Child poverty

Recently, debate among philosophers and theorists on how to define and measure poverty stems from the emergence of the human capability approach, where poverty is defined by Hi Kos extent of freedoms that a person possesses. Amartya Sen, the creator of the capability approach, argues that there are five fundamental freedoms that should be available to all humans: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security.[22] He also suggests that they are all interconnected, where each freedom fosters and/or enhances the others.[22]

Additionally, the capability approach claims that development should be considered a process of expanding freedoms or removing the major sources of unfreedom rather than a focus on narrower measurements such as growth of gross national product, per capita income, or industrialization.[22] According to ILO's basic needs approach (which in most aspects is quite like the capability approach), the objective of development should be to provide all humans with the opportunity to a full life, which goes beyond abstractions such as money, income, or employment.[23] Therefore, the definition and measurement of poverty in general must extend beyond measurements like per capita GDP, which tools such as the Human Development Index attempt to accomplish.

In light of this, a UK initiative, Save the Children, has also developed a measurement of child poverty based on measures of capability, called the Child Development Index (CDI).[24] CDI is an index that combines performance measures specific to children – primary education, child health, and child nutrition – to produce a score on a scale of 0 to 100, with zero being the best with higher scores indicating worse performances.[24] According to Save the Children, each of the indicators was chosen because it was easily accessible, universally understood, and clearly indicative of child wellbeing.[24] Health measures under-five mortality rate; nutrition measures the percentage of children under five who are moderately or severely underweight (which is two standard deviations below the median weight for age of the reference population); and education measures the percentage of primary school-age children that are not enrolled in school.[24] In terms of opportunities and capabilities, CDI is the most appropriate measurement of child poverty.[24]

Of the estimated 2.2 billion children worldwide, about a billion, or every second child, live in poverty.[25] Of the 1.9 billion children in developing nations, 640 million are without adequate shelter; 400 million are without access to safe water; 270 million have no access to health services.[25] In 2003, 10.6 million children died before reaching the age of five, which is equivalent to the total child population of France, Germany, Greece, and Italy.[25] 1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation while 2.2 million die each year due to lack of immunizations.[25]

The Child Development Index also illustrates relative child poverty compared across all regions of the world (see Measuring child poverty).[24]

• World performance: CDI = 17.5
• Africa: CDI = 34.5
• Middle East/North Africa: CDI = 11.2
• Central/East Europe and Central Asia: CDI = 9.2
• South Asia: CDI = 26.4
• East Asia: CDI = 8.5
• Latin America and Caribbean: CDI = 6.8
• Developed Countries: CDI = 2.1

The CDI in Africa is twice that of the world average, and South Asia also fares poorly in relation to the global performance.[24] In contrast, the CDI in developed countries is one-ninth of the world CDI, indicating a clear distinction between developing and developed nations.[24]

However, in 2013, child poverty reached record high levels in the United States, with 16.7 million children, more than 20%, living in food insecure households. 47 million Americans depend on food banks, more than 30% above 2007 levels. Households headed by single mothers are most likely to be affected. Worst affected are the District of Columbia, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico and Florida, while North Dakota, New Hampshire, Virginia, Minnesota and Massachusetts are the least affected.[26] More recently in 2021, it is estimated that nearly 11 million children live in poverty in the US, making up almost one-third of all people living in poverty in the country.[27]

It has been theorized that a great deal of childhood poverty is caused by choices, incentives, and the cultural beliefs of their parents. For example, factors like single motherhood, low education, and especially unemployment are associated with poverty. There has been extensive research on which incentives shape behavior to produce less poverty. The effects of poverty such as cognitive burden, bias, and stress are known to encourage behavior that perpetuates poverty, for example by reducing educational attainment or not investing in insurance. There is strong evidence that growing up in poverty feeds back into behavior that increases the chance of poverty for the next generation. Some attribute these tendencies to culture or problematic incentives, though the relationship between poverty and behaviors is not well-established. For example, single motherhood is associated with childhood poverty, especially in developing countries. However, in 19 of 29 rich democracies, single parenthood is not significantly associated with childhood poverty. In the U.S., the association between single motherhood and poverty has been falling since the 1970s, and childhood poverty is now much more closely associated with parental employment than marriage status. The 1996 welfare reforms in the U.S. were shown to increase employment and reduce dependence on welfare by single parents, but did not have any measurable effect on single motherhood. International studies in developing countries find no effect between conditional vs unconditional cash aid on future employment.[34][35]

Economic and demographic contexts have been shown to increase poverty directly, as well as change parent behavior in ways that increase poverty. For example, local economic growth and development, state of industrialization, and spatial or skills mismatches can all affect poverty directly by limiting the opportunity for employment. Demographics are also correlated with poverty, including neighborhood disadvantage, residential segregation, age/sex composition, or living in a rural area.

Structural effects seem to vary across time and place and research often comes to contradictory conclusions. For example, urbanization in rich countries is often associated with displacing the poorest members of the community, which increases their average poverty levels. However, in developing countries, local economic growth is more often associated with reducing poverty of the most poor.[35]

Institutions and power can lead to policy that tends to increase or decrease childhood poverty irrespective of local culture or current behaviors. Power resource theory is one of the most popular political explanations for poverty. Since elites and businesses are typically favored in the distribution or political power in a capitalist democracy, less advantaged groups may gain political power by mobilizing together (for example for labor unions or voting). In the United States, working poverty is lower in states that have higher levels of unionization. Country-wide poverty tends to be lower when there is greater unionization, a higher proportion of women in parliament, and when the government of a stable democracy is controlled by Left-wing parties. The effects of leftist politics appear to have a much larger effect on poverty levels than structural factors or individual behavior.[35]

Another political theory focuses on institutions. Institutionalists claim that poverty is caused by how institutions (such as laws or regulations) affect the long-term distribution of resources. One piece of evidence is that poverty rates do not respond quickly to changes in power or elections, and instead are relatively stable and slow-moving. Some historical institutions tend to lock in poverty, and these institutions are rarely changed significantly by contemporary politics. In this theory, governments shape poverty by organizing resource distribution (taxes and transfers), providing insurance against risks (or not), investing in capabilities like education or health services, creating opportunities like public employment, and discipline of the poor (for example, parental incarceration is associated with increased childhood homelessness).[36] There is a closer relationship between poverty and behaviors like single motherhood in weak welfare states compared to generous welfare states like Denmark which have no correlation between single motherhood and poverty. However, the effects of Left parties and unions on poverty seems to be diminishing over time.[35]

Most children in poverty have poor parents and typically do not receive adequate education, care, or nutrition. Some children are affected by disease, injury, negative cultural influences, or other hazards outside their control. Because a child has no control over their parenting, health, or where they are born, it has been said that luck has a large effect on a child's chance of living in poverty.[34]

The cycle of poverty is when a family remains in poverty over many successive generations. For this reason reducing child poverty has been a focus of many governments as a way to break this cycle. Improving the quality of education is generally seen as the most effective way to break this cycle, especially the education of young children before they reach 3rd grade.[37][38] Studies show that kids who test below grade level when they enter Kindergarten are at much greater risk of poor future educational attainment, and kids that are still behind in grade 3 generally never catch up.[39][40] Improving the environment the child grows up in, ensuring access to health, and providing financial incentives (either through benefit schemes or reducing taxes) have all been suggested as ways to break the cycle.

Some have noted that U.S. schools are more segregated now than they have been since the 1960s, which may be contributing to the cycle of poverty by concentrating the poorest kids together in schools that are typically underfunded. Studies show that children whose parents went to an integrated school for 5 or more years are 10% more likely to graduate high school.[37][41]

Boys and girls have equal rates of poverty through their childhoods but as women enter their teens and childbearing years the rates of poverty between the genders widens. Globally, women are far more impoverished than men and poor children are more likely to live in female-headed households. Attempts to combat the cycle of poverty, therefore, have often targeted mothers as a way to interrupt the negative patterns of poverty that affect the education, nutrition/health, and psychological/social outcomes for poor children.[42]

UNICEF reported that 100 million children fell into poverty due to the COVID-19 pandemic, causing a 10% increase in childhood poverty between 2019 and 2021.[43]

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, children across the globe were removed from their in-person classrooms due to school closures and began remote learning from home. In the United States and European countries, the closure of schools meant that children living in poverty who were experiencing food insecurity at home were not able to receive the daily school lunches that they would otherwise receive when attending school. The loss of schools as a resource for resolving food insecurity not only has an effect on children's physical hunger, but also has a negative effect on educational attainment and mental health for children from low socioeconomic backgrounds.[44]

Research by the Grattan Institute of Australia found that the equity gap was widened by school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for children experiencing poverty who had limited access to electronic devices and internet connections to attend school remotely. Research also found that children from disadvantaged families in Australia reported feelings of anxiety, stress, and helplessness as a result of their family's hardships.[45]

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were felt worldwide and children living in poverty were affected in numerous ways, including physically, psychologically, and emotionally.

Developed countries also have a serious problem with child poverty. If all the 16.7 million poor children in America were gathered in one place, they would form a city bigger than New York.[49] Many published studies have demonstrated strong associations between childhood poverty and the child's adult outcomes in education, health and socialization, fertility, labor market, and income. Strong evidence suggests that children of low income parents have an increased risk of intellectual and behavioral development problems.[50] Large negative associations between poverty during early childhood and academic outcomes have been consistently found in many studies.[30] Furthermore, children in poverty have a greater risk of displaying behavior and emotional problems, such as impulsiveness and difficulty getting along with peers, and family poverty is associated with higher risk for teen childbearing, less positive peer relations, and lower self-esteem.[51] These behaviors increase the chances of children who grew up in poverty to stay in poverty.[52]

In terms of economic disadvantages, adults who experienced persistent childhood poverty are more likely to fall below the poverty line at least once later in life.[51] Poor boys work fewer hours per year, earn lower hourly wages, receive lower annual earnings, and spend more week idle in their mid-twenties.[30] Paternal income is also strongly associated with adult economic status.[30] The National Academy of Sciences found that "childhood poverty and chronic stress may lead to problems regulating emotions as an adult". Not only can growing up in poverty affect physical health, it can have an effect on your future as well. Growing up in poverty has been statistically proven to increase an individual's probability of going to prison, becoming an addict, mental illness, or not completing high school.[53] Because of these things, children who grow up in poverty often end up staying in poverty and repeating the cycle.[52] [54][55]

Also, childhood poverty in the first three years of life is related to substandard nutritional status and poor motor skills; in contrast, poverty is also associated with child obesity – as they get older, poor children are more likely to have chronic health problems, such as asthma and anemia.[51] These impacts probably reflect issues related to poverty including a substandard diet, inferior housing conditions, poor neighborhood environment, reduced access to goods and activities and the psychological stress stemming from these factors.[56]

The relationship between childhood poverty and later negative adult outcomes has been found to be relatively small in other research.[57] In one systematic analysis, family income only "modestly" affected likelihood of teen pregnancy and male unemployment.[58]

Developing countries

Children of road workers near Rishikesh, India.

James Town, Accra.

Using a relative measure of child poverty, an impoverished child growing up in a developing country suffers more hardship than most children living in poverty in a developed country. Poverty in these countries is a condition usually characterised by a severe deprivation of basic human needs (UN,1995). It is estimated that one third of all children in developing countries (~674 million) are living in poverty, the highest rates being in the rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (over 70%).[59] War, disease, corruption, lack of resources and harsh environmental conditions afflict many of these countries, contributing to their poverty. These factors are a major cause of death, which in turn leads to a higher number of single parents and orphaned children. All UN member states have ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, with the exception of the United States and South Sudan, which aims at reducing violations to a number of rights relevant to reducing child poverty in different countries.[60] A review published by UNICEF in 2009, found declines in under five mortality, less child malnourishment, increases in breastfeeding, improved water systems and better education access.[61] It also states that despite these improvements 24 000 children still die each day from mostly preventable diseases, 150 million 5- to 14-year-olds are involved in child labour and 100 million primary aged children go without schooling. There are still great inequalities within populations, with girls and children from rural areas more likely to suffer poor health, education and survival than boys and urban populations. Notable state attempts to tackle child poverty in the developing world, include Brazil's Bolsa Familia initiative (reaches 12 million households) and South Africa's Child Grant (7 million households.[62] Elsewhere, child specific social protection policies and programmes are few and the institutions to implement them are often lacking.[62]