essay on child poverty

Poverty Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on poverty essay.

“Poverty is the worst form of violence”. – Mahatma Gandhi.

How Poverty is Measured?

For measuring poverty United nations have devised two measures of poverty – Absolute & relative poverty.  Absolute poverty is used to measure poverty in developing countries like India. Relative poverty is used to measure poverty in developed countries like the USA. In absolute poverty, a line based on the minimum level of income has been created & is called a poverty line.  If per day income of a family is below this level, then it is poor or below the poverty line. If per day income of a family is above this level, then it is non-poor or above the poverty line. In India, the new poverty line is  Rs 32 in rural areas and Rs 47 in urban areas.

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Causes of Poverty

According to the Noble prize winner South African leader, Nelson Mandela – “Poverty is not natural, it is manmade”. The above statement is true as the causes of poverty are generally man-made. There are various causes of poverty but the most important is population. Rising population is putting the burden on the resources & budget of countries. Governments are finding difficult to provide food, shelter & employment to the rising population.

The other causes are- lack of education, war, natural disaster, lack of employment, lack of infrastructure, political instability, etc. For instance- lack of employment opportunities makes a person jobless & he is not able to earn enough to fulfill the basic necessities of his family & becomes poor. Lack of education compels a person for less paying jobs & it makes him poorer. Lack of infrastructure means there are no industries, banks, etc. in a country resulting in lack of employment opportunities. Natural disasters like flood, earthquake also contribute to poverty.

In some countries, especially African countries like Somalia, a long period of civil war has made poverty widespread. This is because all the resources & money is being spent in war instead of public welfare. Countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. are prone to natural disasters like cyclone, etc. These disasters occur every year causing poverty to rise.

Ill Effects of Poverty

Poverty affects the life of a poor family. A poor person is not able to take proper food & nutrition &his capacity to work reduces. Reduced capacity to work further reduces his income, making him poorer. Children from poor family never get proper schooling & proper nutrition. They have to work to support their family & this destroys their childhood. Some of them may also involve in crimes like theft, murder, robbery, etc. A poor person remains uneducated & is forced to live under unhygienic conditions in slums. There are no proper sanitation & drinking water facility in slums & he falls ill often &  his health deteriorates. A poor person generally dies an early death. So, all social evils are related to poverty.

Government Schemes to Remove Poverty

The government of India also took several measures to eradicate poverty from India. Some of them are – creating employment opportunities , controlling population, etc. In India, about 60% of the population is still dependent on agriculture for its livelihood. Government has taken certain measures to promote agriculture in India. The government constructed certain dams & canals in our country to provide easy availability of water for irrigation. Government has also taken steps for the cheap availability of seeds & farming equipment to promote agriculture. Government is also promoting farming of cash crops like cotton, instead of food crops. In cities, the government is promoting industrialization to create more jobs. Government has also opened  ‘Ration shops’. Other measures include providing free & compulsory education for children up to 14 years of age, scholarship to deserving students from a poor background, providing subsidized houses to poor people, etc.

Poverty is a social evil, we can also contribute to control it. For example- we can simply donate old clothes to poor people, we can also sponsor the education of a poor child or we can utilize our free time by teaching poor students. Remember before wasting food, somebody is still sleeping hungry.

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Child Poverty - Free Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

Child poverty refers to the state of children living in poverty, facing a lack of basic necessities and opportunities for development. Essays could delve into the causes, consequences, and measures to alleviate child poverty. Discussions might also explore the long-term societal implications of child poverty, the role of government and non-governmental organizations in addressing this issue, and comparisons of child poverty across different regions and countries. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to Child Poverty you can find at Papersowl. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

A Problem Child Poverty and Effects on Education

“The impact of poverty on a child’s academic achievement is significant and starts early,” – Jonah Edelman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Stand for Children (Taylor, 2017). According to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2015, around 20 percent of children in the U.S. lived in poverty (Taylor, 2017). Rather than focusing all our time, attention, and resources on rewriting standards and adding higher stakes standardized tests, are we missing a larger looming issue? Studies have shown that student poverty […]

Child Poverty in America and India

According to UN Children's Fund, approximately one billion children currently live in poverty around the world and 22,000 children die each day from it. Living in poverty means lacking the resources to live a happy and healthy life. Poverty exists on many levels and includes barriers such as education and healthcare. Poverty is often measured in terms of income which is reflected in their low living standards. Adults can fall into poverty temporarily; however, children are more likely to get […]

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Although children are some of the most resilient creatures on earth. Living in poverty has risks that can cause children all types of issues. That makes you wonder, does poverty have an effect on a child's brain development? The million dollar question. How does poverty affect children's brain development? Poverty can cause health and behavioral issues. There is suggestive evidence that living in poverty may alter the way a child's brain develops and grows, which can, in turn, alter the […]

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How does Poverty Impact a Child’s Education?

Poverty can mold a child's development in result of a child's health and nutrition, parental mental and physical involvement, stimulating home environment and child care, also neighborhood and school conditions. These factors can cause a child to become self-doubting, uninterested and unable to maintain a healthy education. So how can we begin to provide an outreach for these stunted children? There are complex factors that result in the stunting in education for low-income student, require several solutions. To reduce or […]

Poverty and Early Childhood Development

Poverty is the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions. Poverty affects a child's development and educational outcomes beginning in the earliest years of life. A child's ability to profit from school has been recognized to play a role in poverty in the United States. The effect that poverty has on early childhood development is complex due to its range of diverse challenges for children and their families. More than 1 […]

Childhood Poverty and its Physical Effects

An alarming rate of children in the United States and other countries live in poverty. In fact, in 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics stated that nearly half of the children in the United States are living at poverty level (Pediatrics, April 2016). A life of poverty not only affects their quality of life, but it has a profound effect on their physical health as well. It can directly affect things such as brain growth, diabetes, asthma, and a multitude […]

Life of Children in Poverty

Children growing up in poverty are presented with a stress that consequently effects, and interferes with successful development. Youth raised in low-income homes are more susceptible to poor health, lack of proper education, social issues, and difficulty achieving tasks and/or goals, both long-term and short-term. This research topic will discuss various underlying problems that cause and effect poverty, such as: how poverty is defined, how poverty affects childhood development, how poverty is caused, and what can be done to put […]

The Impact of the Cycle of Poverty on Children

"Poverty is not made by God, it is created by you and me when we don't share what we have" (Mother Teresa). Mother Teresa fought poverty as an evil and lived it as a virtue. Her life was a long and moving illustration of the relationship between Christianity and poverty. She fought against poverty, going out into filthy streets to serve the destitute, but also embraced it in her own life giving up all material goods and physical comfort. There […]

The Effect of Poverty on Child Development

What happens when a child enters kindergarten without being ready? Why are scores in third grade reading and eight grade math continuing to lag? Children who are inadequately ready for kindergarten have a hard time catching up over the years, and a report from the education advocacy organization Groundwork Ohio found that poverty is often tied to this insufficient kindergarten readiness. Early education is the foundation for a child's future and, according to the report, the repercussions of not being […]

Children of Poverty in the U.S.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an estimated 39.7 million Americans lived in poverty in 2017 (15). Based on this measure, the official poverty rate in the U.S. was near 14 percent overall (15). For children, almost half in the U.S. are living in or near poverty (1). When compared to adults, 1 in 5 live in poverty, versus 1 in 8 of adults, which translates to 15.5 million impoverished kids in the U.S. (2). Poverty is defined as making […]

The Problem of Poverty and Child Development

Poverty can undermine a child's development including educational outcomes that start to take effect in the earliest stages of life, either directly and indirectly through moderated, mediated and transactional processes. Various renowned authors have come up with the definition of poverty. According to hutchison definition of poverty it is a condition in which an infant or toddler cannot get enough nutritional food, quality education, proper healthcare, access to safe water, electricity or various other much needed services. In addition to […]

Why is Poverty Increasing Among Children?

"In 1991, more than one in five children under 18 years of age lived in poverty: and among children under 6 years of age, the poverty rate was 24% almost one of every four children in this age group was poor" (198pg. Lewit). Resulted from the termination of loyal employees at several, American unemployment rates raised. The growing space between wages earnings and the cost of housing in the United States leaves millions of families and individuals unable to make […]

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The United States' Declaration of Independence (US, 1776) proudly declares, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." While Americans certainly have such liberties and rights, notably the rights of free speech and assembly to protest social injustice, nearly 17 million of America's children live in abject poverty, with families whose income is […]

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Poverty among the woman and children in Sub-Saharan Africa has long been a topic of charities, celebrities, and governments. Seven of the ten most unequal countries in the world are in Africa, most of them southern. According to the World Bank that places the monetary level of poverty at less than $1.90 a day, there are 48.5% living on less than $1.25 a day. (Lanker, 2018) The rate of poverty decrease is among the slowest in the world. Most surveys […]

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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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Why America Has Been So Stingy In Fighting Child Poverty

Greg Rosalsky

It was heralded as a game changer for America's social safety net. It dramatically reduced child poverty. But, last month, the enhanced Child Tax Credit — a kind of "Social Security for kids" — expired, and millions of American children sank back into poverty.

In March 2021, President Biden and congressional Democrats revamped the child tax credit as part of the American Rescue Plan. They restructured it, so that parents could get a monthly check from the government. They increased the credit's size, allowing parents to claim as much as $3,600 a year per child, or $300 a month. And they made the credit fully refundable, so that even super-low-income families who don't pay much — or anything — in federal taxes could get it.

For those primarily concerned with ending child poverty, these changes were a resounding success. Scholars at Columbia University found they reduced child poverty by about 30% . Another study found the enhanced program cut household food insufficiency by 26% .

But President Biden's efforts to renew the credit have been thwarted by opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and congressional Republicans. They disliked how much the program cost and how generous it was, and they worried that it would encourage parents to stop working because it did not have a work requirement.

According to the Tax Policy Center, the beefed-up Child Tax Credit would cost around $225 billion per year (about $100 billion more per year than the original version, which is now back in effect). For context, that's less than a quarter of the annual cost of Social Security, about a third of the cost of Medicare, and about the same as the budget for the Department of Agriculture. A report from the Urban Institute finds that even with the enhanced child tax credit, America spent only about 7% of its federal budget on kids in 2021 — and that is now projected to decline.

As for how many parents stopped working as a result of the enhanced Child Tax Credit, estimates range from about 300,000 to 1.5 million . There are about 50 million working parents in the United States, so even if we accept only the highest estimate, more than 97% of parents continued working after receiving the payments. That makes sense because 300 bucks a month is hardly enough for most families to live on.

The failure of Washington to renew the enhanced Child Tax Credit continues a long tradition in America: Our welfare system has long spent generously on the old, but it has consistently skimped on the young. While America spends about as much, or even more on the elderly than many other rich nations, it spends significantly less on kids. Among the almost 40 countries in the OECD, only Turkey spends less per child as a percentage of their GDP. It's a big reason why the United States has a much higher rate of child poverty than most other affluent countries — and even has a higher rate of child poverty than some not-so-affluent countries.

In a new paper , the economists Anna Aizer, Hilary W. Hoynes and Adriana Lleras-Muney explore the reasons why the United States is such an outlier when it comes to fighting child poverty. While they acknowledge the reasons are varied and complex, they focus their analysis on one factor: American policymakers, influenced by economists, have dwelled much more on the costs of social programs than their benefits.

The cost of focusing solely on costs

For decades, many American economists were pretty much obsessed with trying to document the ways in which welfare programs discouraged work, or broke up families, or encouraged pregnancy, while ignoring all the benefits that society gets from having kids grow up in a more financially secure environment. Aizer, Hoynes and Lleras-Muney analyzed research papers in America's top academic journals since the 1960s and found that prior to 2010, fewer than 27% of all articles about welfare programs even bothered to try to document their benefits.

Over the last decade, however, economists have increasingly been focusing on the benefits of such social programs. One reason for this is that research techniques and data have gotten much better, allowing researchers to see both the short- and long-term effects of programs. In recent years, economists have found all sorts of benefits that derive from government spending on kids, including better educational outcomes, fewer health problems , lower crime and incarceration rates, and higher earnings (and tax payments ) when the kids become adults.

One recent study in a top economic journal, by Harvard economists Nathaniel Hendren and Ben Sprung-Keyser, analyzed the bang-per-buck of government spending programs. They found that social spending on kids stands out as having far greater returns for society over the long run than spending on adults. The returns are so large that it's possible that government spending on kids could end up paying for itself over those kids' lifetimes, through economic gains for the kids, and through reduced public spending on them through other social programs when they get older.

Aizer, Hoynes and Lleras-Muney argue that the evidence is clear: Social programs aimed at kids are investments , which have very real, measurable returns for society. "The returns of these investments ... can only be properly measured over the entire lifetime of the recipients and should be comprehensive in nature, including gains to schooling, health and other aspects of human wellbeing," Aizer, Hoynes and Lleras-Muney write.

However, they write, the federal government currently fails to take into account these long-term benefits. The Congressional Budget Office, which is the nonpartisan agency that informs lawmakers about the costs and benefits of programs, currently only looks at the effects of programs over 10 years. "Many of the returns to investments in children are not realized for many years, once the children complete their education, attain young adulthood and enter the labor market," Aizer, Hoynes and Lleras-Muney write. "Thus, even if there were consensus on the long run benefits of a program (which might need to be predicted if a program is new), the long run benefits outside the 10-year window would not be included in the CBO scoring."

It's Not Just Economists' Fault

There are many other reasons why America continues to prioritize social spending on the elderly over investment in kids. Kids, of course, don't vote — and seniors do in droves. Aizer, Hoynes and Lleras-Muney point out that the AARP "boasted 38 million members and $1.7 billion in revenues in 2019." It's a powerful lobbying group. Kids, on the other hand, don't really have an analogue to the AARP. "The Children's Defense Fund, one of the major groups advocating for children in the US, reported revenue of $17.8 million in 2019, just 1 percent of AARP revenue," Aizer, Hoynes and Lleras-Muney write.

Another factor that may be behind the discrepancy is that while children may be a sympathetic group, government spending, generally speaking, doesn't go directly to them. It goes to their parents — and helping out parents sparks an age-old debate about fairness, work and individual responsibility that doesn't get opened up in the same way when giving money to the elderly.

But, arguably, the biggest factor of all in explaining why our social safety net looks the way it does is America's deeply fraught, racialized politics. That has been well-documented, including in a recent book by New York Times writer Eduardo Porter: American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise . Since the beginnings of the American welfare state, many Americans have disliked the idea of their tax dollars going to minorities or immigrants — and that has torn large holes in America's social safety net.

Even today, Aizer, Hoynes and Lleras-Muney argue, demographics may help explain why we spend so much more on seniors than kids. "The elderly population in the US is 77 percent white non-Hispanic in contrast to children who are slightly less than half white non-Hispanic," they write. "From the onset, the generosity and universality of anti-poverty programs have been a function of the racial composition of potential recipients."

Economists are now amassing a mountain of evidence that supports the notion that spending on kids has huge benefits, not just for kids themselves, but for society — and taxpayers — as a whole. While many economists in the past may have helped contribute to the scaling back of social programs by pointing out their costs, maybe now they will help contribute to building them back up by illuminating their ample benefits.

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Guest Essay

America Pulled Children Out of Poverty. Now It’s Set to Reverse Course With a Vengeance.

By Nikhil Goyal

Dr. Goyal is the author of the book “ Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty .”

The annual Census Bureau report released earlier this month revealed that child poverty more than doubled in the United States last year, the largest single-year increase on record. The news feels less like a surprise and more like a confirmation, if not a deliberate choice.

Many federal pandemic relief programs in health care, food assistance, housing and child care — most notably the expanded child tax credit — have either expired or are set to expire, which in all likelihood will ensure that child poverty will continue to accelerate. The list also includes emergency rental assistance , the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program emergency allotments and Medicaid continuous coverage . The implications of letting these policies lapse without replacement, one after the other, will likely be felt for years to come.

A significant blow arrives on Sept. 30, when child care emergency-relief funding terminates . According to a Century Foundation report , 3.2 million children are expected to lose access to care in the coming months. Seventy thousand child care programs are likely to close, and more than 200,000 industry workers could lose their jobs. Child care and preschool costs have been soaring faster than inflation, and the surviving centers could be forced to raise their fees. The lack of accessible and affordable child care could pull more women out of the work force, potentially leading to higher inflation and a slower economic recovery.

We should not be surprised by the outcomes that follow from subjecting children and families to chronic deprivation. Over eight years, I conducted an ethnographic study examining the lives of children growing up in Kensington, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Babies born in the neighborhood are expected to live to 71, which is 17 years less than babies born no more than four miles away in the affluent, predominantly white neighborhood of Society Hill — and a life span on par with countries such as Egypt, Bhutan and Uzbekistan.

When I first met Emmanuel Coreano, a Puerto Rican student from Kensington, he was living with his disabled mother in a dilapidated row home that lacked hot water and electricity. The rooms were filthy and mold-ridden. The bathtub was at risk of falling through the cracked ceiling into the kitchen. One night, Emmanuel was sleeping when he woke up to a sharp pain. Tasting something metallic, he touched his lip, and in the glow of his phone screen he could see that his finger was stained with blood. A rat had bitten him.

Still, this was the best housing that his mother could find on her limited budget; she had no earnings and relied on Supplemental Security Income and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. “I remember asking God to give me a happy home,” Emmanuel wrote in a poem. “One where the neighborhood was good, where I didn’t have to care about the anger in people’s hearts, where I didn’t have to worry about getting shot up in a park.”

Despite experiencing housing precarity and economic hardship, Emmanuel managed to graduate from El Centro de Estudiantes, a last-chance alternative high school, thanks to the support of caring educators. He was an adult when Donald Trump and Joe Biden enacted trillions of dollars of the most significant anti-poverty measures in decades — economic impact payments , expanded unemployment insurance and the expanded child tax credit . Tens of millions of Americans were kept out of poverty and economic insecurity as a result; in another world, a younger Emmanuel could have been one of them. The stark relief that pandemic programs brought to families is proof that poverty is not an intractable problem when there is sufficient political will.

The economist Amartya Sen has argued that poverty is not simply the condition of low income, it is also “the deprivation of basic capabilities,” which he defines as “the substantive freedoms he or she enjoys to lead the kind of life he or she has reason to value.” To guarantee such economic and social freedoms , we also need to reverse decades of privatization and austerity and invest in equitable public goods : education, health care, housing, child care, broadband, utilities, food and other sectors.

As a senior policy adviser for Bernie Sanders, who was then the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, I spent six months in 2021 helping my colleagues draft, revise and negotiate the details of the Build Back Better bill. ​​We dreamed of achieving a feat akin to the New Deal, so it was devastating to watch the original $6 trillion , 10-year spending plan get hacked to $3.5 trillion , and then $1.75 trillion , only to die in the Senate. A dramatically pared-down version of that bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, made transformative investments, but nearly all of Build Back Better’s original measures were left out. We should recommit to finishing the job and passing an agenda that will reduce child poverty and make life more affordable.

It is also up to the states to do their part. Buoyed by Democratic trifectas, some have become bona fide laboratories of social democracy. Fourteen states have adopted a state-level child tax credit, with many featuring a fully refundable provision so that families with little to no income can benefit. This year, New Mexico has expanded free preschool seats and made child care free for families earning up to four times the federal poverty rate — roughly $120,000 for a family of four. In the upcoming fiscal year, Minnesota will pour more than $250 million of additional funding into early childhood education to reduce the costs of child care and create thousands of new preschool slots. This includes $10 million to supplement funding of the federal Head Start program, which serves children up to the age of 5 and should be bolstered by states. Today, nine states have universal free school breakfast and lunch on the books. Just last month, the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, established a $20 million initiative that will help fund grocery stores in food deserts.

Millions of children are in the predicament that Emmanuel Coreano was once in, and more will join them if we refuse to act. The government has a choice here. It can deliver cash transfers , enact public goods and establish a floor of livelihood where nobody suffers from poverty or want — or it can allow children and families to go hungry, unhoused, indebted and abandoned on the altar of the market . It is time to once again use our immense power and resources to reduce suffering and save lives.

Nikhil Goyal is the author of the book “ Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty .” He served as a senior policy adviser on education and children for Senator Bernie Sanders on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the Committee on the Budget.

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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.

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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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390 Poverty Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

• 📑 Aspects to Cover in a Poverty Essay

Students who learn economics, politics, and social sciences are often required to write a poverty essay as part of their course. While everyone understands the importance of this topic, it can be hard to decide what to write about. Read this post to find out the aspects that you should cover in your essay on poverty.

🏆 Best Poverty Topics & Free Essay Examples

👍 powerful topics on poverty and inequality, 🎓 simple & easy topics related to poverty, 📌 interesting poverty essay examples, ⭐ strong poverty-related topics, 🥇 unique poverty topics for argumentative essay, ❓ research questions about poverty.

Topics related to poverty and inequality might seem too broad. There are so many facts, factors, and aspects you should take into consideration. However, we all know that narrowing down a topic is one of the crucial steps when working on an outline and thesis statement. You should be specific enough to select the right arguments for your argumentative essay or dissertation. Below, you will find some aspects to include in your poverty essay.

Poverty Statistics

First of all, it would be beneficial to include some background information on the issue. Statistics on poverty in your country or state can help you to paint a picture of the problem. Look for official reports on poverty and socioeconomic welfare, which can be found on government websites. While you are writing this section, consider the following:

• What is the overall level of poverty in your country or state?
• Has the prevalence of poverty changed over time? If yes, how and why?
• Are there any groups or communities where poverty is more prevalent than in the general population? What are they?

Causes of Poverty

If you look at poverty essay titles, the causes of poverty are a popular theme among students. While some people may think that poverty occurs because people are lazy and don’t want to work hard, the problem is much more important than that. Research books and scholarly journal articles on the subject with these questions in mind:

• Why do some groups of people experience poverty more often than others?
• What are the historical causes of poverty in your country?
• How is poverty related to other social issues, such as discrimination, immigration, and crime?
• How do businesses promote or reduce poverty in the community?

Consequences of Poverty

Many poverty essay examples also consider the consequences of poverty for individuals and communities. This theme is particularly important if you study social sciences or politics. Here are some questions that may give you ideas for this section:

• How is the psychological well-being of individuals affected by poverty?
• How is poverty connected to crime and substance abuse?
• How does poverty affect individuals’ access to high-quality medical care and education?
• What is the relationship between poverty and world hunger?

Government Policies

Governments of most countries have policies in place to reduce poverty and help those in need. In your essay, you may address the policies used in your state or country or compare several different governments in terms of their approaches to poverty. Here is what you should think about:

• What are some examples of legislation aimed at reducing poverty?
• Do laws on minimum wage help to prevent and decrease poverty? Why or why not?
• How do governments help people who are poor to achieve higher levels of social welfare?
• Should governments provide financial assistance to those in need? Why or why not?

Solutions to Poverty

Solutions to poverty are among the most popular poverty essay topics, and you will surely find many sample papers and articles on this subject. This is because poverty is a global issue that must be solved to facilitate social development. Considering these questions in your poverty essay conclusion or main body will help you in getting an A:

• What programs or policies proved to be effective in reducing poverty locally?
• Is there a global solution to poverty that would be equally effective in all countries?
• How can society facilitate the reduction of poverty?
• What solutions would you recommend to decrease and prevent poverty?

Covering a few of these aspects in your essay will help you demonstrate the in-depth understanding and analysis required to earn a high mark. Before you start writing, have a look around our website for more essay titles, tips, and interesting topics!

• Poverty Research Proposal To justify this, the recent and most current statistics from the Census Bureau shows that the level and rate of poverty in USA is increasing, with minority ethnic groups being the most disadvantaged.
• Poverty: A Sociological Imagination Perspective I was raised in a nuclear family, where my mum was a housewife, and my father worked in a local hog farm as the overall manager.
• “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” by Peter Singer The article “The Singer Solution to World Poverty” by author Peter Singer attempts to provide a workable solution to the world poverty problem.
• Poverty and the Environment The human population affects the environment negatively due to poverty resulting to environmental degradation and a cycle of poverty. Poverty and the environment are interlinked as poverty leads to degradation of the environment.
• Poverty Areas and Effects on Juvenile Delinquency The desire to live a better life contributes to the youths engaging in crimes, thus the increase in cases of juvenile delinquencies amid low-income families. The studies indicate that the fear of poverty is the […]
• Poverty in Africa These pictures have been published online to show the world the gravity of the poverty situation in the African continent. The pictures represent the suffering of majority of the African people as a result of […]
• Poverty in the World In this paper, we will be looking at the situation of poverty in the world, its causes and the efforts of the international organizations to manage the same.
• The End of Poverty Philippe Diaz’s documentary, The End of Poverty, is a piece that attempts to dissect the causes of the huge economic inequalities that exist between countries in the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere.
• Max Weber’s Thoughts on Poverty Weber has contributed to the exploration of the origins of poverty and the impact of religions on the attitude to it.
• Is Poverty a Choice or a Generational Curse? The assumption that poverty is a choice persists in public attitudes and allows policy-makers to absolve themselves of any responsibility for ensuring the well-being of the lower socioeconomic stratum of society.
• Analysis of Theodore Dalrymple’s “What Is Poverty?” With ethical arguments from Burnor, it can be argued that Dalrymple’s statements are shallow and based on his values and not the experience of those he is judging.
• The Philippines’ Unemployment, Inequality, Poverty However, despite the strong emphasis of the government on income equality and poverty reduction along with the growth of GDP, both poverty and economic and social inequality remain persistent in the Philippines.
• Children Living in Poverty and Education The presence of real subjects like children is a benefit for the future of the nation and a free education option for poor families to learn something new and even use it if their children […]
• Poverty Effects on Child Development and Schooling To help children from low-income families cope with poverty, interventions touching in the child’s development and educational outcomes are essential. Those programs campaign against the effects of poverty among children by providing basic nutritional, academic, […]
• The Problem of Poverty in Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” To see the situation from the perspective of its social significance, it is necessary to refer to Mills’ concept of sociological imagination and to the division of problems and issues into personal and social ones.
• The Singer Solution to World Poverty: Arguments Against The article compares the lives of people in the developed world represented by America and that of developing world represented by Brazil; It is about a school teacher who sells a young boy for adoption […]
• Community Work: Helping People in Poverty The first project would be water project since you find that in most villages water is a problem, hence $100 would go to establishing this project and it’s out of these water then the women […]
• Cause and Effect of Poverty For example, the disparities in income and wealth are considered as a sign of poverty since the state is related to issues of scarcity and allocation of resources and influence.
• What Causes Poverty in the World One of the major factors that have contributed to poverty in given areas of the world is overpopulation. Environmental degradation in many parts of the world has led to the increase of poverty in the […]
• Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Development The research focuses on the causes of poverty and the benefits of poverty alleviation in achieving sustainable development. One of the causes of poverty is discrimination and social inequality.
• Relationship Between Crime Rates and Poverty This shows that the strength of the relationship between the crime index and people living below the line of poverty is.427.
• Poverty in Bambara’s The Lesson and Danticat’s A Wall of Fire Rising It is important to note the fact that culture-based poverty due to discrimination of the past or political ineffectiveness of the nation can have a profound ramification in the lives of its victims.
• Social Issues of Families in Poverty With the tightened budget, parents of the families living in poverty struggle to make ends meet, and in the course of their struggles, they experience many stresses and depressions.
• The Myth of the Culture of Poverty Unfortunately, rather all of the stereotypes regarding poor people are widespread in many societies and this has served to further increase the problem of generational poverty. Poor people are regarded to be in the state […]
• Poverty in Urban Areas The main reason for escalation of the problem of poverty is urban areas is because the intricate problems of urban poverty are considered too small to attract big policies.
• Poverty Through a Sociological Lens Poverty-stricken areas, such as slums, rural villages, and places hit by disasters, lack the required economic activities to improve the employment and wealth status of the people.
• Poverty in Rural and Urban Areas My main focus is on articles explaining the sources of poverty in rural and urban areas and the key difference between the two.
• Health, Poverty, and Social Equity: The Global Response to the Ebola Outbreak Canada and Australia, as well as several countries in the Middle East and Africa, were the most active proponents of this ban, halting the movements for both people and goods from states affected by the […]
• Poverty and Global Food Crisis: Food and Agriculture Model Her innovative approach to the issue was to measure food shortages in calories as opposed to the traditional method of measuring in pounds and stones.
• Social Issues; Crime and Poverty in Camden This has threatened the social security and peaceful coexistence of the people in the community. The larger the differences between the poor and the rich, the high are the chances of crime.
• Reflective Analysis of Poverty It can be further classified into absolute poverty where the affected do not have the capability to make ends meet, and relative poverty which refer to the circumstances under which the afflicted do not have […]
• Poverty, Government and Unequal Distribution of Wealth in Philippines The author of the book Poverty And The Critical Security Agenda, Eadie, added: Quantitative analyses of poverty have become more sophisticated over the years to be sure, yet remain problematic and in certain ways rooted […]
• Global Poverty: The Ethical Dilemma Unfortunately, a significant obstacle to such global reforms is that many economic systems are based on the concept of inequality and exploitation.
• Poverty Simulation Reflection and Its Influence on Life Something that stood out to me during the process is probably the tremendous emotional and psychological impact of poverty on a person’s wellbeing.
• Tourism Contribution to Poverty Reduction Managers usually make targeting errors such as poor delivery of tourism benefits to the poor and accruing tourism benefit to the rich in the society.
• The Problem of Poverty in Chad Thus, the study of the causes of poverty in the Republic of Chad will help to form a complete understanding of the problem under study and find the most effective ways to solve it.
• Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? & How to Judge Globalism The article Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality by Robert Hunter Wade explores the phenomenon of globalization and its influence on the poverty and inequality ratios all over the world.
• Analysis of a Social Problem: Poverty Furthermore, the World Bank predicts that both the number of people and the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty will increase in 2020 and 2021 due to the coronavirus outbreak.
• Poverty and Diseases A usual line of reasoning would be that low income is the main cause of health-related problems among vulnerable individuals. Such results that the relationship between mental health and poverty is, in fact, straightforward.
• Marginalization and Poverty of Rural Women The women are left to take care of the economic welfare of the households. I will also attempt to propose a raft of recommendations to alleviate poverty and reduce marginalization of women in the rural […]
• Poverty in Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” The fact that the structure of society is discussed is especially interesting, and it is suggested that opinions of people that live in poverty are not acknowledged most of the time.
• Environmental Degradation and Poverty It is however important to understand the causes of the environmental degradation and the ways to reduce them, which will promote the improvement of the environmental quality.
• Consumerism: Affecting Families Living in Poverty in the United States Hence, leading to the arising of consumerism protection acts and policies designed to protect consumers from dishonest sellers and producers, which indicates the high degree of consumer’s ignorance, and hence failure to make decisions of […]
• Poverty as Capability Deprivation In this paper, the importance of social justice manifests through the understanding of social deprivation, as opposed to the understanding of income levels in the achievement of social justice.
• Poverty in the Bronx: Negative Effects of Poverty South Bronx is strictly the southwestern part of the borough of Bronx and Bronx is the only borough in New York city in the mainland.
• Poverty and Homelessness as a Global Social Problem What makes the task of defining poverty particularly difficult is the discrepancy in the distribution of social capital and, therefore, the resulting differences in the understanding of what constitutes poverty, particularly, where the line should […]
• “The Hidden Reason for Poverty…” by Haugen It is also noteworthy that some groups of people are specifically vulnerable and join the arrays of those living in poverty.
• Dependency Theory and “The End of Poverty?” It is also reflected in the film “The End of Poverty?” narrating the circumstances of poor countries and their precondition. It started at the end of the fifteenth century and marked the beginning of the […]
• The Problems of Poverty and Hunger Subsequently, the cause in this case serves as a path to a solution – more social programs are needed, and wealthy citizens should be encouraged to become beneficiaries for the hungry.
• “Life on a Shoestring – American Kids Living in Poverty” by Claycomb Life on a Shoestring – American Kids Living in Poverty highlights the widening disparity between the poor and the wealthy in America and how the economic systems are set up to benefit the rich and […]
• Poverty in “A Modest Proposal” by Swift The high number of children born to poor families presents significant problems for a country.”A Modest Proposal” is a satirical essay by Jonathan Swift that proposes a solution to the challenge facing the kingdom.
• Poverty: $2.00 a Day in America When conversations about the poor occur in the city of Washington, they usually discuss the struggles of the working poor, forgetting about the issues that the non-working poor face day by day.
• “Facing Poverty With a Rich Girl’s Habits” by Suki Kim Finally, revealing the problems of adapting to a new social status, the story turns remarkably complex, which also lends it a certain charm.
• Concept of Poverty The main difference between this definition and other definitions of poverty highlighted in this paper is the broad understanding of the concept.
• Poverty in Brazil The primary aim of the exploration was to relate and construe the experimental findings arising from the application of the FGT poverty standards reformulation to Brazilian domestic examination data.
• Inequality and Poverty Relationship To begin with, it is necessary to define the concepts of poverty and inequality. As of inequality, it is the difference in access to income, power, education, and whatever.
• How Poverty Contributes to Poor Heath The results show that poverty is the main cause of poor health. The study was purposed to assess the effect of poverty in determining the health status of households.
• Global Poverty Project: A Beacon of Hope in the Fight Against Extreme Poverty The organization works with partners worldwide to increase awareness and understanding of global poverty and inspire people to take action to end it.
• The Causes of an Increase in Poverty in Atlanta, Georgia The key causes of the high poverty rise in the city include housing policies and instabilities, the lack of transit services and public transportation infrastructure in suburban areas, and childhood poverty.
• Thistle Farms: Help for Women Who Are Affected by Poverty As I said in the beginning, millions of women need help and assistance from the community to overcome poverty and heal emotional wounds caused by abuse. You can purchase a variety of its home and […]
• Median Household Incomes and Poverty Levels The patterns of poverty in the Denver urban area show that rates are higher in the inner suburb and the core city and lower in the outer suburb.
• Poverty: The American Challenge One of the main problems in the world is the problem of poverty, which means the inability to provide the simplest and most affordable living conditions for most people in a given country.
• The Poverty Issue From a Sociological Perspective The core of the perspective is the idea that poverty is a system in which multiple elements are intertwined and create outcomes linked to financial deficits.
• Saving the Planet by Solving Poverty The data is there to make the necessary links, which are needed when it comes to the economic variations and inadequate environmental impacts of climate change can be distinguished on a worldwide scale.
• Anti-Poverty Programs From the Federal Government The programs provide financial assistance to low-income individuals and families to cover basic needs like housing and food. The anti-poverty programs that have been most effective in reducing poverty rates in the United States are […]
• Rural Development, Economic Inequality and Poverty The percentage of the rural population is lower for developed countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus, the objective of the proposal is to determine how the inhabitants of the country in […]
• Global Poverty: Ways of Combating For example, one of such initiatives is social assistance and social protection programs, which ensure the safety and creation of various labor programs that will help increase the number of the working population.
• Poverty: Aspects of Needs Assessment The target neighborhood and population for the following analysis are women of reproductive age, defined as 15 to 49 years, in Elmhurst and Corona, Queens. 2, and the percentage of births to women aged over […]
• What Is Poverty in the United States? Estimates of the amount of income required to meet necessities serve as the foundation for both the official and supplemental poverty measurements.
• The Caribbean Culture: Energy Security and Poverty Issues Globally, Latin American and the Caribbean also has the most expensive energy products and services because of fuel deprivation in the Caribbean and the Pacific regions.
• Poverty: The Main Causes and Factors Because of the constant process of societal development, the concept of poverty changes rapidly, adapting to the new standards of modern human life.
• How to Overcome Poverty and Discrimination As such, to give a chance to the “defeated” children and save their lives, as Alexie puts it, society itself must change the rules so that everyone can have access to this ticket to success. […]
• Poverty and Homelessness in American Society It is connected with social segregation, stigmatization, and the inability of the person to improve their conditions of life. The problem of affordable housing and poverty among older adults is another problem that leads to […]
• Private Sector’s Role in Poverty Alleviation in Asia The ambition of Asia to become the fastest-growing economic region worldwide has led to a rapid rise of enterprises in the private sector.
• Connection of Poverty and Education The economy of the United States has been improving due to the efforts that have been made to ensure that poverty will not prevent individuals and families from having access to decent education.
• The Opportunity for All Program: Poverty Reduction The limiting factors of the program may be the actions of the population itself, which will not participate in the employment program because of the realized benefits.
• Early Childhood Financial Support and Poverty The mentioned problem is a direct example of such a correlation: the general poverty level and the well-being of adults are connected with the early children’s material support.
• Discussion: Poverty and Healthcare One of the research questions necessary to evaluate this issue is “How do ethical theories apply to the issue?” Another critical research question worth exploring is “Which cultural values and norms influence the problem?” These […]
• Explosive Growth of Poverty in America The three richest Americans now own 250 billion USD, approximately the same amount of combined wealth as the bottom 50 percent of the country. Wealth inequality is a disturbing issue that needs to be at […]
• Global Poverty: Famine, Affluence, and Morality In the article Famine, Affluence, and Morality, Michael Slote contends that rich people have a moral obligation to contribute more to charities.
• The Poverty and Education Quality Relationship Although the number of people living under the poverty threshold has decreased in the last 30 years, more than 800,000,000 people still have to live with insufficient money and a lack of food, water, and […]
• Decreasing Poverty With College Enrollment Program In order to achieve that, it is necessary, first and foremost, to increase the high school students’ awareness of the financial aid programs, possibilities of dual enrollment, and the overall reality of higher education.
• Reducing Poverty in the North Miami Beach Community The proposed intervention program will focus on the students in the last semester of the 9th and 10th grades and the first semester of the 11th and 12th grades attending the client schools.
• Food Banks Board Members and Cycle of Poverty What this suggests is that a large portion of the leadership within these collectives aim to provide assistance and food but not to challenge the current system that fosters the related issues of poverty, unemployment, […]
• Poverty as a Social Problem in Burundi The rationale for studying poverty as a social problem in Burundi is that it will help to combat poverty through the advocacy plan at the end of this paper.
• Poverty: Subsidizing Programs Subsidizing programs are considered welfare and net initiatives that the government takes to aid low-income families and individuals affected by poverty.
• “Poverty, Toxic Stress, and Education…” Study by Kelly & Li Kelly and Li are concerned with the lack of research about poverty and toxic stress affecting the neurodevelopment of preterm children.
• Life Below the Poverty Line in the US The major problem with poverty in the US is that the number of people living below the poverty threshold is gradually increasing despite the economic growth of the country. SNAP is not considered to be […]
• The Relationship Between Single-Parent Households and Poverty The given literature review will primarily focus on the theoretical and empirical aspects of the relationship between single-parent households and poverty, as well as the implications of the latter on mental health issues, such as […]
• Aspects of Social Work and Poverty In terms of work principle, both the poor working and the welfare poor have it to varying degrees, but it does not help them much because the only employment available is low paying and leads […]
• Poverty and Its Effect on Adult Health Poverty in the UK is currently above the world average, as more than 18% of the population lives in poverty. In 2020, 7% of the UK population lived in extreme poverty and 11% lived in […]
• Child Poverty in the United States The causes of child poverty in the United States cannot be separated from the grounds of adult poverty. Thus, it is essential to take care of the well-being of children living in poverty.
• Poverty in New York City, and Its Reasons The poverty rate for seniors in New York is twice the poverty rate in the United States. New York City’s blacks and Hispanics have a much higher poverty rate than whites and Asians in the […]
• Juvenile Violent Crime and Children Below Poverty The effect of this trend is that the number of children below poverty will continue to be subjected to the juvenile and criminal justice systems.
• Poverty and Homelessness as Social Problem The qualifications will include a recommendation from the community to ensure that the person is open to help and willing to be involved in the neighborhood of Non-Return.
• Discussion of the Problem of the Poverty To help prevent homelessness for the woman in question and her children, I think it would be essential to provide mental support for her not to turn to alcohol and drugs as a coping mechanism.
• Poverty Effects and How They Are Handled Quality jobs will provide income to the younger people and women in the community. The focus on developing and facilitating small and medium-sized enterprises is a great strategy but more needs to be done in […]
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• Poverty Effects on American Children and Adolescents The extent to which poor financial status influences the wellbeing of the young children and adolescents is alarming and needs immediate response from the community.
• Progress and Poverty Book by Henry George George wrote the book following his recognition that poverty is the central puzzle of the 20th century. Thus, George’s allegation is inconsistent with nature because the number of living organisms can increase to the extent […]
• Vicious Circle of Poverty in Brazil The vicious circle of poverty is “a circular constellation of forces that tend to act and react on each other in such a way that the country in poverty maintains its poor state”.
• Global Education as the Key Tool for Addressing the Third World Poverty Issue Global education leads to improvements in the state economy and finances. Global education helps resolve the unemployment problem.
• Poverty, Partner Abuse, and Women’s Mental Health In general, the study aimed at investigating the interaction between poverty and the severity of abuse in women. The research question being studied in this article is how income intersects with partner violence and impacts […]
• America’s Shame: How Can Education Eradicate Poverty The primary focus of the article was global poverty, the flaws in the educational system, as well as the U.S.government’s role in resolving the problem.
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• Social Work at Acacia Network: Poverty and Inequality Around the 1980s, the number of older adults was significantly increasing in society; the local government of New York established a home for the aged and was named Acacia Network. The supporting staff may bond […]
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• Political Economy: Relationship Between Poverty, Inequality, and Nationalism The prevalence of nationalism leads to changes in the education system, as the government tries to justify the superiority of the country by altering the curriculum.
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• Poverty as a Global Social Problem For example, the research shows that Kibera is the largest slum in the country, and this is where many people move to settle after losing hope of getting employed in towns.
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• Wealth and Poverty: The Christian Teaching on Wealth and Poverty To illustrate the gap between the world’s richest and the world’s poorest, a recent UN publication reported that the wealth of the three richest persons in the world is greater than the combined wealth of […]
• Guns Do Not Kill, Poverty Does It is widely accepted that stricter gun control policies are instrumental in alleviating the problem, as they are supposed to reduce the rate of firearm-related deaths, limiting gun access to individuals at-risk of participating in […]
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• The Criminalization of Poverty in Canada In this regard, with a special focus on Canada, the objective of this essay is to investigate how public policy has transformed alongside the public perception of social welfare reform.
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• Community Health Needs: Poverty Generally, the higher the level of poverty, the worse the diet, and hence the higher the chances of developing diabetes. Consequently, a considerable disparity in the prevalence of diabetes occurs between communities with high levels […]
• “Poverty, Race, and the Contexts of Achievement” by Maryah Stella Fram et al. The article “Poverty, race, and the contexts of achievement: examining the educational experience of children in the U.S. Multilevel models were then applied in the analyses of how children varied in their reading scores depending […]
• Couple Aims to Fight Poverty, One Village at a Time People are not afraid to risk their own financial savings, their investments, and even life’s safety to help the chosen community and improve the conditions this community has to live under.
• Microeconomic Perspective on Poverty Evolution in Pakistan The periodic spike in poverty levels, notwithstanding economic growth, implies incongruous policy functionality in relation to drivers of poverty and the subsequent failure to improve the indicators.
• The Impact of Poverty on Children Under the Age of 11 The strengths of the Marxist views on poverty are in the structural approach to the problem. Overall, the Marxist theory offers a radical solution to the problem of child poverty.
• Poverty Policy Recommendations Different leaders have considered several policies and initiatives in the past to tackle the problem of poverty and empower more people to lead better lives.
• Poverty Reduction and Natural Assets Therefore, the most efficient way to increase the efficiency of agriculture and reduce its environmental impacts is ensuring the overall economic growth in the relevant region.
• Corporate Social Responsibility & Poverty Alleviation Researchers state that “preventing and managing the negative impacts of the core business on the poor” are essential indicators of the social responsibility of the company.
• Children in Poverty in Kampong Ayer, Brunei Part of the reason is likely malnutrition that results from the eating or consumption patterns of the families and also dependency on the children to help out with the family or house chores.
• Health, Poverty, and Social Equity: Indigenous Peoples of Canada Another problem that much of northern Canada’s Indigenous Peoples face is the availability of healthcare services and people’s inability to access medical help.
• The Problem of Childhood Poverty Unequal income distribution, adult poverty, government policies that exclude children and premature pregnancy are some of the items from the long list of childhood poverty causes. Before discussing the causes and effects of childhood poverty, […]
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• The Internet and Poverty in Society The information that can be found on the web is a very useful resource but at the same time it is important to consider several things with the treatment and examination of the presented information.
• Poverty in Africa: Impact of the Economy Growth Rate Thus, a conclusion can be made that economic growth in Africa will result in the social stability of the local population.
• Poverty and Disrespect in “Coming of Age in Mississippi” by Anne Moody Life was not fair to a little Anne the chapters about her childhood are alike to a chain of unfortunate events that happened to her and her relatives.
• Vietnam’s Economic Growth and Poverty & Inequality A significant part of the population was active in employment, and this means that the numerous income-generating activities improved the economy of this country.
• Poverty and Disasters in the United States Focusing on the precaution measures and the drilling techniques that will help survive in case of a natural disaster is one of the most common tools for securing the population.
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• Poverty Sustainability in Sub-Saharan Countries: The Role of NGOs The position of research and statistics in undertaking social-counting work is not queried. It is after the research method is used in other tribulations of the charity that gaps emerge between management and research.
• “The End of Poverty” by Phillipe Diaz In the film End of Poverty, the filmmaker tries to unravel the mystery behind poverty in the world. The film is arranged in such a way that the author has persuasively argued his case that […]
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• The Poverty Rates in the USA Poverty in the U. Officially the rate of poverty was at14.3%.
• Poverty in America: A Paradox Many people especially the young people living in other countries and more so in developed countries wish to immigrate to America instead of working hard to achieve the dream of better opportunities.
• Values and Ethics: Poverty in Canada The case study1 has indicated for instance, that the number of people living in poverty in 2003 is at 4. A group of individuals would therefore be granted the mandate to lead the others in […]
• War and Poverty Connection in Developing Countries The scholars claim that conflict and war in most nations have been found to exacerbate the rate of poverty in the affected nations.
• Poverty in United States. Facts and Causes Schwartz carried out a research which showed that in the United States, about 13-17|% of the individuals live below the federal poverty line at any one single time and poverty is one of the main […]
• Cultures and Prejudice: Poverty Factors For instance, if the two cultures had in the past interacted in a negative way, the poor culture directs all the blame to the well up culture.
• Poverty and Criminal Behavoiur Relation The level of accuracy that the data collected holds cannot be 100%; there is a level of error that affects the reliability of the data collected.
• Urban Relationship Between Poverty and Crime The areas with high poverty level in the US urban areas have the highest cases of crime but this is inadequate to justify that poverty is the cause of crime.
• The End of Poverty Possibility He presents the difficulty as in inability of each poor country to get to the base rung of the ranking of economic progress if the rank is achieved; a country can drag itself up towards […]
• Poverty, Suburban Public School Violence and Solution However the extension and variation of violence in suburban schools is very different from other schools as a study by the National League of Cities of 700 communities reports that more than 50% of students […]
• Social and Economic Policy Program: Globalization, Growth, and Poverty Topic: Sustainable approaches to poverty reduction through smallholder agricultural development in rural South Africa and Kenya The majority of the poor in Africa, and indeed the whole world, live in rural areas.
• Is Poverty From Developing Countries Imagined?
• How Gender and Race Structure Poverty and Inequality Connected?
• Poverty by Anarchism and Marxism Approaches
• Colonial Economy of America: Poverty, Slavery and Rich Plantations
• Poverty as a Great Social Problem and Its Causes
• Environmental Deterioration and Poverty in Kenya
• Management Issues: The Poverty Business
• Pockets of Poverty Mar the Great Promise of Canada
• Poverty. “How the Other Half Lives” by Jacob Riis
• The Underclass Poverty and Associated Social Problems
• Child Poverty in Toronto, Ontario
• Children’s Brain Function Affected by Poverty
• Poverty Issue in America Review
• Microeconomics. Poverty in America
• Poverty and Inequality in Modern World
• Poverty and Its Effects on Females
• Poverty and Its Effects on Women
• Poverty of America: Economic Assumptions
• Poverty as a General Problem
• Feminization of Poverty – A Grave Social Concern
• Global Poverty Dimensions and Alleviating Approaches
• Poverty Level in any Country
• Theories of Fertility. Economics Aspect and Poverty.
• The Cultural Construction of Poverty
• Poverty in the US: Causes and Measures
• Poverty Rates Issue in Alberta Analysis
• “Old Age Poverty” Study by Kwan & Walsh
• Phenomena of Poverty Review
• Development Economics: Poverty Traps in Africa
• Healthcare Development. Poverty in the 1800s
• Social Problem of Poverty in the United States
• Poverty and Hip-Hop: Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy”
• Globalization Issues and Impact on Poverty and Free Trade
• Anthropology: Culture of Poverty
• Poverty, Stratification and Gender Discrimination
• Teen Pregnancy Can Lead to Suicide and Poverty
• Poverty Around the World
• Poverty in Los Angeles
• “Rethinking the Sociological Measurement of Poverty” by Brady
• Poverty in the US: Essentials of Sociology
• Econometrics: Poverty, Unemployment, Household Income
• Religious Quotes on Poverty and Their Interpretations
• Poverty and Inequality in “Rich and Poor” by Peter Singer
• The Relation Between Poverty and Justice
• Canada and the Imposition of Poverty
• Poverty and Politics in “The Bottom Billion” by Collier
• The Impact of Poverty in African American Communities
• “Poverty and Joy: The Franciscan Tradition” by Short
• International Financial Institutions’ Poverty Reduction Strategy
• Social Study: Mamelodi Residents Living in Poverty
• Video Volunteers’ Interventions Against Poverty
• Poverty in American Single-Parent Families
• Single-Mother Poverty and Policies in the United States
• Poverty and Its Aspects in Historical Documents
• Economic Development: Prosperity and Poverty
• Poverty and Its Relative Definitions
• Poverty in America: An Ethical Dilemma
• Child Poverty and Academic Achievement Association
• Poverty as a Factor of Terrorist Recruitment
• Poverty Solution as a Political Issue in Australia
• Poverty: An Echo of Capitalism
• Poverty, Inequality and Social Policy Understanding
• Breastfeeding Impact on Canadian Poverty Gaps
• Urban and Suburban Poverty in the United States
• Poverty and Child Health in the US and the UK
• Poverty Impact on Life Perception
• Energy Poverty Elimination in Developing Countries
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
• Vietnamese Poverty and Productivity Increase
• Global Health Governance and Poverty
• Poverty Rates Among Whites and Blacks Americans
• Culture of Poverty in the “Park Avenue” Documentary
• Poverty in the US
• Poor Economics and Global Poverty
• Poverty as a Cause of the Sudanese Civil War
• “Halving Global Poverty” by Besley and Burges
• Do Poverty Traps Exist? Assessing the Evidence
• Poverty Reasons in Ancient Times and Nowadays
• American War on Poverty Throughout US History
• Poverty and Challenges in Finding Solutions
• Children and Poverty in “Born into Brothels” Documentary
• Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States
• Poverty in “A Theology of Liberation” by Gutierrez
• Poverty Reduction Among American Single Mothers
• The Relationship Between Poverty and Education
• Divorce Outcomes: Poverty and Instability
• African Poverty at the Millennium: Causes and Challenges
• Poverty Effect on Children
• Poverty and Education: School Funding Reinforces Inequality
• Global Poverty and the Endeavors of Addressing It
• Global Poverty Reduction: Economic Policy Recommendation
• Global Conflict and Poverty Crisis
• Poverty in the Novel “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk
• The Rise of Poverty in the US
• Profit From Organizing Tours to Poverty Areas
• Detroit Poverty and “Focus Hope” Organization
• Poverty Controversy in the USA
• Poverty as the Deprivation of Capabilities
• Suburbanisation of Poverty in the USA
• The Solution to World Poverty by Peter Singer
• The Poverty Across the US Culture
• How Racial Segregation Contributes to Minority’s Poverty?
• Catholic Dealing With Poverty and Homelessness
• Human Capital and Poverty in Scottsdale
• Global Poverty Studies and Their Importance
• The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform
• Challenges of Social Integration: Poverty
• Globalization and the Issue of Poverty: Making the World a Better Place
• The Economic Effect of Issuing Food Stamps to Those in Poverty
• Business and Pollution Inequality in Poor States
• What Should You Do? Poverty Issue
• Causes of Poverty Traps in an Economy, Its Results and Ways of Avoiding Them
• Millennium Development Goals – Energy and Poverty Solutions
• Sociological Indicators of Energy Poverty
• Energy and Poverty Solutions – Non-Traditional Cookstoves
• Energy and Poverty Solutions – World Bank
• How do Migration and Urbanization Bring About Urban Poverty in Developing Countries?
• Poverty and Domestic Violence
• The Rise of Extremist Groups, Disparity and Poverty
• Measuring Poverty and Social Exclusion in Australia
• Does Poverty Lead to Terrorism?
• “Urban and Rural Estimates of Poverty: Recent Advances in Spatial Microsimulation in Australia” by Tanton, R, Harding, A, and McNamara, J
• Importance of Foreign Aid in Poverty Reducing
• Wordsworth’s Vision of Childhood in His Poems “We Are Seven” and “Alice Fell or Poverty”
• Hispanic Childhood Poverty in the United States
• How Poverty Affects Children Development?
• Why Is Poverty Important in Contemporary Security Studies?
• Millennium Development Goals in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Haiti, and Chad
• Development Is No Longer the Solution to Poverty
• Issues Underlying Global Poverty and Provision of Aid
• Films Comparison: “The Fields” by Roland Joffe and “Hotel Rwanda” by Terry George
• Poverty Prevalence in the United States
• Terrorism, Poverty and Financial Instability
• Global Poverty and Education
• Critical Analyses of the Climate of Fear Report From Southern Poverty Law Center
• How World Vision International Contributes to Poverty Reduction
• Global Poverty, Social Poverty and Education
• Global Poverty, Social Policy, and Education
• Poverty Reduction in Africa, Central America and Asia
• The Connection Between Poverty and Mental Health Problems
• Does Parental Involvement and Poverty Affect Children’s Education and Their Overall Performance?
• African Poverty: To Aid, or Not to Aid
• Poverty Fighting in Saudi Arabia and in USA
• Technological Development in Trade and Its Impacts on Poverty
• Poverty and Development Into the 21st Century
• Social Dynamics: The Southern Poverty Law Centre
• Property, Urban Poverty and Spatial Marginalization
• Rural Poverty in Indonesia
• Is Poverty of Poor Countries in Anyway Due to Wealth of the Rich?
• Poverty and Gender Violence in Congo
• Correlation Between Poverty and Obesity
• Fight Poverty, Fight Illiteracy in Mississippi Initiative
• Civil War and Poverty: “The Bottom Billion” by Paul Collier
• Analytical Research: Poverty in Thailand: Peculiarities and Perspectives
• Poverty Indicators in Developing Countries
• Poverty, Homelessness and Discrimination in Australia: The Case of the Aboriginal
• Social Business Scope in Alleviating Poverty
• Africa’s Poverty: The Influence of Western States
• Susceptibility of Women and Aboriginal People to Poverty in Canada
• MDG Poverty Goals May Be Achieved, but Child Mortality Is Not Improving
• We Can Stop Poverty in Ghana Today
• Poverty in India and China
• Third World Countries and the Barriers Stopping Them to Escape Poverty
• Microcredit: A Tool for Poverty Alleviation
• Impacts of Global Poverty Resistance
• Reducing Poverty: Unilever and Oxfam
• Poverty in the United States
• The Mothers Who Are Not Single: Striving to Avoid Poverty in Single-Parent Families
• Effect of Poverty on Children Cognitive and Learning Ability
• Sweatshops and Third World Poverty
• War on Poverty: Poverty Problem in US
• Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right and the UN Declaration of Human Rights
• War on Poverty in US
• The Causes of Poverty Concentration in the Modern World
• Poverty in Saudi Arabia
• Poverty as a Peculiarity of the Economical Development
• Capitalism and Poverty
• The Problems of Poverty in the Modern World
• Poverty Among Women and Aboriginals
• On (Not) Getting by in America: Economic Order and Poverty in the U.S.
• The Singer Solution to World Poverty
• Poverty and Inequality in Jacksonian America
• Poverty in America Rural and Urban Difference (Education)
• What Is the Relationship Between Race, Poverty and Prison?
• Poverty and Its Effects on Childhood Education
• Poverty in Russia During the Late Nineteenth Century
• Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty: Advantages of Microcredit
• Social Welfare Policy That Facilitates Reduction of Poverty and Inequality in the US
• Immigrant Status and Poverty: How Are They Linked?
• Effects of Poverty on Immigrant Children
• The Problem of Immigrants Poverty in the US
• Why Poverty Rates are Higher Among Single Black Mothers
• Poverty and Its Impact on Global Health: Research Methodologies
• Poverty Concerns in Today’s Society
• Literature Study on the Modern Poverty Concerns
• Poverty and Wealth in “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara
• Peter Singer on Resolving the World Poverty
• Aspects of Global Poverty
• Concepts of Prenatal Drug Exposure vs. Poverty on Infants
• UN Summit in New York: Ending Global Poverty
• Why Has Poverty Increased in Zimbabwe?
• Should Private Donations Help Eliminate Child Poverty?
• Why Was Poverty Re-Discovered in Britain in the Late 1950s and Early 1960?
• Why Does Child Labour Persist With Declining Poverty?
• Why Are Child Poverty Rates Higher in Britain Than in Germany?
• What Are the Principles and Practices for Measuring Child Poverty in Rich Countries?
• Why Did Poverty Drop for the Elderly?
• What Is the Relationship Between Income Distribution and Poverty Reduction in the UK?
• What Are the Pros and Cons of Poverty in Latin America?
• Should Poverty Researchers Worry About Inequality?
• What Helps Households With Children in Leaving Poverty?
• What Is the Connection Between Poverty and Crime?
• Why Have Some Indian States Done Better Than Others at Reducing Rural Poverty?
• What Is the Relationship Between Lack of Education and Poverty?
• Why Are Child Poverty Rates So Persistently High in Spain?
• Trade Liberalisation and Poverty: What Are the Links?
• What Are Academic Programs Available for Youth in Poverty?
• What Are the Main Factors Contributing to the Rise in Poverty in Canada?
• Single-Mother Poverty: How Much Do Educational Differences in Single Motherhood Matter?
• What Are the Causes and Effects of Poverty in the United?
• Why Are Some Countries Poor?
• What Is the Link Between Globalization and Poverty?
• What Are the Factors That Influence Poverty Sociology?
• What Causes Poverty Within the United States Economy?
• What Is the Relationship Between Poverty and Obesity?
• Why Were Poverty Rates So High in the 1980s?
• With Exhaustible Resources, Can a Developing Country Escape From the Poverty Trap?
• Why Does Poverty Persist in Rural Ethiopia?
• Who Became Poor, Who Escaped Poverty, and Why?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Child Poverty — A Difficult Childhood: Effects of Poverty on Child Development

A Difficult Childhood: Effects of Poverty on Child Development

• Categories: Child Poverty Children Development

About this sample

Words: 1192 |

Published: Jan 21, 2020

Words: 1192 | Pages: 3 | 6 min read

Table of contents

Definition of child development, works cited.

• Brooks-Gunn, J., & Duncan, G. J. (1997). The effects of poverty on children. The future of children, 55-71.
• Duncan, G. J., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1997). Consequences of growing up poor. Russell Sage Foundation.
• National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. (2005). Excessive Stress Disrupts the Architecture of the Developing Brain: Working Paper 3. Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
• Shonkoff, J. P., Boyce, W. T., & McEwen, B. S. (2009). Neuroscience, molecular biology, and the childhood roots of health disparities: building a new framework for health promotion and disease prevention. Jama, 301(21), 2252-2259.
• Ziol-Guest, K. M., & McKenna, C. C. (2014). Early childhood poverty, immune-mediated disease processes, and adult productivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(26), 9512-9517.
• Fernald, L. C., Gertler, P. J., & Neufeld, L. M. (2008). Role of cash in conditional cash transfer programmes for child health, growth, and development: an analysis of Mexico's Oportunidades. The Lancet, 371(9615), 828-837.
• Luby, J. L., Belden, A., Harms, M. P., Tillman, R., & Barch, D. M. (2016). Preschool is a sensitive period for the influence of maternal support on the trajectory of hippocampal development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(20), 5742-5747.
• Li, W., Li, Y., Zhou, Y., Chen, T., Li, C., Li, L., ... & Huang, L. (2020). The Effects of Childhood Poverty on Brain Development and Cognitive Functions. Neuroscience Bulletin, 36(7), 757-764.
• Farah, M. J. (2017). The neuroscience of socioeconomic status: correlates, causes, and consequences. Neuron, 96(1), 56-71.
• Purtell, K. M., & McLoyd, V. C. (2015). Parents’ income and children’s outcomes: A quasi-experimental study. Developmental psychology , 51(1), 12.

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The impact of poverty on early childhood

For most parents, bringing a baby into the world and nurturing a young child brings both great joy and intense love, but it also comes with many changes, and sometimes stress, pressure and anxiety. Those pressures and stresses are likely to be much greater for families who are struggling to make ends meet.  In the UK today, more than one in four families with a child under five are living in poverty .  

Experiencing poverty can cause harm at any age, but particularly for the youngest children. This is when the foundations for their physical, emotional and social development are being laid. A substantial body of research shows that family poverty is associated with and can cause poorer academic attainment and social and emotional development. Perhaps not surprisingly, poverty can be highly detrimental if it is persistent, experienced in the first three years of life and combined with other disadvantages. Given this, addressing early childhood poverty is a vital part of the jigsaw of support needed to enable young children to flourish.

The harm that poverty can inflict begins during pregnancy and is shaped by the health and well-being of parents and their socio-economic status. Gaps in development between disadvantaged and advantaged children emerge very early on. Poverty impacts are also not the same for everyone and are further compounded by inequalities in relation to parents’ ethnicity, health and economic status. By the time a child reaches 11 months there are gaps in communication and language skills, and by the age of three inequalities in children’s cognitive and social and emotional skills are evident. A large body of analysis shows how these early disadvantages can go on to affect children’s development in later life.

Importantly, this is not to say that economic disadvantage inevitably leads to poor long-term outcomes; other factors – family circumstances, wider family support, social networks and connections, educational resources and public services - all play a vital role and can mitigate the effects of poverty.

Younger children are more likely to be in poverty than other groups 

Poverty here is defined as not having enough material resources such as money, housing, or food to meet the minimum needs - both material and social – in today’s society. While there have been some key changes over the last two decades, there is one constant – children are markedly more likely to experience poverty than adults or pensioners and it is younger children who are most at risk .

This is the result of a combination of factors including the costs of children and that households with younger children are less likely to have two parents in full-time work parents. The latest figures show that there are some 4.2 million children living in poverty in the UK, a rise of 600,000 over the last decade.

Most worryingly deep poverty has been rising, particularly affecting lone parents, large families, and people living in families with a disabled person. The Runnymede Trust found that Black and minority ethnic people are currently 2.2 times more likely to be in deep poverty than white people, with Bangladeshi people more than three times more likely.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report on Destitution in the UK 202 3 found that over 1 million children had experienced destitution at some point over 2022.

Poverty affects children’s material, social, educational and emotional well-being

Poverty affects young children’s experiences directly. Parents have less money to meet children’s material and social needs. The sharply rising costs of providing the basic essentials – food, warmth, lighting, housing costs, nappies, baby food, clothing - has created acute pressure for many families. Drawing on a survey of their service users, in 2022 Barnardo’s reported that 30% of parents said their child’s mental health had worsened in the previous four months, 16% said their child/ren had to share a bed with them or a sibling, and 30% were concerned about losing their home/being made homeless.

Recent research (Ruth Patrick et al. 2023 ) looked at the effects of benefit changes on larger families. It shows the many hardships that families are dealing with, the inability to meet their children’s needs and the stress and worry they feel as a result. But it also shows the resilience, strength and skills they employ to give their children the best possible life in the circumstances. Families spoke about the sheer amount of time it takes to manage on a very tight budget and its direct impact on children – from missing bath time to reading a bedtime story. This is affecting children’s educational outcomes. 95% of teachers surveyed by Kindred Squared believe that the cost-of-living crisis is going to impact school readiness next year.

Poverty gets under your skin; it takes a toll on the mental health of mothers, fathers, and wider family. The Family Stress Model, underpinned by research, shows the way in which economic stress - poverty, hardship, debt - creates psychological distress, lack of control and feelings of stigma. Not surprisingly, these stresses affect family relationships, both between parents and with children. Hardship, debt, deprivation and ‘feeling poor’ is linked to poorer maternal mental health and lower life satisfaction and this can make it more difficult to find the mental space to be an attentive and responsive parent. This in turn can affect young children’s social and emotional development and outcomes.

What can we do?

Explaining how poverty affects young children’s well-being and outcomes is important when it comes to developing effective responses: addressing poverty and hardship directly, supporting parents’, especially mothers’, mental health, and providing support for parenting.

The research also helps identify the protective factors that help to reduce the detrimental impact of poverty: wider family and neighbourhood support, good maternal and paternal mental health, access to high quality early education, warm parent-child interaction and financial and housing stability.

Early years professionals, health visitors, family support workers and many others are in the front line of the difficulties that families with young children are facing. They are responding to the legacy of the Covid pandemic and the rise in cost of living, working across service boundaries and in new ways, despite budgetary pressures.

Local services are working to meet the needs of families with young children in the round – including support for maternal mental health, parental conflict, parenting and the home learning environment. There are many voluntary initiatives, such as Save the Children’s Building Blocks, which combines giving grants to reduce the impact of material deprivation with supporting parents to play and learn with their children at home, initiatives to use local authority data to increase the take-up of benefit entitlements, and thebaby bank network, providing essential products and equipment as well as practical support for parents who are struggling.

Tackling early childhood poverty rests both on public policy which takes a holistic and joined up approach, as well as action at local level, whether that’s through local authorities, early years services in health and education, local businesses and community and voluntary initiatives.

In the Nuffield Foundation’s Changing Face of Early Childhood , we set out some core principles to address early childhood poverty including:

A multi-dimensional approach that reflects the range of socioeconomic risks and intersecting needs faced by families with young children.

Money matters - a financial bedrock for families with young children living on a low income, through improved social security benefits and access to employment, which takes account of the care needs of the under-fives.

Greater attention and investment in policies to support parental mental health and parenting from the earliest stage of a child’s life.

A more coherent, joined up and effective approach to early childhood would help to address the inequalities between children by supporting them early on in life and establishing deep roots from which they can grow and flourish.

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Ending child poverty, unicef advocates for greater national investments in social protection and supports government efforts to track and monitor progress on poverty reduction..

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The challenge

Countries in Europe and Central Asia have seen impressive economic growth over the past 20 years, alongside improved standards of living and a halving of the number of people living in poverty. But progress has masked persistent equity gaps, with the benefits of economic advances shared unevenly. 

Children are more likely to be poor than adults. And some children are more likely to be poor than others, particularly children with disabilities , children from larger families and those in remote rural areas. Roma children also suffer disproportionately from poverty and remain one of the poorest groups in the region: a Roma child is twice as likely to grow up in poverty as a non-Roma child. 

The legacy of child poverty can last a lifetime.

Poverty in childhood can have life-long consequences, with the poorest children less likely to access health care  or complete their education and more likely to suffer from poor nutrition .

Children who do not reach their full potential cannot contribute fully to social, political and economic growth, and those who grow up in poverty are more likely to be poor when they are older, perpetuating a cycle of poverty and disadvantage. 

It is in every government’s long-term interest to invest in children and in child-sensitive social protection to prevent, manage and overcome the poverty that threatens their well-being. Social protection includes cash transfers, such as child benefits to shield children from the worst impacts of poverty, as well as integrated systems to provide vulnerable children and families with the extra support and care they need. 

Too many children are still denied social protection to ease the impact of poverty. 

While there has been an increase in social protection to meet the needs of children in the region, too many are still being left behind. Governments are cutting their spending on social protection, with benefits for children and families being eroded by austerity measures in the wake of the global financial crisis. 

On average, only around 10 per cent of social protection expenditure in the region goes to child and family benefits. Those benefits are usually too small to lift families out of poverty, and many people in need are still excluded from them entirely.   

The roots of the problem lie in a mix of: 

• a failure to prioritize the social protection programmes that have the greatest benefits for children
• limited budgets and human resources 
• barriers such as bureaucratic processes and lack of information about entitlements and programmes, and
• discrimination against the most vulnerable people, including those who receive social protection.

The result: the most vulnerable children in the region are not being reached by benefits to which they are entitled.

The solution

All children have the right to a standard of living that ensures their full development. That is why UNICEF supports governments as they attempt to shield children from the impact of poverty and deprivation. 

Aiming for an end to poverty – in line with Sustainable Development Goal 1 – we work with governments and other partners across the region to halve child poverty by 2030 and strengthen social protection systems to diminish the impact of poverty on their lives. 

We gather and analyse evidence on what works, pushing to translate that evidence into concrete policies and actions for children, especially the most disadvantaged. We also support national efforts to monitor child poverty, making it possible to track progress across the region. 

We look beyond monetary poverty.

We also innovate, looking beyond monetary poverty to the wider well-being of children and their families. One prime example is our collaboration with the World Bank on the Listening to Tajikistan (L2TJK) survey. This monitors life satisfaction to provide vital information on the kinds of ‘shocks’ that can undermine family well-being, including illness, medical expenses, food shortages or migration – crucial factors that are missed by traditional surveys focused solely on income. 

UNICEF’s Social Monitor report provides unique perspectives on children’s living conditions and vulnerability and has played a pivotal role in shaping economic and social policy and debate across the region. 

A cross-sectoral approach to tackle child poverty.

Our support for government efforts are guided by our Social Protection Strategy, which promotes child-sensitive social protection that is led by governments and integrated across sectors, including health, nutrition and education. The Strategy aims to tackle the many challenges faced by vulnerable children, which are rarely limited to lack of income. 

This work improves the lives of children in two ways. First, we promote social assistance benefits that can increase living standards and reduce child poverty, focusing on outreach to ensure that the most marginalized and vulnerable people are able to access the benefits to which they are entitled. Second, we promote social transfer systems that dovetail with other services to ensure that marginalized children and adolescents have access to health care , education , job training and HIV/AIDS programmes. 

In Georgia, for example, our work with the Government and the World Bank has supported a major increase in social benefits for children. Georgia introduced a child benefit in 2015, which reached more than 153,000 children under the age of 16 in 2016. More than half of these qualified for the benefit as a result of a methodology developed by UNICEF and partners.  

Roma children

The Roma are one of Europe’s largest and most disadvantaged minority groups. Of the 10 to 12 million Roma people in Europe, around two-thirds live in central and eastern European countries. While some have escaped from poverty, millions live in slums and lack the basic services they need, from healthcare and education to electricity and clean water. 

Many Roma children are excluded from the services and support enjoyed by others. In line with our mandate to prioritize the most marginalized children and empower communities, UNICEF upholds their rights by addressing their lack of opportunities.

Integrated social protection systems can reduce multi-dimensional poverty, (both monetary poverty and other vulnerabilities), empowering families and individuals and contributing to achievement of  Sustainable Development Goal 1, End poverty in all its forms everywhere .

The ‘Integrated Social Protection Systems: Review of Different Approaches in UNICEF Europe and Central Asia Region’ (ECAR) studies 17 ECAR countries’ social protection systems and focuses on three country case studies in  Armenia ,  Moldova  and  North Macedonia  representing diverse approaches on coordination and integration of social protection services and programmes for children and families.

These resources on child poverty represent just a small selection of materials produced by UNICEF and its partners in the region. The list is regularly updated to include latest information. 

Responses to disasters and crises through subnational social protection systems (2023) - UNICEF

Preparing social protection systems for shock response. Case study from Armenia (2020) - UNICEF

Preparing social protection systems for shock response. Case study from Tajikistan (2020) - UNICEF

Universal Child Benefits in Europe and Central Asia (2020) - UNICEF

Inclusive Social Protection Systems for Children with Disabilities  (2019) - UNICEF

Supporting Families and Providing Early Childhood Education and Care in Europe and Central Asia (2019) - UNICEF

Supporting National Social Protection Systems to Respond in Times of Crisis. Case Sturdy of Kyrgyzstan (2019)  - UNICEF

Approaches to Providing Cash Based Assistance in Protracted Crises. Lessons from Turkey (2019) - UNICEF

Child poverty in Europe and Central Asia region (2017) - UNICEF

Resilience, humanitarian assistance and social protection for children in Europe and Central Asia - Social Protection Regional Issue Brief: 2  (2017) - UNICEF

The Effectiveness and Impact of Social Protection in support of Children’s Wellbeing - Social Protection Regional Issue Brief: 1 (2017) - UNICEF

Rapid Review of Gender and Inclusion  (2016) - UNICEF

Promising practices in Social Protection for children in Europe and Central Asia (2016) - UNICEF

The Social Monitor Report  (2015) - UNICEF

COVID-19 impact on the remittances

Assesment of coping mechanisms of families with children from the Republic of Moldova

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

Reducing poverty by supporting children with disabilities

Children with disabilities’ opportunity to lead fulfilling lives and participate in society depend on the extent to which they are supported and included

Deepening poverty lines

Since 2020, child poverty in Europe and Central Asia has soared affecting 24.3 million children across the region