The Definition of Child Poverty and the Consequences of Poverty on Child Outcomes

• In Event: 1-182 - Reducing Child Poverty by Half in 10 Years: A National Academies Report

Integrative Statement

The capacities that children develop in childhood promote life-long success through academic achievement, robust mental and emotional health, and responsible behavior in adulthood. This, in turn, is the foundation for a well-functioning and prosperous society. Many studies suggest that lack of adequate resources in childhood due to poverty, both relational and material, impede the development of children. Child poverty is measured in several different ways, and we will briefly demystify these methods, which include the official poverty measure (OPM) developed in the 1960s, and the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which among other differences with the OPM gives credit for the impact of governmental cash and some near-cash programs. These both are based on economic resources defined by a household’s income. Another approach is to use the household’s consumption; this may lead to results indicating a lower level of poverty. We will briefly discuss these differences and the difficulties with using a consumption-based measure of poverty currently. The NASEM committee was directed to use the SPM in its report.

The consequences on children’s health and education, and later between poverty and employment, anti-social behavior, and adult well-being and health are clearly very negative. There is strong evidence that, on average, children growing up in a family with income below the poverty line experience worse outcomes in virtually every dimension measured, including physical and mental health, educational attainment, job success, and risky behaviors as compared to children in higher-income families. We will briefly discuss the mechanisms by which poverty can affect child outcomes.

We will focus our discussion of evidence on studies that indicate a causal pathway to worse outcomes for child poverty. Most of this literature relates to governmental policy changes. While there are some true experimental approaches, most are nonexperimental, sometimes referred to as “natural experiments”. These include studies on increases in cash income (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, welfare-to-work experiments, Supplementary Security Income, casino development on American Indian lands, as well as international evidence), and increases in near cash benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid. While we may touch on evidence from correlation studies, this evidence must be considered with the caveat that although poverty is associated with these outcomes, it is also associated with a cluster of other disadvantages that may be harmful to children. These other disadvantages include low levels of parent education, living with a single parent and living in a dangerous or polluted neighborhood. Finally, we will present discussions of the macroeconomic impacts of child poverty, and the role of current federal government assistance programs in reducing child poverty.

Authors

• Benard Dreyer, New York University School of Medicine
  Presenting Author

• Vonnie McLoyd, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Author

• Janet Currie, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author