Foreclosed Childhoods: Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy

• In Event: Defending Childhood: Toward a Broader View of Early Education

Abstract

1. Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to examine the toxic impact of poverty on the lives of children and youth in the United States and to argue that redressing poverty requires a rights-based policy framework.

2. Perspective(s)/theoretical framework
A critical, feminist, and comparative interdisciplinary analysis of public policy and practice anchored in a human rights perspective frames the paper (Davis, 2003; Hobson, Lewis & Siim, 2002; Judt, 2010; Nussbaum, 2000). Key social policy analysts are referenced to argue that children have become the collateral damage of neoliberal policies and unfettered free market fundamentalism in the United States. Hobson and Lister (2002) argue that the lack of social citizenship rights— social and economic rights that guarantee “a positive state” for women and their children—create fecund conditions for child poverty to flourish.

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
The paper utilizes a range of inquiry modes—drawing on critical social policy analysis, feminist policy analysis and utilizing ethnographic data gathered from various sites to analyze the way in which poverty comes home and impacts children on the ground. Case studies of children in child care and elementary school who have become ‘problems’ in the classroom are examined as their difficult and marginalized childhoods are juxtaposed against the broader policy landscape of poverty.

4. Data sources/evidence
a) Policy and legislative documents from the U.S. that focus on child poverty, welfare, and child care and comparative documents from the European Union;
b) The author’s ethnographic data –observations, interviews, and household diaries gathered from low-income families in the United States, Denmark, and Scotland.

5. Results
The social citizenship rights that exist in the European Union—particularly Scandinavia— guaranteeing universal rights of access to welfare, child care, health care, paid parental leave, and education from infancy through the postsecondary years—promote family stability and hence act as effective poverty remediation measures, influenced by the international obligations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (1989). Children’s lives in a “de-welfared” nation in the United States are no longer granted even the minimal protections associated with childhood in a modern democracy

6. Scholarly significance
Child poverty is now the crisis of our times, demanding redress. With over 15 million (21%) of the nation’s children living below the poverty threshold, and 31 million (42%) living in low- income households (Wight, Chau & Aratani, 2011), the United States is now an outlier amongst other wealthy industrialized nations. UNICEF ranks the United States last among all 24 OECD countries in overall inequality arguing that “protecting children during their vital, vulnerable years of growth is both the mark of a civilized society and the means of building a better future.” (UNICEF, 2010, p.1).

The scholarly significance of this paper is to disseminate critical awareness of the crisis of persistent poverty that impedes development and forecloses on young lives. An instrumentalist cost-benefit discourse is juxtaposed against a rights discourse with a specific emphasis on children’s rights— anchored in international human rights conventions.

Author

• Valerie Polakow, Eastern Michigan University