience health, behavioral, and cognitive problems.

Kelly Short – Poverty: “Damaged Child,” Oklahoma City, OK, USA, 1936. (Colorized). – CC BY-SA 2.0.

A recent study used government data to follow children born between 1968 and 1975 until they were ages 30 to 37 (Duncan & Magnuson, 2011). The researchers compared individuals who lived in poverty in early childhood to those whose families had incomes at least twice the poverty line in early childhood. Compared to the latter group, adults who were poor in early childhood

• had completed two fewer years of schooling on the average;
• had incomes that were less than half of those earned by adults who had wealthier childhoods;
• received $826 more annually in food stamps on the average;
• were almost three times more likely to report being in poor health;
• were twice as likely to have been arrested (males only); and
• were five times as likely to have borne a child (females only).

We discuss some of the major specific consequences of poverty here and will return to them in later chapters.

Family Problems

The poor are at greater risk for family problems, including divorce and domestic violence. As Chapter 9 “Sexual Behavior” explains, a major reason for many of the problems families experience is stress. Even in families that are not poor, running a household can cause stress, children can cause stress, and paying the bills can cause stress. Families that are poor have more stress because of their poverty, and the ordinary stresses of family life become even more intense in poor families. The various kinds of family problems thus happen more commonly in poor families than in wealthier families. Compounding this situation, when these problems occur, poor families have fewer resources than wealthier families to deal with these problems.

Children and Our Future

Getting under Children’s Skin: The Biological Effects of Childhood Poverty

As the text discusses, childhood poverty often has lifelong consequences. Poor children are more likely to be poor when they become adults, and they are at greater risk for antisocial behavior when young, and for unemployment, criminal behavior, and other problems when they reach adolescence and young adulthood.

According to growing evidence, one reason poverty has these consequences is that it has certain neural effects on poor children that impair their cognitive abilities and thus their behavior and learning potential. As Greg J. Duncan and Katherine Magnuson (Duncan & Magnuson, 2011, p. 23) observe, “Emerging research in neuroscience and developmental psychology suggests that poverty early in a child’s life may be particularly harmful because the astonishingly rapid development of young children’s brains leaves them sensitive (and vulnerable) to environmental conditions.”

In short, poverty can change the way the brain develops in young children. The major reason for this effect is stress. Children growing up in poverty experience multiple stressful events: neighborhood crime and drug use; divorce, parental conflict, and other family problems, including abuse and neglect by their parents; parental financial problems and unemployment; physical and mental health problems of one or more family members; and so forth. Their great levels of stress in turn affect their bodies in certain harmful ways. As two poverty scholars note, “It’s not just that poverty-induced stress is mentally taxing. If it’s experienced early enough in childhood, it can in fact get ‘under the skin’ and change the way in which the body copes with the environment and the way in which the brain develops. These deep, enduring, and sometimes irreversible physiological changes are the very human price of running a high-poverty society” (Grusky & Wimer, 2011, p. 2).

One way poverty gets “under children’s skin” is as follows (Evans, et. al., 2011). Poor children’s high levels of stress produce unusually high levels of stress hormones such as cortisol and higher levels of blood pressure. Because these high levels impair their neural development, their memory and language development skills suffer. This result in turn affects their behavior and learning potential. For other physiological reasons, high levels of stress also affect the immune system, so that poor children are more likely to develop various illnesses during childhood and to have high blood pressure and other health problems when they grow older, and cause other biological changes that make poor children more likely to end up being obese and to have drug and alcohol problems.

The policy implications of the scientific research on childhood poverty are clear. As public health scholar Jack P. Shonkoff (Shonkoff, 2011) explains, “Viewing this scientific evidence within a biodevelopmental framework points to the particular importance of addressing the needs of our most disadvantaged children at the earliest ages.” Duncan and Magnuson (Duncan & Magnuson, 2011) agree that “greater policy attention should be given to remediating situations involving deep and persistent poverty occurring early in childhood.” To reduce poverty’s harmful physiological effects on children, Skonkoff advocates efforts to promote strong, stable relationships among all members of poor families; to improve the quality of the home and neighborhood physical environments in which poor children grow; and to improve the nutrition of poor children. Duncan and Magnuson call for more generous income transfers to poor families with young children and note that many European democracies provide many kinds of support to such families. The recent scientific evidence on early childhood poverty underscores the importance of doing everything possible to reduce the harmful effects of poverty during the first few years of life.

Health, Illness, and Medical Care

The poor are also more likely to have many kinds of health problems, including infant mortality, earlier adulthood mortality, and mental illness, and they are also more likely to receive inadequate medical care. Poor children are more likely to have inadequate nutrition and, partly for this reason, to suffer health, behavioral, and cognitive problems. These problems in turn impair their ability to do well in school and land stable employment as adults, helping to ensure that poverty will persist across generations. Many poor people are uninsured or underinsured, at least until the US health-care reform legislation of 2010 takes full effect a few years from now, and many have to visit health clinics that are overcrowded and understaffed.

As Chapter 12 “Work and the Economy” discusses, it is unclear how much of poor people’s worse health stems from their lack of money and lack of good health care versus their own behavior such as smoking and eating unhealthy diets. Regardless of the exact reasons, however, the fact remains that poor health is a major consequence of poverty. According to recent research, this fact means that poverty is responsible for almost 150,000 deaths annually, a figure about equal to the number of deaths from lung cancer (Bakalar, 2011).

Poor children typically go to rundown schools with inadequate facilities where they receive inadequate schooling. They are much less likely than wealthier children to graduate from high school or to go to college. Their lack of education in turn restricts them and their own children to poverty, once again helping to ensure a vicious cycle of continuing poverty across generations. As Chapter 10 “The Changing Family” explains, scholars debate whether the poor school performance of poor children stems more from the inadequacy of their schools and schooling versus their own poverty. Regardless of exactly why poor children are more likely to do poorly in school and to have low educational attainment, these educational problems are another major consequence of poverty.

Housing and Homelessness

The poor are, not surprisingly, more likely to be homeless than the nonpoor but also more likely to live in dilapidated housing and unable to buy their own homes. Many poor families spend more than half their income on rent, and they tend to live in poor neighborhoods that lack job opportunities, good schools, and other features of modern life that wealthier people take for granted. The lack of adequate housing for the poor remains a major national problem. Even worse is outright homelessness. An estimated 1.6 million people, including more than 300,000 children, are homeless at least part of the year (Lee, et. al., 2010).

Crime and Victimization

As Chapter 7 “Alcohol and Other Drugs” discusses, poor (and near poor) people account for the bulk of our street crime (homicide, robbery, burglary, etc.), and they also account for the bulk of victims of street crime. That chapter will outline several reasons for this dual connection between poverty and street crime, but they include the deep frustration and stress of living in poverty and the fact that many poor people live in high-crime neighborhoods. In such neighborhoods, children are more likely to grow up under the influence of older peers who are already in gangs or otherwise committing crime, and people of any age are more likely to become crime victims. Moreover, because poor and near-poor people are more likely to commit street crime, they also comprise most of the people arrested for street crimes, convicted of street crime, and imprisoned for street crime. Most of the more than 2 million people now in the nation’s prisons and jails come from poor or near-poor backgrounds. Criminal behavior and criminal victimization, then, are other major consequences of poverty.

Lessons from Other Societies

Poverty and Poverty Policy in Other Western Democracies

To compare international poverty rates, scholars commonly use a measure of the percentage of households in a nation that receive less than half of the nation’s median household income after taxes and cash transfers from the government. In data from the late 2000s, 17.3 percent of US households lived in poverty as defined by this measure. By comparison, other Western democracies had the rates depicted in the figure that follows. The average poverty rate of the nations in the figure excluding the United States is 9.5 percent. The US rate is thus almost twice as high as the average for all the other democracies.

This graph illustrates the poverty rates in western democracies (i.e., the percentage of persons living with less than half of the median household income) as of the late 2000s

Source: Data from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2011). Society at a glance 2011: OECD social indicators. Retrieved July 23, 2011, from http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/soc_glance-2011-en/06/02/index.html;jsessionid=erdqhbpb203ea.epsilon?contentType=&itemId=/content/chapter/soc_glance-2011-17-en&containerItemId=/content/se .

Why is there so much more poverty in the United States than in its Western counterparts? Several differences between the United States and the other nations stand out (Brady, 2009; Russell, 2011). First, other Western nations have higher minimum wages and stronger labor unions than the United States has, and these lead to incomes that help push people above poverty. Second, these other nations spend a much greater proportion of their gross domestic product on social expenditures (income support and social services such as child-care subsidies and housing allowances) than does the United States. As sociologist John Iceland (Iceland, 2006) notes, “Such countries often invest heavily in both universal benefits, such as maternity leave, child care, and medical care, and in promoting work among [poor] families…The United States, in comparison with other advanced nations, lacks national health insurance, provides less publicly supported housing, and spends less on job training and job creation.” Block and colleagues agree: “These other countries all take a more comprehensive government approach to combating poverty, and they assume that it is caused by economic and structural factors rather than bad behavior” (Block et, al., 2006).

The experience of the United Kingdom provides a striking contrast between the effectiveness of the expansive approach used in other wealthy democracies and the inadequacy of the American approach. In 1994, about 30 percent of British children lived in poverty; by 2009, that figure had fallen by more than half to 12 percent. Meanwhile, the US 2009 child poverty rate, was almost 21 percent.

Britain used three strategies to reduce its child poverty rate and to help poor children and their families in other ways. First, it induced more poor parents to work through a series of new measures, including a national minimum wage higher than its US counterpart and various tax savings for low-income workers. Because of these measures, the percentage of single parents who worked rose from 45 percent in 1997 to 57 percent in 2008. Second, Britain increased child welfare benefits regardless of whether a parent worked. Third, it increased paid maternity leave from four months to nine months, implemented two weeks of paid paternity leave, established universal preschool (which both helps children’s cognitive abilities and makes it easier for parents to afford to work), increased child-care aid, and made it possible for parents of young children to adjust their working hours to their parental responsibilities (Waldfogel, 2010). While the British child poverty rate fell dramatically because of these strategies, the US child poverty rate stagnated.

In short, the United States has so much more poverty than other democracies in part because it spends so much less than they do on helping the poor. The United States certainly has the wealth to follow their example, but it has chosen not to do so, and a high poverty rate is the unfortunate result. As the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman (2006, p. A25) summarizes this lesson, “Government truly can be a force for good. Decades of propaganda have conditioned many Americans to assume that government is always incompetent…But the [British experience has] shown that a government that seriously tries to reduce poverty can achieve a lot.”

Key Takeaways

• Poor people are more likely to have several kinds of family problems, including divorce and family conflict.
• Poor people are more likely to have several kinds of health problems.
• Children growing up in poverty are less likely to graduate high school or go to college, and they are more likely to commit street crime.

For Your Review

• Write a brief essay that summarizes the consequences of poverty.
• Why do you think poor children are more likely to develop health problems?

Bakalar, N. (2011, July 4). Researchers link deaths to social ills. New York Times , p. D5.

Block, F., Korteweg, A. C., & Woodward, K. (2006). The compassion gap in American poverty policy. Contexts, 5 (2), 14–20.

Brady, D. (2009). Rich democracies, poor people: How politics explain poverty . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Duncan, G. J., & Magnuson, K. (2011, winter). The long reach of early childhood poverty. Pathways: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy , 22–27.

Evans, G. W., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Klebanov, P. K. (2011, winter). Stressing out the poor: Chronic physiological stress and the income-achievement gap. Pathways: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy , 16–21.

Grusky, D., & Wimer, C.(Eds.). (2011, winter). Editors’ note. Pathways: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy , 2.

Iceland, J. (2006). Poverty in America: A handbook . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Krugman, P. (Krugman, 2006). Helping the poor, the British way. New York Times , p. A25.

Lee, B., Tyler, K. A., & Wright, J. D. ( 2010). The new homelessness revisited. Annual Review of Sociology, 36 , 501–521.

Lindsey, D. (2009). Child poverty and inequality: Securing a better future for America’s children . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Moore, K. A., Redd, Z., Burkhauser, M., Mbawa, K., & Collins, A. (2009). Children in poverty: Trends, consequences, and policy options . Washington, DC: Child Trends. Retrieved from http://www.childtrends.org/Files//Child_Trends-2009_04_07_RB_ChildreninPoverty.pdf .

Ratcliffe, C., & McKernan, S.-M. (2010). Childhood poverty persistence: Facts and consequences . Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press.

Russell, J. W. ( 2011). Double standard: Social policy in Europe and the United States (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Sanders, L. (2011). Neuroscience exposes pernicious effects of poverty. Science News, 179 (3), 32.

Shonkoff, J. P. (2011, winter). Building a foundation for prosperity on the science of early childhood development. Pathways: A Magazine on Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policy , 10–14.

Waldfogel, J. (2010). Britain’s war on poverty . New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; Committee on National Statistics; Board on Children, Youth, and Families; Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years; Le Menestrel S, Duncan G, editors. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2019 Feb 28.

A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty.

• Hardcopy Version at National Academies Press

3 Consequences of Child Poverty

In response to the first element of the committee's statement of task, this chapter summarizes lessons from research on the linkages between children's poverty and their childhood health and education as well as their later employment, criminal involvement, and health as adults. It also provides a brief review of research on the macroeconomic costs of child poverty. Because this research literature is vast, the committee focused its review on the most methodologically sound and prominent studies in key fields, primarily in developmental psychology, medicine, sociology, and economics. All else equal, we also selected more recent studies.

We find overwhelming evidence from this literature that, on average, a child growing up in a family whose income is below the poverty line experiences worse outcomes than a child from a wealthier family in virtually every dimension, from physical and mental health, to educational attainment and labor market success, to risky behaviors and delinquency.

This finding needs to be qualified in two important ways. First, although average differences in the attainments and health of poor and nonpoor children are stark, a proportion of poor children do beat the odds and live very healthy and productive lives ( Abelev, 2009 ; Ratcliffe and Kalish, 2017 ).

Second, and vital to the committee's charge, is the issue of correlation versus causation. Income-based childhood poverty is associated with a cluster of other disadvantages that may be harmful to children, including low levels of parental education and living with a single parent ( Currie et al., 2013 ). Are the differences between the life chances of poor and nonpoor children a product of differences in childhood economic resources per se , or do they stem from these other, correlated conditions? Evidence both on the causal (as distinct from correlational) impact of childhood poverty and on which pathways lead to better outcomes is most useful in determining whether child well-being would be best promoted by policies that specifically reduce childhood poverty. If it turns out that associations between poverty and negative child outcomes are caused by factors other than income, then the root causes of negative child outcomes must be addressed by policies other than the kinds of income-focused anti-poverty proposals presented in this report.

That said, most of the scholarly work on poverty and the impacts of anti-poverty programs and policies on child well-being is correlational rather than causal. There is much to be learned from these studies, nevertheless, and it is often the case that evidence derived from experimental designs and that derived from correlational designs lead to similar conclusions. To maintain clarity in our reviews of these two strands in the literature, we have opted to focus this chapter's main text on the results found in the causal literature, while we review the correlational literature in the Chapter 3 portion of Appendix D .

We begin with a brief summary of the mechanisms by which childhood poverty may cause worse childhood outcomes, along with lessons from the vast correlational literature, which is reviewed in depth in this chapter's appendix. We then turn to a review of the causal impacts of policies—income policies as well as anti-poverty policies—on child well-being, derived from both experimental and quasi-experimental (natural experiment) studies. The chapter concludes with a brief review of some of the limited literature on the macroeconomic costs of poverty to society.

Note that virtually all of the available evidence focuses on child poverty as measured by the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) rather than the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that is used in other chapters of this report. Given the considerable overlap in terms of who is considered poor by both measures, we would expect that the bulk of the lessons from OPM-based studies would carry over to the SPM.

• WHY CHILDHOOD POVERTY CAN MATTER FOR CHILD OUTCOMES

Economists, sociologists, developmental psychologists, and neuroscientists each emphasize different ways poverty may influence children's development. Two main mechanisms have been theorized to describe these processes (see Figure 3-1 ). One emphasizes what money can buy—in other words, how poverty undermines parents' ability to procure the goods and services that enhance children's development. An alternative mechanism emphasizes the detrimental impact on families of exposure to environmental stressors as a key pathway by which poverty compromises children's development.

Hypothesized pathways by which child poverty affects child outcomes.

As detailed in Chapter 8 and in the appendix to this chapter, low-income parents face steep challenges in meeting basic financial needs. Many poor families are not only cash-constrained but they also have little to no savings and lack access to low-cost sources of credit ( Halpern-Meekin et al., 2015 ; Yeung and Conley, 2008 ; Zahn, 2006 ). When faced with income shortfalls, they are often forced to cut back on expenditures, even for essential goods such as food and housing, and to pay high interest rates on loans ( McKernan, Ratcliffe, and Quakenbush, 2014 ). As a result, poverty is linked to material hardship, including inadequate shelter and medical care, food insecurity, and a lack of other essentials ( Ouellette et al., 2004 ).

An “investment” perspective may be adopted in addressing the challenge of poverty reduction by building on an analysis of the foregoing problems, emphasizing that higher income may support children's development and well-being by enabling poor parents to meet such basic needs. As examples, higher incomes may enable parents to invest in cognitively stimulating items in the home (e.g., books, computers), in providing more parental time (by adjusting work hours), in obtaining higher-quality nonparental child care, and in securing learning opportunities outside the home ( Bornstein and Bradley, 2003 ; Fox et al., 2013 ; Raver, Gershoff, and Aber, 2007 ). Children may also benefit from better housing or a move to a better neighborhood. Studies of some poverty alleviation programs find that these programs can reduce material hardship and improve children's learning environments ( Huston et al., 2001 ; Morris, Gennetian, and Duncan, 2005 ).

The alternative, “stress” perspective on poverty reduction focuses on the fact that economic hardship can increase psychological distress in parents and decrease their emotional well-being. Psychological distress can spill over into marriages and parenting. As couples struggle to make ends meet, their interactions may become more conflicted ( Brody et al., 1994 ; Conger et al., 1994 ). Parents' psychological distress and conflict have in fact been linked with harsh, inconsistent, and detached parenting. Such lower-quality parenting may harm children's cognitive and socioemotional development ( Conger et al., 2002 ; McLoyd, 1990 ). All of this suggests that higher income may improve child well-being by reducing family stress.

Investing in children and relieving parental stress are two different mechanisms, but they overlap and reinforce each other. For example, both increased economic resources and improved parental mental health and family routines may result in higher-quality child care, more cognitively enriching in-home and out-of-home activities, and more visits for preventive medical or dental care. Better child development, in turn, can encourage more investment and better parenting; for example, more talkative children may trigger more verbal interaction and book reading from their parents, especially if parents can afford to spend the necessary time.

We have focused on parental stress, because reducing poverty may ameliorate this stress and improve parenting, including emotional support for and interactions with children. In addition, a major portion of existing research has focused on this pathway. We recognize that child stress is an important factor leading to negative child outcomes, including effects on early brain development ( Blair and Raver, 2016 , Shonkoff et al., 2012 ). We have not included it in the model (refer to Figure 3-1 ) because it is a more indirect mediator of the effects of other factors of poverty on child outcomes. These other factors include parenting stress, other adverse child experiences, and the negative impacts of underresourced schools and environments in poor neighborhoods. For a more extensive review of both parental and child stress, please see the appendix to this chapter ( Appendix D, 3-1 ).

CONCLUSION 3-1: Poverty alleviation can promote children's development, both because of the goods and services that parents can buy for their children and because it may promote a more responsive, less stressful environment in which more positive parent-child interactions can take place.

The foregoing brief discussion is intended only to provide a framework in which the correlational and causal studies of the impacts of poverty can be understood. We provide a more complete review of the literature about some of these pathways in Chapter 8 and in the appendix to this chapter.

• CORRELATIONAL STUDIES

Many studies document that, on average, children growing up in poor families fare worse than children in more affluent families. A study by Duncan, Ziol-Guest, and Kalil (2010) is one striking example (see Figure 3-2 ). Their study uses data from a national sample of U.S. children who were followed from birth into their 30s and examines how poverty in the first 6 years of life is related to adult outcomes. What they find is that compared with children whose families had incomes above twice the poverty line during their early childhood, children with family incomes below the poverty line during this period completed 2 fewer years of schooling and, as adults, worked 451 fewer hours per year, earned less than one-half as much, received more in food stamps, and were more than twice as likely to report poor overall health or high levels of psychological distress (some of these differences are shown in Figure 3-2 ). Men who grew up in poverty, they find, were twice as likely as adults to have been arrested, and among women early childhood poverty was associated with a six-fold increase in the likelihood of bearing a child out of wedlock prior to age 21. Reinforcing the need to treat correlations cautiously, Duncan, Ziol-Guest, and Kalil (2010) also find that some, but not all, of these differences between poor and nonpoor children disappeared when they adjusted statistically for differences in factors such as parental education that were associated with low childhood incomes.

Adult outcomes for children with lower and higher levels of early childhood income. SOURCE: Adapted from Duncan, Ziol-Guest, and Kalil (2010).

Neuroscientists have produced striking evidence of the effect of early-life economic circumstances on brain development. Drawing from Hanson et al. (2013) , Figure 3-3 illustrates differences in the total volume of gray matter between three groups of children: those whose family incomes were no more than twice the poverty line (labeled “Low SES” in the figure); those whose family incomes were between two and four times the poverty line (“Mid SES”); and those whose family incomes were more than four times the poverty line (“High SES”). Gray matter is particularly important for children's information processing and ability to regulate their behavior. The figure shows no notable differences in gray matter during the first 9 or so months of life, but differences favoring children raised in high-income families emerge soon after that. Notably, the study found no differences in the total brain sizes across these groups—only in the amount of gray matter. However, the existence of these emerging differences does not prove that poverty causes them. This study adjusted for age and birth weight, but not for other indicators of family socioeconomic status that might have been the actual cause of these observed differences in gray matter for children with different family incomes.

Total gray matter volume in early life, by socioeconomic group. SOURCE: Hanson et al. (2013).

Two themes from these two studies characterize much of the child poverty literature: (1) consistent correlations between a child's poverty status and later outcomes and (2) particularly strong associations when poverty status is measured early in childhood. Our review of this correlational literature, which is provided in this chapter's appendix, is organized into the following sections: family functioning, child maltreatment, domestic violence, and adverse childhood experiences; material hardship; physical health; fetal health and health at birth; brain development; mental health; educational attainment; and risky behaviors, crime, and delinquency. Each section discusses the observed relationships between poverty and the outcomes in question. Collectively, they paint a consistent picture, which may be summarized in the following conclusion.

CONCLUSION 3-2: Some children are resilient to a number of the adverse impacts of poverty, but many studies show significant associations between poverty and child maltreatment, adverse childhood experiences, increased material hardship, worse physical health, low birth weight, structural changes in brain development, mental health problems, decreased educational attainment, and increased risky behaviors, delinquency, and criminal behavior in adolescence and adulthood. As for the timing and severity of poverty, the literature documents that poverty in early childhood, prolonged poverty, and deep poverty are all associated with worse child and adult outcomes.

• THE IMPACT OF CHILD POVERTY

Policies designed to reduce poverty will promote positive child outcomes to the extent that poverty reduction causes these child outcomes to improve. This section discusses the causal evidence linking poverty and child outcomes. It includes studies that the committee judged to have the strongest research designs, whether purposely experimental or based on natural experiments that can support the estimation of causal linkages.

In experimental approaches to understanding the impacts of poverty reduction, the policy researcher attempts to vary income while holding constant other potentially causative factors. Randomly assigning subjects to large treatment and control groups helps to ensure that the distribution of these other causative factors (e.g., parental education and motivation) will be similar across the two groups. In this case, a poverty reduction “treatment” might be income payments to families for a number of years, with no such payments made to control group families. Comparing the subsequent well-being of children in the two groups would provide strong evidence about the causal impact of poverty reduction on child well-being.

If experimental methods are not feasible, then some nonexperimental methods, in particular “natural experiments,” are able to mimic random-assignment experiments. Much of the literature using these kinds of nonexperimental designs relies on policy changes or some other unanticipated event that causes family income to change more for one group of children than for another similar group. Our literature review on the causal impacts of poverty reduction on child well-being draws from both experimental methods that use random assignment and natural experiments.

Studies of Increases in Cash Incomes

Family economic resources can be changed in a variety of ways, so researchers have cast a wide net to find circumstances in which families' incomes vary in ways that are beyond their control, which provide an opportunity to relate income changes to changes in child well-being. Examples in which family cash incomes were increased or decreased by policy changes comprise the first part of our review of causal studies. Notably absent from this section are impacts on children of family income changes resulting from legislated changes in the minimum wage; we found no such studies in our review of the literature.

We also do not report on conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs), which condition income on behaviors such as well-baby visits and school attendance. CCTs are prevalent in low- and middle-income countries. These programs, which intend to reduce family economic hardship and stress, typically require families to invest more in their children, especially in their education and health. In the United States, two randomized clinical trials have been conducted of CCTs (Family Rewards 1.0 and 2.0). Both trials found that income increased due to the cash transfers, but that these increases faded after the program ended. Results showed only minimal improvements in children's health and educational outcomes and no impacts on the verified employment or earnings of parents ( Aber et al., 2016 ; Miller et al., 2016 ; Riccio and Miller, 2016 ; Riccio et al., 2013 ).

Negative Income Tax Experiments

The negative income tax experiments initiated under the Nixon administration provided the first random-assignment evidence of income effects on children. A negative income tax is based on a minimum income, or floor, under the tax system; people with incomes above the floor pay taxes, while those with incomes below the floor receive a transfer payment—a kind of negative tax that brings their family incomes up to the floor. The negative tax payment is largest for families with the least income, becoming smaller and smaller as other sources of family income increase.

Large-scale experimental trials of a negative income tax were conducted in seven states between 1968 and 1982. Treatment families, randomly chosen, received payment amounts equivalent to one-third or two-thirds of the federal poverty line. After adjusting for inflation, the largest payments were quite substantial, more than twice the size of current average payments made under the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) Program. That these experiments were conducted decades ago limits the value of the lessons they might provide for today's policy discussions. That said, the large negative income tax payments reduced poverty and improved children's birth outcomes and nutrition, but had mixed effects on child outcomes such as school performance ( Kehrer and Wolin, 1979 ; Salkind and Haskins, 1982 ).

Two of the three experimental sites that measured achievement gains for children in elementary school found significant improvements in treatment-group children relative to control-group children ( Maynard, 1977 ; Maynard and Murnane, 1979 ). In contrast, the achievement of adolescents in families receiving this income supplement did not differ from the achievement of adolescents in control-group families. Impacts on school enrollment and attainment for youth were more uniformly positive, with both of the sites at which these outcomes were measured producing increases in school enrollment, high school graduation rates, and/or years of completed schooling ( Maynard, 1977 ; Maynard and Murnane, 1979 ; Venti, 1984 ).

The Earned Income Tax Credit

The EITC is a refundable federal tax credit for low- and moderate–income working people. A worker's EITC credit grows with each additional dollar of earnings until it reaches a maximum value, and then it flattens out and is gradually reduced as income continues to rise. The dollar value of the EITC payment to a family depends on the recipient's income, marital status, and number of children. As of 2017, 29 states and the District of Columbia had their own EITC programs ( Waxman, 2017 ), supplementing the tax benefits provided by the federal EITC.

Natural-experiment studies of EITC's impact on child outcomes take advantage of the fact that federal EITC benefit levels increased substantially on a number of occasions between the late 1980s and the 2000s. For example, legislation passed in 1993 increased the maximum credit for families with two or more children by $2,160 (in 1999 dollars) compared with an increase in the maximum credit for families with one child of $725 ( Hoynes, Miller, and Simon, 2015 ). Several researchers have used these kinds of expansions, as well as EITC introduction and expansions at the state level, to assess whether child outcomes improved the most for children whose families stood to gain the most from the increased EITC generosity. It is important to bear in mind that the EITC affects family income through the tax credit payment, increases in parental work effort, and, for some families, reductions in other income sources ( Hoynes and Patel, 2017 ). This makes it difficult to separate income effects from the effects of changes in parental employment.

Most of the research on the effects of the EITC focuses on children's school achievement and consistently suggests that boosts in EITC have had positive effects. For example, Dahl and Lochner (2012) link EITC changes to national data tracking children's achievement test scores over time and find that a $1,000 increase in family income raised math and reading achievement test scores by 6 percent of a standard deviation. Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2011) find a similarly sized effect when they look at the test scores of children attending schools in a large urban school district. In the state they study, state and local match rates for the federal EITC increased during the late 1990s and up until 2006. Gains in the children's test scores in math and language arts closely tracked these policy changes. The estimated impact was about 4 percent of a standard deviation in 2003, increasing to about 10 percent of a standard deviation in 2006 and leveling off thereafter. Drawing from the literature estimating the longer-run effects of test scores, they calculate that a typical student would gain more than $40,000 in lifetime income from the initial increase in EITC and its resulting increase in test scores.

Maxfield (2013) uses the same child data as Dahl and Lochner (2012) and finds that an increase in the maximum EITC of $1,000 boosted the probability of a child's graduating high school or receiving a GED by age 19 by about 2 percentage points and increased the probability of completing one or more years of college by age 19 by about 1.4 percentage points. Additionally, Manoli and Turner (2014) , using U.S. tax data and variations due to the shape of the EITC schedule, find that a larger EITC leads to an increase in college attendance among low-income families.

A few studies have also examined the effect of EITC increases on infant health. Strully, Rehkopf, and Xuan (2010) find that increases in state EITCs during the prenatal period increased birth weights, partly by reducing maternal smoking during pregnancy. This is consistent with evidence that when an expectant mother receives a larger EITC during pregnancy, this reduces the likelihood that her baby will have low birth weight by 2 to 3 percent ( Baker, 2008 ; Hoynes, Miller, and Simon, 2015 ). Like Strully, Rehkopf, and Xuan (2010) , Hoynes, Miller, and Simon (2015) suggest that a reduction in smoking is partly responsible, but they also find increases in the use of prenatal care by mothers eligible for the higher EITC payments, which in turn might also lead to a reduction in the incidence of infants' low birth weight.

Evans and Garthwaite (2010) find support for a stress and mental health pathway operating in EITC expansions. They use data from the National Health Examination and Nutrition Survey to estimate whether increased EITC payments were associated with improvements in low-income mothers' health. They find that mothers most likely to receive the increased payments experienced the largest improvements in self-reported mental health as well as reductions in stress-related biomarkers. 1

Taken together, the robust literature on the impacts of EITC-based increases in family income suggests beneficial impacts on children.

CONCLUSION 3-3: Periodic increases in the generosity of the Earned Income Tax Credit Program have improved children's educational and health outcomes.

Welfare-to-Work Experiments

In the early 1990s, a number of states were granted waivers to experiment with the rules governing welfare payments under the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) Program. A condition for receiving the waiver, for most states, was the use of random assignment to evaluate the effects of changing from “business as usual” AFDC rules to their new programs ( Gennetian and Morris, 2003 ; Morris et al., 2001 ). Some states implemented welfare reform programs that offered earnings supplements, either by providing working families cash benefits or by increasing the amount of earnings that were not counted as income when calculating the family's welfare benefit. Other state programs provided only mandatory employment services (e.g., education, training, or immediate job search) or put time limits on families' eligibility for welfare benefits and offered no increased income. All of the new programs had the effect of increasing parent employment, relative to the old AFDC programs, but only some of the programs increased family income as well. Because a number of evaluations included measures of child outcomes, these diverse state experiments provided an opportunity to assess the effects of combinations of increased income and parental employment on child and adolescent well-being.

Morris et al. (2001) and Morris, Gennetian, and Knox (2002) examine the effects of these programs on preschool-age and elementary school-age children. Specifically, children were assessed 2 to 4 years after random assignment, and ranged in age from 5 to 12 years old at the time of assessment. The authors find that earnings supplement programs that increased both parental employment and family income produced positive but modest improvements across a range of child behaviors. All the programs had positive effects on children's school test scores, with impacts ranging from one-tenth to one-quarter of a standard deviation, and some programs also reduced behavior problems, increased positive social behavior, and/or improved children's overall health. In contrast, programs with work requirements that increased employment but not family income (because participants lost welfare benefits as their earnings increased) showed a mix of positive and negative, but mostly null, effects on child outcomes.

Gennetian et al. (2004) focus on adolescents, ages 12 to 18 years at the time of follow-up surveys. These children had been 10 to 16 years old when their parents entered the experimental programs. In contrast to the positive effects that Morris and colleagues find for younger children's school achievement, Gennetian and colleagues find a number of negative impacts on school performance and school progress, irrespective of the type of policy or program that was tested. Some parents in the experimental group reported worse school performance for their children, a higher rate of grade retention, and more use of special education services among their adolescent children than did parents in the control group. However, overall the sizes of these worrisome negative effects were small, and many of the programs did not produce statistically significant effects.

Why did welfare-to-work programs, particularly those that increase family income, have positive effects on younger children but null or even negative effects on adolescents? Duncan, Gennetian, and Morris (2009) study this question by focusing on children who were ages 2 to 5 when their parents entered the program. Their analysis finds that increased income and the use of center-based child care were key pathways through which programs improved young children's school achievement. These findings are consistent with correlational research linking formal child care to better academic skills among low-income children ( National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network and Duncan, 2003 ). Duncan, Morris, and Rodrigues (2011) conduct a similar analysis using this same set of studies to estimate the causal effect of increases in income on the children's school achievement and standardized test scores 2 to 5 years after baseline. They find modest but policy-relevant effects that began during the preschool years on young children's later achievement. Their estimates suggest that each $1,000 increase in annual income, sustained across an average of 2 to 5 years of follow up, boosts young children's achievement by 5 to 6 percent of a standard deviation.

In contrast, the pattern of negative impacts on adolescents may have been generated by the fact that all of the programs tested increased the amount of parental employment, which in turn led to increases in adolescents' responsibilities for household and sibling care and reduced supervision by adults when parents were working. Those inferences are tentative, however, because several studies lacked the data necessary to explore potential pathways.

CONCLUSION 3-4: Welfare-to-work programs that increased family income also improved educational and behavioral outcomes for young children but not for adolescents. Working parents have less time to supervise their children, which may place more burdens on adolescents in the family.

Pre-AFDC Cash Welfare

Estimating the impacts in adulthood of program benefits received during childhood requires the use of data on children spanning several decades, and consequently it includes children born into general social and economic conditions that often were far worse than conditions prevailing today. One study of a cash assistance program focused on the Mother's Pension Program, which pre-dated the 1935 introduction of the AFDC program and was provided by some states to poor women with children. Aizer et al. (2016) evaluate the long-run effects of this program by comparing the children of women who were granted the pension to those who were rejected. Using data from state censuses, death records, and World War II enlistment records, they find that receiving the pension as a child led to a 1.5 year increase in life expectancy, a 50 percent reduction in the probability of being underweight, a 0.4 year increase in educational attainment, and a 14 percent increase in income in early adulthood. However, these local programs were introduced at a time when few other resources existed for lone mothers, so it may represent an upper bound on what one could expect from cash welfare programs today.

Supplemental Security Income

The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) Program is designed to increase the incomes of low-income families that have adults or children with disabilities. The rationale for assisting families with a severely disabled child is that they face additional expenses, and caregivers may have to reduce their own work hours to care for the child. A family qualifies for full benefits under SSI if its members earn less than about 100 percent of the federal poverty threshold. Benefits phase out altogether for families with incomes above about 200 percent of that threshold. In addition to meeting the income thresholds, eligible children must have a severe, medically documented disability. Currently, SSI benefits cover almost 2 percent of all children, with benefit amounts that average $650 a month, and they raise about one-half of recipient families above the poverty line ( Romig, 2017 ). Children on SSI are also automatically eligible for public health insurance coverage under the Medicaid program.

There has been relatively little research on the effects of these income supports on child outcomes, in part because benefit levels have not changed as much or as differentially as benefit levels in programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. But one SSI program provision provides a natural experiment for estimating the possible benefit of SSI income on child outcomes: babies weighing less than 1,200 grams at birth are eligible for SSI, while babies weighing just over 1,200 grams are not. 2 This eligibility cutoff provides researchers with opportunities to compare the developmental trajectories of children on either side of the cutoff. Guldi et al. (2017) do this, and find that mothers of qualifying children work less but, perhaps as a result, show more positive parenting behaviors than mothers of children whose birth weights placed them just above the cutoff. Most importantly for this chapter, the motor skills of babies with birth weights just below the cutoff improved more rapidly than the motor skills of slightly heavier babies whose parents did not qualify for SSI. Since lower birth weight infants should, all else equal, have more delayed motor skills than infants with higher birth weights, these results are especially consequential.

Levere (2015) takes advantage of a second source of quasi-experimental variation in SSI coverage, in this case occasioned by the 1990 Sullivan v. Zebley Supreme Court decision, which broadened SSI coverage for children with mental disabilities. Children with mental health conditions who were younger when Zebley was handed down became eligible for more years of SSI support than older children. In contrast to the picture of generally positive income effects on children, Levere finds that children who were eligible for more years of SSI support were less likely to work and had lower earnings as adults. This finding is hard to interpret. The negative impact may have to do with more severe mental health problems in those identified in early childhood or factors associated with more prolonged eligibility for SSI that did not help and may have harmed their adult employment prospects.

Supplemental Income Provided by a Tribal Government

In some cases, opportunities to study the causal impacts of income increases on child well-being come from unexpected sources. The Great Smoky Mountains Study of Youth was designed to assess the need for mental health services among Eastern Cherokee and non-Indian, mostly White, children living in Appalachia ( Costello et al., 2003 ). When the study began in 1993, children in the study were 9 to 13 years old, and they and their families were then interviewed periodically over the next 13 years. In the midst of the study, a gambling casino owned by the Eastern Cherokee tribal government opened on the tribe's reservation. Starting in 1996, all members of the Eastern Cherokee tribe received an income supplement that grew to an average of approximately $9,000 by 2006 ( Costello et al., 2010 ). Over the study period, payments produced roughly a 20 percent increase in income for households with at least one adult tribal member, excluding the children's cash transfers, which were not available to the families until the child reached maturity ( Akee et al., 2010 ). The fact that incomes increased for families with tribal members relative to families with no tribal members provided researchers with an opportunity to assess whether developmental trajectories were more positive for tribal children than for nontribal children.

The income supplements produced a variety of benefits for children in qualifying families. There were fewer behavioral problems such as conduct disorders, perhaps due to increased parental supervision ( Costello et al., 2003 ). At age 21, the children whose families had received payments for the longest period of time were significantly less likely to have a psychiatric disorder, to abuse alcohol or cannabis, or to engage in crime ( Akee et al., 2010 ; Costello et al., 2010 ). Reductions in crime were substantial: Four more years of the income supplement decreased the probability of an arrest for any crime at ages 16 to 17 by almost 22 percent and reduced the probability of having ever been arrested for a minor crime by age 21 by almost 18 percent.

Beneficial impacts on educational attainment were also found. Having 4 more years of this income supplement increased a Cherokee youth's probability of finishing high school by age 19 by almost 15 percent. Akee and colleagues (2010) found that annual payments equaling approximately $4,000 often resulted in 1 year of additional schooling for American Indian adolescents living in some of the poorest households. Additionally, Akee et al. (2018) find that the income supplements led to large beneficial changes in children's emotional and behavioral health.

In sum, studies of casino payments provide opportunities to estimate causal impacts of income on adolescent and young adult outcomes. They show strong positive impacts on emotional, behavioral, and educational outcomes, and reduced drug and alcohol use and criminal behavior. As with other studies, younger children and children with longer exposures to higher income had better outcomes.

Cash Payments: International Evidence from Canada

Although many countries have experimented with cash payments to low-income families ( Fiszbein et al., 2009 ), few share the living standards that prevail in the United States. Canada, on the other hand, shares many characteristics with the United States and provides several examples of policy studies of income effects. For example, Milligan and Stabile (2011) take advantage of the fact that the benefit amounts of child benefits in Canada changed in different provinces at different times to investigate whether benefit increases were associated with improvements in child well-being. They find that higher benefits do improve measures of both child and maternal mental health, and also that they increase child math and vocabulary test scores. The effect size is similar to that found in Dahl and Lochner's (2012) EITC study. Among the low-income families most likely to receive the benefits, Milligan and Stabile (2011) also find declining rates of hunger and obesity, an increase in height among boys, and a decrease in physical aggression among girls.

“Near-Cash” Benefits: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Housing Subsidies

In addition to work on cash transfers of various kinds, there has been a great deal of research into the causal effects of what are sometimes called “near-cash” programs, especially those offering nutrition assistance and housing subsidies. These programs are referred to as near cash because while their benefits must be spent on food or housing, they free up a household's money that would otherwise have been spent on food and housing. The freed-up money can then be spent on other goods or services and may also decrease parental stress. Health insurance has not traditionally been viewed as one of these near-cash programs because of difficulties in assigning a dollar value to health coverage. However, see the appendix to this chapter ( Appendix D, 3-1 ) for a discussion of the effects on child and adult outcomes stemming from expansions of public health insurance for poor pregnant women and children.

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

Serving more than 44 million Americans at a cost of $70.9 billion (in fiscal 2016), the SNAP program (formerly known as the Food Stamp Program) is by far the nation's largest near-cash program ( Food and Nutrition Service, 2018a ). To be eligible, households must have a gross monthly income of less than 130 percent of the poverty line, net income (after deductions) of less than the poverty line, and assets of less than an asset limit ( Food and Nutrition Service, 2018b ). Benefits can be used to purchase most foods available in grocery stores, with exceptions such as vitamins and hot foods for immediate consumption. Benefits are delivered in the form of an Electronic Benefit Transfer card that functions much like a debit card.

Given the substitution possibilities between income from SNAP and other sources, it is not surprising that research studies estimate that with a $100 increase in SNAP benefits, households increase their food consumption by quite a bit less than $100. The review of Hoynes and Schanzenbach, (2015) places the increase in food consumption at around $30 per $100 in benefits. While these families do spend all their SNAP benefits on food, the benefits allow them to spend less of their own income on food. The review by Hoynes and Schanzenbach finds that for every $100 in SNAP benefits, households have $70 of their own income that they no longer need to spend on food. Families can then use these household funds for additional resources for their children.

Hoynes and Schanzenbach (2015) also provide a summary of the literature examining causal links between SNAP participation and the nutrition and health outcomes of infants, children, and adults. Many (but not all) of the methodologically strongest studies show SNAP benefits having positive impacts on health. Given the interest in the longer-run impacts of poverty reduction on child health and attainment, in the following we provide more details about two studies that took advantage of the fact that the SNAP (then known as food stamps) program rolled out gradually between the late 1960s and mid-1970s. Notably, the rollout occurred on a county by county basis, which resulted in many instances in which the families of children born in the same state at the same time may have had different access to program benefits. 3

This slow rollout enabled Almond, Hoynes, and Schanzenbach (2011) to estimate causal effects of participation during pregnancy on infant health and, in a later study ( Hoynes, Schanzenbach, and Almond, 2016 ) to investigate the effects on adult health of the availability of food stamps at different points in childhood. The infant health study found that food stamp availability reduced the incidence of low birth weight—a result similar to one found in a more recent study of birth weight surrounding changes in rules for immigrant eligibility for food stamps beginning in the mid-1990s ( East, 2016 ). In a related paper using the same policy variation, East (2018) finds that more exposure to SNAP at ages 0 to 4 leads to a reduction in poor health and school absences in later childhood. Using variations in the price of food across areas of the United States, Bronchetti, Christensen, and Hoynes (2018) find that increases in the purchasing power of SNAP lead to improvements in child school attendance and compliance with physician checkups.

In their 2016 study of possible long-term effects of food stamp coverage in early childhood on health outcomes in adulthood, Hoynes, Schanzenbach, and Almond focus on the presence or absence of a cluster of adverse health conditions known as metabolic syndrome. In the study, metabolic syndrome was measured by indicators for adult obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. Scores on these indicators of emerging cardiovascular health problems increased (grew worse) as the timing of the introduction of food stamps shifted to later and later in childhood (see Figure 3-4 ). The best adult health was observed among individuals in counties where food stamps were already available when these individuals were conceived. Scores on the index of metabolic syndrome increase steadily until around the age of 5.

Impact of food stamp exposure on metabolic syndrome index at age 25 and above. SOURCE: Adapted from Hoynes, Schanzenbach, and Almond (2016).

It is impossible to determine the extent to which the adult health benefits of food stamp availability in very early childhood were generated by the nutritional advantages of the extra spending on food or by the more general increase in economic resources freed up for spending on other family needs. And while these studies of the food stamp rollout offer the best available evidence of the long-term effects of food benefits, the food landscape facing Americans has arguably changed a great deal since that period.

Another possible cause of health benefits is the fact that SNAP benefits appear to cushion unexpected changes in household income: Both Blundell and Pistaferri (2003) and Gundersen and Ziliak (2003) show that the SNAP program substantially reduces the volatility of income.

CONCLUSION 3-5: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has been shown to improve birth outcomes as well as many important child and adult health outcomes.

Housing Subsidies

By reducing housing costs, housing subsidy programs can provide a substantial transfer of economic resources to recipient households. The main types of assistance available are public housing, voucher-based rental assistance under the Housing Choice Voucher (formerly called Section 8) Program, and subsidized privately owned housing, including the Low Income Housing Tax Credit ( Olsen, 2008 ). All three programs aim to limit the housing expenses of low-income households to 30 percent of their income.

Given their large size and the length of time they have been operating, it is surprising that relatively little research has been conducted concerning the impacts on children of the in-kind resources these programs provide ( Collinson, Ellen, and Ludwig, 2015 ). Some of the best-known studies of housing vouchers—the Moving to Opportunity demonstration is the best known example—involve offering housing vouchers to families that are already living in subsidized public housing. And even when studies compare households receiving housing subsidies with those receiving no housing assistance, it is difficult to separate the benefits to children that stem from improved housing quality occasioned by program benefits from the benefits they experience due to the freeing up of their families' economic resources for spending on other needs.

Nevertheless, whether the resource-enhancing benefits of housing subsidies improve the well-being of children is best seen in studies that contrast children in families that do and do not receive housing subsidies. Jacob, Kapustin, and Ludwig (2015) compare children in families that won the lottery allocating Section 8 housing vouchers in Chicago with children in families that lost that lottery. Examining a 14-year period following the lottery, they find virtually no differences across a range of outcomes in educational attainment, criminal involvement, and health care utilization. On the other hand, Carlson et al. (2012a , 2012b) study a large group of Section 8 recipients in Wisconsin and find small positive effects on the earnings and employment of older children.

A second type of comparison is between children in families that do and do not receive subsidized public housing units. Currie and Yelowitz (2000) take advantage of the fact that two-child families with children of different genders are entitled to larger units and are therefore more likely to “take up” the program and live in public housing. They find that living in public housing reduced the probability that boys would be held back in school and, as well, improved the family's housing quality.

In the case of public housing demolitions, children whose families were displaced from soon-to-be demolished public housing and given housing vouchers may be compared with children living in the same housing projects whose units were not demolished. Since both groups received housing subsidies, the contrast does not involve large differences in economic resources provided by housing subsidies. Jacob (2004) finds no differences in the school achievement of the two groups. Using longer-run data, Chyn (2018) finds improvements in the affected children's labor-market outcomes, namely that young adults who were relocated to less disadvantaged neighborhoods were more likely to be employed than those who lived in the public housing that was not demolished.

The housing policy research that has received much interest focuses on the evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity Program. Moving to Opportunity was a large-scale randomized experiment that provided residents of public housing projects with either “regular” Section 8 housing vouchers or with vouchers that could only be used in a neighborhood with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent ( Orr et al., 2003 ). Those in the latter group also received assistance to find a new residence. In addition to the two treatment groups, a control group of public housing residents remained eligible to stay in their existing public housing. In this experiment, all three groups received housing subsidies, but most families in the two treatment groups moved away from public housing while many in the control group remained.

Focusing first on the comparison between control-group children and children in families receiving the conventional housing vouchers (which were renamed Housing Choice Vouchers during the intervening period), Gennetian and colleagues (2012) find no differences across a range of schooling, health, and behavioral outcomes measured 10 to 15 years after the study began. The longer-run examination of college and labor market outcomes by Chetty, Hendren, and Katz (2015) also failed to find statistically significant outcomes, even for those children who were younger (under age 13) when they entered the study. These results, when combined with those reported in Jacob, Kapustin, and Ludwig (2015) , suggest that these programs may reduce child poverty but provide little reason to expect that expanding the existing Housing Choice Voucher Program would lead to better child and youth outcomes.

However, some children in Moving to Opportunity families who received vouchers that could only be used if they moved to low-poverty neighborhoods did have better outcomes. When compared with their control-group counterparts, female (but not male) youth experienced better mental health outcomes ( Gennetian et al., 2012 ). Chetty, Hendren, and Katz (2015) focus on children who were younger than age 13 when their families moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods and find that children who moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods through Moving to Opportunity acquired more education and, as adults, earned more and were less likely to be receiving disability or welfare payments. No such benefits were found for older youth, a result also found in Oreopoulos's (2003) study of families moving into public housing in more advantaged and less advantaged parts of Toronto.

CONCLUSION 3-6: Evidence on the effects of housing assistance is mixed. Children who were young when their families received housing benefits enabling them to move to low-poverty neighborhoods had improved educational attainment and better adult outcomes.

Controversy over the Medicaid expansions included in the Affordable Care Act has obscured public understanding of the sheer scale of the earlier expansions of public health insurance for pregnant women, infants, and children. In 2009, 45 percent of all births in the United States were covered by public health insurance ( Markus et al., 2013 ). Between 1986 and 2005, the share of children eligible for Medicaid/Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) 4 increased from a range of 15 to 20 percent of children (depending on the age group) to a range of 40 to 50 percent of children ( Currie, Decker, and Lin, 2008 ). Because the Medicaid expansions were phased in in a staggered way, they have created natural experiments in the value of health insurance for low-income people.

Currie and Gruber (1996a) show that the 30 percent increase in the eligibility of pregnant women during the 1980s and early 1990s was associated with a 7 percent decline in the infant mortality rate. The roughly 15 percent increase in Medicaid eligibility for children that occurred over the same period reduced the probability that a child went without any doctor visits during the year by 9.6 percent ( Currie and Gruber, 1996b ). Aizer (2007) and Dafny and Gruber (2005) find that increases in eligibility for Medicaid as well as in Medicaid enrollments reduced preventable hospitalizations among children, also indicating that those children gained access to necessary preventive care. Collectively, these results suggest that as many as 6 million children gained access to basic preventive care as a result of the Medicaid expansions. (See Howell and Kenney, 2012 , for a review of research studies.)

Several recent papers look at the long-term effects of the expansions of child Medicaid coverage ( Brown, Kowalski, and Lurie, 2015 ; Cohodes et al., 2016 ; Currie, Decker, and Lin, 2008 ; Miller and Wherry, 2018 ; Wherry and Meyer, 2015 ; Wherry et al., 2015 ). These studies all show that cohorts who received Medicaid coverage in early childhood are more likely to work, to have higher earnings, to have more education, and to be in better health in adulthood (using self-reported health, mortality, and hospitalization rates as outcomes) than cohorts who were not covered by the Medicaid/CHIP expansions.

For example, Miller and Wherry (2018) show that early-life access to Medicaid stemming from these expansions is associated with lower rates of obesity and fewer preventable hospitalizations in adulthood. Levine and Schanzenbach (2009) find long-run effects of Medicaid on child educational attainment. Examining the performance of different cohorts of children on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a nationally representative assessment of U.S. students' knowledge and ability in various subject areas, they find higher scores in states and cohorts where larger numbers of children were covered at birth. East and colleagues (2017) find that women who were covered by Medicaid as infants because of the expansions in the late 1980s and early 1990s have grown into mothers who give birth to healthier children today.

A few studies use historical data about the staggered rollout of Medicaid across the states in the late 1960s to measure its long-term effects. Goodman-Bacon (2018) notes that regulations mandating Medicaid coverage of all cash-welfare recipients led to substantial variations across states in the share of children who became eligible for Medicaid. He finds that after the introduction of Medicaid, mortality fell more rapidly among infants and children in states with bigger Medicaid expansions. Among non-White children, mortality fell by 20 percent. Goodman-Bacon (2016) also looks at the longer-term effects of these increases in coverage and finds that eligibility in early childhood reduced adult disability and increased labor supply up to 50 years later. Boudreaux, Golberstein, and McAlpine (2016) also find that access to Medicaid in early childhood is associated with long-term improvement in adult health, as measured by an index that combines information on high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

Currie and Schwandt (2016) argue that the expansions in public health insurance for children have dramatically reduced mortality among poor children, and especially among poor Black children. The result is that socioeconomic inequality in mortality has been falling among children since 1990, even while it has increased for adults. Baker, Currie, and Schwandt (2017) provide comparisons to Canada and show that while mortality remains lower in Canada than in the United States at all ages, the child mortality rate in the United States converged toward the Canadian rate between 1990 and 2010 following the rollout of public health insurance for all poor U.S. children.

CONCLUSION 3-7: Expansions of public health insurance for pregnant women, infants, and children have generated large improvements in child and adult health and in educational attainment, employment, and earnings.

Summary of Studies on the Causal Impact of Poverty

Causal studies of the effect of poverty on later child well-being often (but not always) find negative impacts, while causal studies of the impact of anti-poverty programs on child well-being consistently find positive impacts. The general pattern may be summed up by this conclusion:

CONCLUSION 3-8: The weight of the causal evidence indicates that income poverty itself causes negative child outcomes, especially when it begins in early childhood and/or persists throughout a large share of a child's life. Many programs that alleviate poverty either directly, by providing income transfers, or indirectly, by providing food, housing, or medical care, have been shown to improve child well-being.

• MACROECONOMIC COSTS OF CHILD POVERTY TO SOCIETY

The first element of the committee's Statement of Task also calls for a review of evidence on the macroeconomic costs of child poverty in the United States. Procedures for estimating these costs are very different from the experimental and quasi-experimental methods adopted in studies of the microeconomic costs of poverty, reviewed above. Holzer et al. (2008) base their cost estimates on the correlations between childhood poverty (or low family income) and outcomes across the life course, such as adult earnings, participation in crime, and poor health. These correlations come from the kinds of studies reviewed in this chapter's appendix ( Appendix D, 3-1 ). Their estimates represent the average decreases in earnings, costs associated with participation in crime (e.g. property loss, injuries, and the justice system), and costs associated with poor health (additional expenditures on health care and the value of lost quantity and quality of life associated with early mortality and morbidity) among adults who grew up in poverty.

Holzer and colleagues (2008) reason that these outcomes are costly to the economy because the overall volume of economic activity is lower than it would have been in the absence of policies that reduced or eliminated poverty. Their procedures lead to a very broad interpretation of the causal effects of childhood poverty—the impacts not only of low parental incomes but also of the entire range of environmental factors associated with poverty in the United States and all of the personal characteristics imparted by parents, schools, and neighborhoods to children affected by them.

At the same time, Holzer and colleagues (2008) make a number of very conservative assumptions in their estimates of earnings and the costs of crime and poor health. For all three, they subtract from their estimates the potential “genetic” (as opposed to environmental) component of the cost. 5 When making calculations, they use those at the lower end of credible estimates in published studies. The earnings data include only those workers who are at least marginally in the labor force; data from families whose household heads are not in the workforce because of incarceration or disability or for other reasons are not captured, nor are government expenditures related to disability included. Additionally, the authors' estimates of the cost of crime include only “street crime” and not other crimes, such as fraud, and they assume that the cost of police, prisons, and private security is unchanged as a result of increases in crime due to child poverty. Finally, they only measure costs related to earnings, crime, and health; there are probably other societal costs that are not measured. All of these analytic choices make it likely that these estimates are a lower bound that understates the true costs of child poverty to the U.S. economy.

The bottom line of the Holzer and colleagues (2008) estimates is that the aggregate cost of conditions related to child poverty in the United States amounts to $500 billion per year, or about 4 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The authors estimate that childhood poverty reduces productivity and economic output in the United States by $170 billion per year, or by 1.3 percent of GDP; increases the victimization costs of crime by another $170 billion per year, or by 1.3 percent of the GDP; and increases health expenditures, while decreasing the economic value of health, by $163 billion per year, or by 1.2 percent of GDP.

McLaughlin and Rank (2018) build on the work of Holzer and colleagues (2008) by updating their estimates in 2015 dollars and adding other categories of the impact of childhood poverty on society. They include increased corrections and crime deterrence costs, increased social costs of incarceration, costs associated with child homelessness (such as the shelter system), and costs associated with increased childhood maltreatment in poor families (such as the costs of the foster care and child welfare systems). Their estimate of the total cost of childhood poverty to society is over $1 trillion, or about 5.4 percent of GDP. This compares to the approximately 1 percent of GDP constituted by direct federal expenditures on children ( Isaacs et al., 2018 ).

These calculations do not reveal which anti-poverty programs are likely to be most effective, nor whether it is sensible to try to reduce poverty in 10 years rather than adopting programs that improve childhood outcomes over a longer time period. They do make it clear that there is considerable uncertainty about the exact size of the costs of child poverty. Nevertheless, whether these costs to the nation amount to 4.0 or 5.4 percent of GDP—roughly between $800 billion and $1.1 trillion annually in terms of the size of the U.S. economy in 2018 6 —it is likely that significant investment in reducing child poverty will be very cost-effective over time.

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These include measures of inflammation, such as albumin; cardiovascular conditions (e.g., systolic blood pressure); measures of metabolic conditions such as total cholesterol; and other risks ( Evans and Garthwaite, 2010 ).

A specific description of disability evaluation under Social Security is available at https://www ​.ssa.gov/disability ​/professionals ​/bluebook/ChildhoodListings.htm . Guldi et al. (2017) note that Social Security Administration low birth weight criteria are more limiting than the medical community's criteria in order to target infants at risk of long-term disability.

A look at the long-term impact of program participation in childhood on adult health requires that the affected cohorts be followed for decades. A caveat with any such study is that conditions facing children today may be different from those decades ago, hence the effect of program participation may also differ.

CHIP was signed into law in 1997. See https://www ​.medicaid ​.gov/about-us/programhistory/index.html for more information about its history.

Holzer et al. (2008) refer to this as the “possible genetic contributions to the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage” (p. 45). For example, the authors recognize that genes can have an important effect on a person's height, weight, and physical and mental health.

This is based on a GDP of $20,412 trillion in the second quarter of 2018. See Table 3, https://www ​.bea.gov/system ​/files/2018-09/gdp2q18_3rd_3.pdf .

• Cite this Page National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; Committee on National Statistics; Board on Children, Youth, and Families; Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years; Le Menestrel S, Duncan G, editors. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2019 Feb 28. 3, Consequences of Child Poverty.
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Childhood and Intergenerational Poverty: The Long-Term Consequences of Growing Up Poor

• Publication Type   Report  
• Post date November 1, 2009

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Introduction

Children growing up in low-income families face many challenges that children from more advantaged families do not. These children are more likely to experience multiple family transitions, move frequently, and change schools. The schools they attend are less well funded, and the neighborhoods they live in are more disadvantaged. The parents of these children have fewer resources to invest in them and, as a consequence, their homes have fewer cognitively-stimulating materials, and their parents invest less in their education. The stress of living in poverty and struggling to meet daily needs can also impair parenting.

Social and economic deprivation during childhood and adolescence can have a lasting effect on individuals, making it difficult for children who grow up in low-income families to escape poverty when they become adults. Because the negative effects of deprivation on human development tend to cumulate, individuals with greater exposure to poverty during childhood are likely to have more difficulty escaping poverty as adults. In this research brief, we examine patterns of exposure to poverty during childhood and the association between these patterns and poverty in early and middle adulthood. Data for this study come from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which collects information on the social and economic status of PSID families and their offspring every year.

We find that individuals who grow up in poor families are much more likely to be poor in early adulthood. Moreover, the chances of being poor in early adulthood increase sharply as the time spent living in poverty during childhood increases. At all levels of poverty during childhood, African-Americans are more likely than whites to be poor in early and middle adulthood.

“The American Dream” is rooted in the idea of upward mobility, the idea that individuals and families can escape the confines of poverty and disadvantage through hard work and perseverance. How widespread is upward mobility across generations? How do parents’ socioeconomic characteristics influence their children’s success? Do children from more affluent families remain at the top of the economic structure? Are poor children able to escape poverty as adults? How does race impact income mobility, especially mobility out of poverty? Intergenerational economic mobility is a key indicator of the degree of equality of opportunity in a society. Even though the limited availability of long-term, longitudinal data makes economic mobility research challenging, social scientists have been studying intergenerational mobility for some time.

A number of researchers have investigated intergenerational economic mobility by examining the correlation between parents’ and children’s income and earnings. For example, Becker and Tomes report a weak correlation (0.2) between parents’ and children’s incomes. By the 1990s, other researchers’ estimates of the intergenerational income correlation were stronger (closer to 0.4). Mazumder, however, contends that traditional approaches to measuring the correlation between parents’ and children’s income and earnings tend to systematically underestimate this relationship, leading researchers to conclude that there is greater economic mobility in the United States than actually takes place. Using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) earnings data, Mazumder estimates a stronger correlation between parents’ and children’s earnings to be 0.6. Thus, the literature suggests that the actual correlation between parents’ and children’s income ranges from 0.4 to 0.6, suggesting that intergenerational economic mobility in the U.S. is lower than previous studies found. Mayer and Lopoo caution that all estimates of an intergenerational income or earning correlation can vary depending on the time frame used by the researchers.

Recently, Isaacs’ analysis of income mobility using data from the PSID differentiates between the absolute and relative economic mobility of children. For example, she reports that two-thirds of adult Americans earn more than their parents did 30 years earlier. Thus, in absolute terms, most adult children eventually have greater incomes than their parents. Isaacs, however, also finds that relative income mobility among children is limited. That is, children who were born to families at the top of the income structure have the highest probability of being in the highest income strata as adults, while those born at the bottom have the highest probability of being poor as adults. Isaacs suggests that “about half of the difference in income between families in one generation persists into the next generation.”

Studies focusing on the intergenerational transmission of poverty find that while individuals can break out of intergenerational cycles of poverty, they are less likely to do so than is commonly thought. Moreover, when subsequent generations do escape poverty they are likely to move into the ranks of the slightly less poor. Poverty exits depend on numerous factors such as educational and employment opportunities, the availability of role models, and child and parent aspirations, as well as a child’s birth order and when in the child’s life poverty occurs.

Researchers also find that the intergenerational correlation between incomes and earnings vary widely by race. For example, according to Hertz, 17 percent of whites who were born in the lowest income category between 1942 and 1972 remained there as adults while 42 percent of African-Americans did so. Similarly, in a separate study, Isaacs finds that not only do African-American children live in families with lower average incomes than whites, but “African-Americans experience less upward mobility and more downward mobility than whites.” In general, scholars have found that race matters a great deal in intergenerational economic mobility.

Although researchers have examined how having poor parents influences the chances of being poor as an adult and how the timing of poverty in childhood influences economic success in adulthood, little attention has been given to understanding how the duration of exposure to poverty during childhood influences the chances of being poor in early and middle adulthood. In this study, we use data from the PSID to examine individuals’ patterns of exposure to poverty during childhood and how these patterns are associated with poverty status at the ages of 20, 25, 30, and 35. Because earlier studies have found stark racial differences in patterns of exposure to poverty and intergenerational poverty, we examine these patterns and associations separately for whites and African-Americans.

Data and Methods

We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to study intergenerational poverty. The PSID is a publicly-available, nationally representative panel study conducted annually or bi-annually since 1968 by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. In the PSID, individuals from original sample households are re-interviewed every year, whether or not they are living in the same dwelling or with the same people. Adults are followed as they grow older, and children are observed as they advance through childhood and into adulthood, forming family units of their own. This procedure produces an unbiased sample of families each year as well as a continuously representative sample of children born into families each year. As of 2005, the PSID data included longitudinal information on 67,271 individuals who were either members of one of the original sample families, the offspring of one of those individuals, or their co-residents.

Our sample includes all white and African-American children born into responding sample families between 1970 and 1990. Because the PSID sampled the original families in 1968, the data include too few Latinos to compute reliable and representative estimates for this population. The youngest individuals in our sample were born in 1990 and were age 15 at the time of the 2005 interview. The oldest individuals were 35 at the time of the last interview. Individuals with poverty information available for fewer than half of the study years were excluded from the analysis. Sample attrition has been modest and has not generally affected the representativeness of the sample. Nonetheless, sampling weights that accounted for attrition were employed in all analyses.

Recently, Grieger, Danziger, and Schoeni developed a strategy for constructing poverty measures using the PSID that are comparable to official Census Bureau estimates using the Current Population Survey. We use this new strategy (called PSID-4 by the authors) to construct poverty indicators for each individual for each year of their childhood (ages birth to 15 years old) and for the ages of 20, 25, 30, and 35 years old. We then use these poverty indicators to compute the percentage of childhood years spent living in poverty (<100 percent Federal Poverty Line). All results presented below are weighted using the PSID individual-level core sample weights.

Poverty During Childhood

Exposure to poverty during childhood varies widely (see Figure 1). Most children (65 percent) never experience poverty between the ages of birth and 15 years old. Of those who are poor at some point during their childhood and early adolescence, most (69 percent) are poor for less than half of that time. However, one in 10 children spend at least half of childhood living in poverty and 6.4 percent are poor for three-quarters or more of childhood. On average, a child spends nearly 14 percent of his or her childhood living in poverty. Children who were ever poor during childhood spend an average of 47 percent of childhood living in poverty.

African-American children and younger children are more likely to experience poverty than white children and older children. While nearly three-quarters of white children never experience poverty during their childhood, fewer than one-third of African-American children are never poor (see Figure 1). Nearly one-quarter of African-American children live in poverty for more than three-fourths of their childhood and more than one-third are poor for at least half of their childhood. On average, a white child spends only 8.9 percent of childhood living in poverty. By contrast, an African-American child is poor for nearly two-fifths of childhood on average. For both white and African-American children, the chances of being poor declines slowly but steadily between early and late childhood (see Figure 2).

Intergenerational Poverty: The Consequences of Growing Up Poor

Adults who were poor during childhood are much more likely to be poor in early and middle adulthood than are those who were never poor (see Table 1). Few adults who did not experience poverty during childhood are poor in early and middle adulthood. At ages 20, 25, and 30, only four to five percent of those adults who were never poor during their childhood live in poverty. At age 35, less than one percent are poor.

Poverty rates for adults who were poor during childhood are much higher, especially for those individuals with high levels of exposure to poverty during childhood. For adults who experienced low-to-moderate levels of poverty during childhood (one to 50 percent of childhood years), 12 to 13 percent are poor at ages 20 and 25 and seven to eight percent are poor at ages 30 and 35. For adults who experienced moderate-to-high levels of poverty during childhood (51 to 100 percent of childhood years), between 35 percent and 46 percent are poor throughout early and middle adulthood.

At comparable levels of exposure to poverty during childhood, African-Americans are more likely than whites to be poor throughout early and middle adulthood. For example, while 0.5 to five percent of whites who were never poor during childhood are poor in their 20s and early 30s, five to eight percent of African-Americans with no exposure to poverty during childhood are poor. At higher levels of poverty exposure during childhood, the differences between African-American and white poverty rates in adulthood are starker. At low-to-moderate levels of poverty exposure during childhood, four to 11 percent of whites are poor in early and middle adulthood, but 19 to 30 percent of African-Americans are poor. At moderate-to-high levels of childhood poverty exposure, 42 to 51 percent of African-Americans are poor as adults, but only 25 to 40 percent of whites are poor. African-Americans are, therefore, doubly disadvantaged relative to whites. On one hand, they have greater exposure to poverty during childhood than whites. On the other hand, at similar levels of exposure to poverty during childhood, they are more likely to be poor as adults. It also appears that low-to-moderate levels of poverty have a particularly disproportionate impact on African-Americans’ mobility as compared to whites.

Our examination of PSID data indicates that while most children never experience poverty, 35 percent of children born between 1970 and 1990 experienced poverty between birth and age 15. We also find that African-American children are more likely to experience poverty than are white children. These results have implications for adults: Individuals who were poor during childhood are more likely to be poor as adults than are those who were never poor, and this is especially true for African-Americans. Consequently, intergenerational poverty and persistent disadvantage impedes individuals’ ability to achieve the American Dream. Though there is considerable upward mobility in the United States, escaping poverty is difficult, and racial disadvantages mean that mobility out of poverty for African-Americans is far more difficult than it is for whites.

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7. Beginning in 1997, the PSID reinterviewed families biennially.

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19. Glewwe, P.; H. Jacoby; King, E. 1999. Early Childhood Nutrition and Academic Achievement: A Longitudinal Analysis. Discussion Paper No. 68. Washington, DC: IFPRI/FCND.

20. See endnote 1.

Wagmiller, Robert; Lennon, Mary Clare; Kuang, Li; Alberti, Philip; Aber, J. Lawrence. 2006. Dynamics of Family Economic Disadvantage and Children’s Life Chances. American Sociological Review 71(5): 847-866.

21. See endnote 9: 165.

22. See endnote 8: 73-75.

23. See endnote 17.

24. See endnote 1.

25. See endnote 13; endnote 19: Wagmiller et al.

26. Duncan, Greg J.; Hill, Daniel H. 1989. Assessing the quality of household panel survey data: The case of the PSID. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics7(4): 441-51; Hill, Martha. 1992. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics – A User’s Guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

27. 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. [http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/Publications/Papers/tsp/2007-03_Estimating_and_Benchmarking_the_Trends.pdf].

28. We examine the time spent living in poverty between the age 0 and 15 years for several reasons. First, some children leave their parent’s families between the ages of 16 and 18 years making it difficult to classify these children’s family poverty status in the latter stages of childhood. Second, this interval allows us to construct equal width 5-year intervals. Third, other researchers studying the timing of poverty during childhood have used these intervals.

Duncan, Greg J., Yeung, W. Jean, Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne and Smith, Judith R.. 1998. How Much Does Childhood Poverty Affect the Life Chances of Children? American Sociological Review 63: 406-23.

29. We also conducted the analysis based on different birth cohorts and there are some variations across age cohort. However, it was not possible to examine intergenerational poverty for all birth cohorts because later cohorts are not old enough to be observed as adults.

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• Child poverty

Children are more likely to live in poverty than adults. They’re also more vulnerable to its effects.

In recent years, the world has made remarkable strides advancing development. Yet hundreds of millions of people still live in extreme poverty. Children are disproportionately affected. Despite comprising one third of the global population, they represent half of those struggling to survive on less than $2.15 a day. An estimated 333 million children live in extreme poverty.

Children who grow up impoverished often lack the food, sanitation, shelter, health care and education they need to survive and thrive. Across the world, about 1 billion children are "multidimensionally" poor, meaning they lack necessities as basic as nutritious food or clean water.

The consequences are grave. Worldwide, the poorest children are twice as likely to die in childhood than their wealthier peers. For those growing up through humanitarian emergencies, the risks of deprivation and exclusion surge. Compounding crises – from the impacts of climate-related disasters, conflicts and COVID-19 – have stalled progress for the most vulnerable children. Even in the world’s richest countries, one in seven children still live in poverty.

No matter where they are, children who grow up impoverished suffer from poor living standards, develop fewer skills for the workforce, and earn lower wages as adults. But only a limited number of Governments have set the elimination of child poverty as a national priority.

UNICEF’s response

Child poverty is neither inevitable nor immune to efforts to address it. As many countries have already shown, it can be reduced and even eradicated through continued attention and action.

With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), nations agreed for the first time in history to end extreme child poverty. The SDGs call for multidimensional child poverty – a measure of poverty that goes beyond income – to be halved by 2030, building a world in which all children have what they need to survive, thrive and fulfil their potential.

As part of this commitment, UNICEF mobilizes actors at the national, regional and global levels to help countries measure and address child poverty in all its dimensions. With the World Bank, we produce global statistics on extreme child poverty that help guide policymakers. We also work with Governments and partners on integrated policies and programmes, backed by the resources needed to put them into practice. Our efforts support the expansion of child-sensitive social protection programmes, including universal child benefits , which have been shown to positively impact children’s health, education and nutrition.

Since 2014, UNICEF has played an instrumental role in directing global attention to child poverty. The Global Coalition to End Child Poverty , chaired by UNICEF, has become a powerful initiative for raising awareness about child poverty and accelerating global efforts to tackle it. As part of the coalition, we produced a comprehensive guide to help countries reach the Sustainable Development Goals for child poverty.

More from UNICEF

Children’s futures at a crossroads

Geopolitical and geoeconomic fragmentation threaten the development and survival of children across the globe. But a more hopeful path exists

More than 1 in 5 children live in poverty in 40 of the world’s richest countries

Climate finance is about fulfilling obligations

It’s no longer about developed countries being “good-hearted”

Children bearing brunt of stalled progress on extreme poverty reduction worldwide

Ending child poverty: A policy agenda

Unicef’s commitment to ending child poverty and achieving the sustainable development goals, a practical guide to monetary poverty analysis, are countries committed to ending child poverty by 2030 a review of vnr reports from 2017 to 2021, a review of the use of multidimensional poverty measures, a world free from child poverty: a guide to the tasks to achieve the vision , global estimate of children in monetary poverty: an update, social policy analysis to inform the covid-19 response, ending extreme poverty: a focus on children, putting children first: a policy agenda to end child poverty, end child poverty global coalition: child poverty reports.

Long-Term Impact of Poverty on Children: Health and Education

Childhood poverty is a widespread issue in the United States with one in five children living in need . Poverty has both immediate and lasting consequences that can follow a child into adulthood. Here are just ten ways poverty can impact the health and education of a child.

There are identifiable side-effects of poverty such as hunger, but there are also long-term side-effects that can go unnoticed and follow a child into adulthood.

1. Brain Development : Conditions that correspond with poverty (noise, substandard housing, family turmoil, etc.) can be toxic to a developing brain.

2. Self Confidence : A healthy self-esteem is crucial to a child’s health. Without strong levels of confidence, children may be susceptible to various other health problems or unhealthy habits. And since self-esteem tends to form in childhood and continue through adulthood, it’s even more important to help kids feel good about themselves.

3. Heart Disease : Studies have shown that growing up in poverty (less access to healthy meals, lack of proper attire, and insufficient health coverage) might put children at risk for heart disease in adulthood.

4. “Learned Helplessness” : Children feel as if they have no power to control their circumstances. This is a behavioral pattern that can be a result of prolonged poverty.

5. Toxic Stress: Toxic stress is the prolonged activation of stress response systems in the body/brain. This can occur when a child experiences strong, frequent, and/or prolonged adversity—such as emotional abuse or the accumulated burdens of family economic hardship—without adequate adult support. 

Poverty can also impact a child’s ability to succeed in school. Here are two shocking statistics from a study by the Urban Institute:

• Children who are poor from birth to age 2 are 30 percent less likely to complete high school than children who are poor for the first time later in their life.
• Nearly 30 percent of poor children do not complete high school, which limits future economic success and potential employability, leading to poverty as an adult.

6. School Preparation : Students living above the poverty line are entering kindergarten more prepared than those below it. Higher income families are able to put more money towards their children’s cognitive development than those living in poverty. Parents with low incomes, on average, have less time to read to their children, no-funds for pre-school, and less stable home environments. The difference in preparation tends to persist through elementary and high school.

7. School Attendance : Chronic absenteeism (missing more than 10 percent of school a year) occurs at rates three to four times higher in high-poverty areas. An overwhelming majority of chronically absent kids are impoverished, dealing with such daily stresses as caring for siblings, high rates of disease, violence in the community, and frequent familial moves to find employment.

8. Educational Attainment : Early childhood poverty is related to lower educational achievement.

9. Bullying : A study by the American Journal of Public Health found that kids and teens from poor families are more likely to be bullied than others and also concluded that schools with the largest economic inequality (or a big difference between how wealthy some families are and how poor other families are) had the highest rates of bullying.

10. School Behavior: Strong, secure relationships help stabilize children's behavior and provide the core guidance needed to build lifelong social skills. Children who grow up with such relationships learn healthy, appropriate emotional responses to everyday situations. But children raised in poor households often fail to learn these responses, to the detriment of their school performance.

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Poverty: The Main Causes and Factors Essay

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At the moment, there is a great deal of debate in the scientific community as to what exactly should be considered poverty. Because of the constant process of societal development, the concept of poverty changes rapidly, adapting to the new standards of modern human life. Thus, it is impossible to determine the causes of poverty with absolute precision. Still, a range of empirical knowledge about humanity allows identifying three groups of causes most likely to lead people and entire societies to poverty. Thus, this paper’s central thesis is that a person’s poverty can be influenced not only by the characteristics of his behavior but also by the circumstances in which he was born. These may include political and economic factors, which often cause poverty for the individual and the whole society.

There are various theories that summarize the causes of poverty. Brady (2019) writes that all theories about the emergence of poverty can be divided into three conditional groups: structural, behavioral, and political. The behavioral factor refers to the set of qualities of an individual that impede his financial well-being. These may include various addictions, insufficient level of education, a person’s worldview, and other reasons. Structural factors include labor market conditions, demographic context, and other socio-economic circumstances. An example is the increase in poverty associated with the development of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the World Bank (2022), declining incomes, job losses and work stoppages during the pandemic have significantly reduced household incomes. Finally, political causes refer to the policies pursued by the government and its institutions, which hinder the economic well-being of the citizen and society.

Observing the behavioral causes of poverty, it is worth noting several vital factors highlighted by scholars. Brown (2018) writes that given the same circumstances, some people may become more prosperous than others, which may be due to a number of their behavioral characteristics. Various studies have tested the correlation between different measures of human character and one’s financial situation. Still, one can assume the deductive argument that greater diligence, striving for growth and development, ambition, and other personality traits can affect whether or not one will be poor. According to behavioral theory, if people become poor, then they themselves are responsible for this, since their individual shortcomings, laziness or lack of qualifications necessary for society lead to the impossibility of finding a job. Mavroudeas et al. (2019) note that the character traits of the unemployed can vary widely, from a lack of hard work or good morals to a low level of education or competitive market skills. Moreover, it is worth considering that some illnesses prevent a person from reaching their goals. Such illnesses include disabilities, congenital problems, and other factors affecting a person’s future expenses and employment.

The next group of reasons is related to the demographic characteristics of the region and the conditions of the labor market there. Fewer children are born in countries where the second demographic transition has occurred. It allows parents to concentrate all their efforts on upbringing, education, and health. In less developed countries or countries with higher fertility rates, parents have to rely on the number of their children. High infant mortality forces parents to have more children than their financial situation can afford, which is also a significant cause of poverty in the developing world.

Several political, social, historical, and economic factors prevent certain societies, and therefore most of their members, from crossing the poverty threshold. Being in a prolonged military conflict, a severe financial crisis, and insufficient valuable resources for economic development are important causes of poverty for many African and Asian countries (Wijekoon, 2021). All these factors harm the region’s economic development, creating several behavioral and structural problems. For example, higher levels of unemployment often lead to problems with alcohol addiction in society. It is also worth noting that Greve (2019) identifies certain categories of citizens who, due to demographic, social and economic reasons, find themselves in a state of poverty. These include the disabled, pensioners, people with a high incidence of disease, and those with a large number of dependents. Thus, the cause of poverty is a person’s belonging to these groups.

The political reasons also include a high level of state corruption, leading to an unfair allocation of resources. In situations where a limited number of people own most of the country’s natural reserves, resources, and finances, essential to discuss unnatural causes of regional poverty caused by the incompetent work of the state apparatus. Correct distribution of resources in the economy, which promotes competition between businesses and individuals, can lead a country to develop and reduce the number of poor people.

Thus, many causes of poverty affect individuals and society in different ways. Although the definition of poverty is constantly changing and varies from country to country, there are several universal reasons for the poverty of some and the wealth of others. These reasons are historical, political, demographic, and others, as many factors, influence a person’s financial situation. Each of these causes can be a consequence of the previous one, just as alcohol addiction can follow a wage fall or an increase in unemployment.

Brady, D. (2019). Theories of the Causes of Poverty. Annual Review of Sociology , 45 , 155-175.

Brown, U., & Long, G. (2018). Poverty and welfare. In Social Welfare (pp. 19-34). Routledge.

Greve, B. (2019). Poverty: The Basics (1 st ed.). Routledge.

Mavroudeas, S., Akar, S., & Dobreva, J. (2019). Globalization, poverty, inequality, & sustainability. IJOPEC.

The World Bank. (2022). Poverty. The World Bank. Web.

Wijekoon, R., Sabri, M. F., & Paim, L. (2021). Poverty: A literature review of the concept, measurements, causes and the way forward. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences , 11 (15), 93-111.

• Alcohol Addiction: Biological & Social Perspective
• Structural Violence and Its Main Forms
• Misconceptions About Addiction
• How to Overcome Poverty and Discrimination
• Poverty and Homelessness in American Society
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• Connection of Poverty and Education
• The Opportunity for All Program: Poverty Reduction
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Growing Up in Poverty

Children who grow up in poverty experience a myriad of challenges throughout their life. Poverty poses numerous negative impacts on the overall performance of children which results in inequalities in psychological growth, cognitive development, health, and educational achievement. The inequalities are apparent right from pre-school through a child’s school life. As Morgan (2017) illustrates, the inequalities are also clearly visible in the labor market and sometimes passed over to the future generations. This essay reviews the impacts of poverty on the performance of children on the areas highlighted to help families and stakeholders working with children to understand and provide the necessary support.

Effect of Poverty on Educational Achievement and Cognitive Development

Empirically, there is a significant relationship between a child’s economic background and educational achievement, cognitive development, and the future prospects of securing employment. Growing up in poverty adversely affects the cognitive development of a child. According to Morgan (2017), the level of poverty and the time in which a child lives in poverty worsen the harmful effects, with children living in extreme poverty showing the poorest cognitive development. Comparatively, children who do well in aptitude tests during early childhood from poor family settings are outdone by children from rich backgrounds in similar tests carried out in later years. Parents exposed to extreme poverty experience prolonged stress, which results in reduced cognitive replication for their children. Furthermore, parents experiencing economic hardships are less likely to have more parent-child interaction which is a recipe for cognitive development and educational achievement.

Effect of Poverty on Psychological, Health, Social and Emotional Outcomes

There is empirical evidence that poverty is associated with negative psychological, health, social, and emotional outcomes for the children. Fiedler & Kuester (2010) revealed that the relationship is more powerful during early childhood and less powerful in the middle stages. Imparting children with positive psychological and behavioral skills at a tender age results in higher educational achievement and higher employment prospects in the labor market during adulthood. On the contrary, poverty and economic hardship for children in early years leads to poor psychological and behavioral outcomes. Moreover, factors such as mother’s level of stress, self-esteem, and the quality of parenting determine children’s outcome of these parameters. The maternal mental health, which is highly associated with psychological, social, and emotional well-being also directly affect negatively children’s outcomes.

Poverty and Parenting

Economically challenged parents equally face various difficulties including poor mental and physical health and lack of basic amenities, some of which have to do with them growing up in poverty also. Lipina & Colombo (2009) demonstrated that to try reduce the impacts of poverty on children, parents often sacrifice their consumption and possession of material things. Poor parents often have high hopes and aspirations for their children, but lack of the financial muscles and knowledge of how to accomplish those ambitions prevent them from offering the needed support. For poor parents and their children, better information is needed to provide understanding of how work and education fit together in realizing ambitions for the children.

In summary, children are the main beneficiaries of poverty because it affects their lives in the early lives and in the future. Interventions focusing on improving the economic conditions of poor parents as well as the state of children living in poverty are required. Stakeholders have the responsibility of identifying the inequalities and facilitating community development and empowerment programs to address the gaps.

Fiedler, A., & Kuester, I. (2010).  Child development and child poverty . New York: Nova Science Publishers.

Lipina, S. J., & Colombo, J. A. (2009).  Poverty and brain development during childhood: An approach from cognitive psychology and neuroscience . Washington, D.C: American Psychological Association.

Morgan, C. (Aug 2017).  Impacts of Poverty on Children and Young People . Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237078363_Impacts_of_poverty_on_children_and_young_people

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Child Poverty — Growing Up In Poverty And Its Impact On Children

Growing Up in Poverty and Its Impact on Children

• Categories: Child Poverty Child Welfare

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Words: 1695 |

Published: Dec 16, 2021

Words: 1695 | Pages: 4 | 9 min read

Works Cited

• Arnett, J. J. (2016). Human development: A cultural approach. Pearson.
• Hanson, J. L., Hair, N., Shan, D., Shi, F., Gilmore, J. H., Wolf, B., & Pollak, S. D. (2013). Family poverty affects the rate of human infant brain growth. PLOS ONE, 8(12), e80954.
• Kolb, B., & Gibb, R. (2016). Brain plasticity and behavior. Psychology Press.
• Lacour, M., & Tissington, L. D. (2011). The effects of poverty on academic achievement. Educational Research and Reviews, 6(7), 522-527.
• Lempin, I. (2012). Poverty, brain development, and children's health and achievement. Journal of Applied School Psychology, 28(4), 428-438.
• Luthar, S. S. (1999). Poverty and children's adjustment. Sage Publications.
• Poverty USA. (2018). Poverty in the United States. Retrieved from https://www.povertyusa.org/facts
• Sarah Jensen, A., Berne, A., & Nelson, C. (2017). Poverty and the developing brain: Insights from neuroimaging. Pediatric Research, 82(2), 210-219.
• Sum, A., & Fogg, N. (2010). Profile of the class of 2010: Employment prospects for young adults in Massachusetts. Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University.
• Zunker, V. G. (2016). Career counseling: A holistic approach (9th ed.). Cengage Learning.

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CAUSE AND EFFECT ESSAY: POVERTY AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM Name Professor Institution Course Date Cause and Effect Essay: Poverty as a Social Problem

Sample of Cause and Effect Essay: Poverty as a Social Problem Poverty is a common concern all over the world, and it is an urgent socio-economic issue. It is a major challenge that affects most Americans and much of what causes it can be avoided; it can be prevented. Poverty is having no hope or food, adequate means of living and even homelessness. Poverty is a daily struggle with several adverse effects, and it should be addressed adequately. Education is a right that every person should get, no matter the country they live in. Education enables citizens to get employed in well-paying jobs so that they can be productive tax-payers and productive members of the community. A high education is needed to enable an individual to enjoy and experience mobility in career and life. Therefore, when a person lacks education and other means of providing to their families, they become weak. With no jobs or financial assistance, people will have no other choice but to rely on the government or even engage in criminal activities. More so, this forces the government to strain to eradicate poverty. Instead of the government spending money on improving health care, education or other national essential activities, it gives financial aids to the poor people thus being in debt, which will eventually hurt its economy (Emoglu, 2013). It is unfortunate that most people across the world are born in low-income families. Their parents earn mere wages or nothing at all, thus making it hard to make ends meet. Children from such families become disadvantaged and negatively affected because according to Denavis (2015), the children's psychological development is affected because of poor nutrition or even family stress. This probably leads to family dysfunction and inadequate parenting among the caregivers. As a result of this, poverty becomes a cycle. Poverty affects a person's way of life because their sense of purpose or happiness is affected too. With poverty, a victim views that life is full of sadness, struggles and hardship. War and political instability affect several countries in the world. No matter the causes of political upheaval and war, it is clear that stability, safety, and security are significant for survival and, beyond that, growth and economic prosperity. It becomes challenging to individually or collectively harness natural resources without peace and harmony. As a result, a country's economy is adversely affected leading to poverty among its citizens. Without legal protection, farmers, entrepreneurs, business owners and others will fail to work because they don't feel protected. This is why most of the poorest countries in the world, such as Iraq, have in the recent past experienced serious political upheaval or civil war. In fact, such countries have weak governance that can't feed its people (Acemoglu et al. 2013). In conclusion, poverty is a severe worldwide problem that affects many American citizens because they are struggling to provide for their families with minimum wages or none at all or even with unemployment. Just like many other social issues such as segregation, poverty can be fixed. It just involves weighing the adverse effects of poverty and how it worsens over time and how to implement the appropriate actions. References Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. A. (2013). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. Crown Business. DeNavas-Walt, C., Proctor, B. D., & Smith, J. C. (2015). Income and poverty in the United States: 2014 (p. 22). United States Census Bureau.

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Causes of poverty essay sample, example.

When analyzing such a global issue, one should consider historical and cultural factors. Nations that are among the poorest in the world were once colonies, or areas from which richer countries exported slaves; also, some of these territories were drained of resources. Rare exceptions like Canada or Australia do not deny the fact that, for example, almost the entire continent of Africa is a problematic area in terms of poverty and hunger. This happened due to the fact that colonialism contributed to the establishment of conditions where people living in former colonies cannot access capital or education. In addition, there exist several hot spots in the world where wars and political instability also cause a significant decrease in the quality of life: Syria, Egypt, Ukraine, and so on ( The Borgen Project ).

Perhaps the most direct causal link exists between poverty and the balance between a country’s population density and its agricultural capabilities. Although such countries as the Netherlands or Belgium have a high density of population, their agricultural industry is based on mechanized farming and high-tech solutions, so poverty and hunger have no chance there. The same refers to other technologically-advanced countries. In contrast, Bangladesh, which has one of the world’s largest population densities (2,791 persons in a square mile) exists on the edge of extreme poverty—mostly because the majority of population is involved in low-efficient manual farming. On the other hand, there are countries in Africa with only about 80 persons per square mile, but because of low soil fertility, and the use of manual labor, these countries cannot boost their productivity and development ( povertyhci.weebly.com ).

Along with objective poverty factors, it is also important to consider social factors—in particular, psychological traits that many poor people possess. In many developed countries, poor people do not try to improve their financial conditions, relying on welfare payments provided to them by governments (CliffsNotes). Due to the lack of education and skills (also caused by the inability to pay for them), they cannot work at well-paid jobs, although they can still become maids, cleaners, postal workers, couriers, and so on. Doing so would enable such people to earn more money necessary for education and personal development, but they prefer to keep the status quo.

Reasons of poverty are numerous, and it is difficult to analyze the entire complex of causes of such a global issue. However, some of them are obvious: a colonial background, wars and political instability, dense population combined with low agricultural capabilities, and certain psychological traits of poor people. These factors help keep poverty in the world’s list of the most urgent problems.

“Top 5 Causes of Poverty.” The Borgen Project. N.p., 25 June 2013. Web. 21 May 2015.

“Poverty at Large: A Dark Spot in Humanity.”Http://povertyhci.weebly.com/. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 May 2015.

“Causes and Effects of Poverty.” CliffNotes. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 May 2015.

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