Poverty is a complex knot of multiple strands of risk entangled around children, families, and schools, constraining children’s educational and social opportunities and stifling their development. Poverty threatens children’s development from multiple angles at once, arising from the home, school and neighborhood contexts concurrently. This complexity causes otherwise caring people to throw up their hands and walk away in frustration, thinking there is nothing to be done. But a growing body of research is showing us how to untangle the poverty knot.
Some numbers
Poverty is a worsening problem all across America. There are 46.5 million Americans living below the poverty line, including nearly 16 million children under age 18, or 22% of children1. It is important to let the reality of this situation really sink in. The poverty line for a family of 4 people (2 adults, 2 children) is set at an extremely low $23,300 of total family income – so low that it is hard to understand how any family survives on that amount. Even at twice the poverty line, families would need help. There are 106 million people, 34% of our population, living up to double the poverty line, about $46,500. This includes more than 32 million children, about 44% of all American children.
Poverty is a serious challenge in our own diocese. In Essex, Hudson, and Passaic counties each, about 25% of children live beneath the poverty line, over 100,000 children in total2. In the city of Newark, 37% of the children are under the poverty line. The balance of the counties in the diocese contributes in total another 24,000 poor children. At double the poverty line – which is a national average and is not adjusted for regional costs of living – we can safely estimate that at least 250,000 children in our diocese are living in or near poverty.
How does poverty impact children?
The research base on the impact of poverty on children is firmly established. Poverty increases the probability of poor health for children, from their birth. They are more likely to be born premature or at low birth weight, often with lifelong impacts. As they grow, children in poverty are much more likely to suffer from chronic diseases such as asthma and anemia, and are the only children in our country who still suffer from lead poisoning. They miss more school due to their illnesses.
High rates of clinical depression are found among mothers in poverty, with some estimates as high as 50 percent. This depression affects their ability to parent their children.
Children in families struggling with poverty enjoy far fewer educational experiences than other children. Parents are stressed, typically under-educated, almost as likely to work more than one job as they are to be unemployed. Families are often overcrowded in substandard housing, in dangerous neighborhoods. Children can’t go outside to learn about their world, develop their bodies, and burn off excess energy.
The level of family stress can become “toxic stress”3. The unrelenting litany of serious problems sets off psychological and physical reactions that can be measured in the cortisol levels of the parents and children. High cortisol is a chemical marker of stress, and is not harmful when it ebbs and flows normally, through the typical course of daily life. But when cortisol levels stay high for long periods, the developing brain structure is negatively impacted, with fewer neurons linking to one another. We now know just how important it is to protect young children from undue stress.
Parents in poverty often do not have the resources they need financially, or in terms of time, energy or patience, to purchase educational toys like blocks, puzzles, dolls and picture books, and to play with their children, to read the stories and engage in those wonderful conversations that may sound so silly but in fact are critical to children’s early learning. This lack of opportunity for early learning leads to huge gaps in the vocabularies of poor children, and they come to kindergarten on average 18 months behind in receptive vocabulary. We know that children coming to school so far behind go on graduate from high school at far lower rates.
The schools into which children from poor families enroll are often of low quality. While school staffs strive to do their best, there are often identifiable problems in the capacity of these schools to support the educational process. School buildings are sometimes crumbling, lowering school climate and contributing to illness. Teachers churn at a high rate, with the best teachers leaving quickly. Unacceptably high percentages of teachers are long-term substitutes with low teaching qualifications, so they focus on maintaining order in the classroom. Materials are in poor shape, books are old, classrooms are bare, computers are broken. For children who require an even more educationally stimulating and supportive classroom environment to boost their progress and keep them engaged despite the stressors in their lives, they often receive far less educational and psychological support than they need.
The problems of children and families in poverty seem so complex and intractable. What can we do?
Studies of social return on investment (SROI) indicate that our best efforts to protect children from poverty have strong, positive impacts, and that these efforts return benefits not only to people in poverty, but to everyone4. When children in poverty become better educated they turn away from crime, bear children later, and contribute more as adults, costing less and generally strengthening the fabric of our society. We all benefit because of it.
Programs of sufficient strength to fight poverty generally include highly trained and continually supported staff, a research-based curriculum or approach, an intense amount of “dosage,” and a strong focus on outcomes measurement embedded in a quality feedback loop. Two well-known evidence-based programs are Nurse-Family Partnership, which improves parenting, increases safety and health, and decreases arrest rates; and The Incredible Years, an intensive parenting support program which significantly improves parenting.
Perhaps the most impactful program is high quality preschool, which has been shown in rigorous research to close the achievement gap by about half5. New Jersey’s Abbott districts have one of the top preschool programs in the nation, and the latest research shows grade retention and special education placements cut nearly in half and large gains in student’s standardized test scores continuing to be found at fifth grade6.
There are other successful programs, and many that are striving to attain the mark. The What Works Clearinghouse, a website maintained by the Institute for Educational Sciences, is a repository of information on these types of programs, judging their impacts by rigorous standards (http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/).
What does this mean for people of faith?
The evidence that is accruing for an effective, efficient fight against poverty should inform the work of people of faith who want to serve the poor. How do we best serve them? What can we do?
- Develop an informed view of poverty and how it influences families, children, and schools; and learn about what works.
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Advocate for and support the implementation of effective programs to reach everyone who needs them. Policymakers need to know that their constituents support policies and programs that truly help people in poverty.
The organization Advocates for Children of New Jersey is an excellent source of information on the issues.
- Engage in the work of protecting the development of children as your own individual strengths and opportunities allow. There are many opportunities to work with children throughout the diocese. To name just a few: St. Mark's in Teaneck has a Saturday morning tutoring program; St. John’s in Boonton works with Cedar Hill CDC afterschool program, All Saints’ in Hoboken is involved in children's education in both its Episcopal Day School and its Jubilee Center.
- As people of faith, prayer is a starting place in any action to follow. The Children’s Defense Fund offers a variety of materials to engage congregations especially in a prayerful way. These materials are not limited to Christian worship but also allow for engaging communities of all faith.
- Finally, any of these organizations and others that contribute to children's basic needs would be grateful for monetary donations to fund their work.
Cynthia Esposito Lamy is a member of the diocesan Justice Board. She works at the Robin Hood Foundation in New York City, developing methods for the estimation of social return on investment; and is the author of American Children in Chronic Poverty: Complex Risks, Benefit-Cost Analyses, and Untangling the Knot (Lexington Books, October 2012).
References
- U.S. Census Bureau reports. DeNavas-Walt, C., Proctor, B. & Smith, J. (2013). Income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States, 2012. Current Population Reports, P60-245. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.
- County-level information is from Kids Count New Jersey. www.datacenter.kidscount.org/data
- See the Harvard Center for the Developing Child’s fact sheet. Toxic Stress: The Facts. http://developingchild.harvard.edu/topics/science_of_early_childhood/toxic_stress_response/
- For instance see Phillip B. Levine and David J. Zimmerman (Eds.) Targeting Investments in Children: Fighting Poverty When Resources are Limited. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Barnett, W.S. & Lamy, C.E. (2013). Achievement gaps start early: Preschool can help. In Prudence L. Carter and Kevin G. Welner (Eds.) The Opportunity Gap: What America Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Barnett, W.S., Jung, K., Youn, M. & Frede, E. (2013). Abbott Preschool Program Longitudinal Effects Study: Fifth Grade Follow-Up. New Brunswick, NJ: the National Institute for Early Education Research, Rutgers University.
