Economic Well-being

In this commentary for BlogHer.com, Urban Institute fellow Olivia Golden discusses a two-generation policy agenda that can help promote young children's development and low-wage workers' economic stability, which should start with a national focus on the first year of life.

Considerable research attention has been devoted to low-income mothers disconnected from both work and welfare. This body of work has rarely highlighted disconnected mothers' roles as parents and has remained virtually silent about the experiences and well-being of their children. This paper synthesizes research findings to show that many of the circumstances disconnected mothers face pose major risks to children's development and potentially serious consequences for children. We describe potential interventions to help disconnected families by increasing and stabilizing family income, enhancing parenting skills, supporting children directly, and reaching out to disconnected mothers who are not citizens.

This issue brief examines unemployment from a child's perspective, reporting that 6.2 million children lived in families with unemployed parents in 2012. Many of these children live with parents who have been out of work six month or longer. Unemployment insurance covers only 36 percent of children with unemployed parents; unemployed parents are more likely to receive SNAP benefits than UI benefits. The brief provides estimates of children affected by unemployment by state and metropolitan area, considers the effects of parental job loss on child development, and reviews policies affecting the safety net for children of the unemployed.

Zone 126 is a nonprofit neighborhood organization in Queens, New York City that was awarded a Promise Neighborhood planning grant from the US Department of Education in 2011. The Urban Institute developed a neighborhood survey for residents of Astoria Houses, a public housing development in the Zone 126 neighborhood, to support Zone 126's needs assessment and planning process. Zone 126 used results from the survey to inform the initiative’s family and child-centered programming. This report summarizes the methodology and findings of the survey and provides the survey instrument and sources of survey questions.

This issue brief provides nearly "real-time" tracking of the recession's impact on children, with state-by-state data through 2012 on children with an unemployed parent and individuals receiving SNAP benefits, as well as the authors' predictions of state child poverty rates for 2012. There has not been much change in children's economic well-being over the past year, but there has been a sharp deterioration compared with conditions before the recession. Compared to 2007, more children today live in families with an unemployed parent, families that turn to SNAP benefits to help pay their grocery bills, and/or families below the poverty threshold.

Nearly half of children born to poor parents remained poor half their childhoods. Black children are especially disadvantaged: two-thirds of poor black newborns are persistently poor. Children who are poor early in life (age 0-2) are 30 percent less likely to complete high school than those first poor later in childhood, even after controlling for poverty duration and other factors. Reaching vulnerable children at birth is vital, as a child’s early environment can affect brain development. This factsheet summarizes the report “Child Poverty and Its Lasting Consequence".

One in six newborns were born poor over the past 40 years, and nearly half remained poor half their childhoods. These persistently poor children are nearly 90 percent more likely than never-poor children to enter their 20s without completing high school and are four times more likely to give birth outside of marriage during their teenage years. Children whose parents did not complete high school are less likely to complete high school themselves. This paper examines the magnitude of child poverty, family characteristics related to childhood poverty persistence, and childhood poverty’s lasting consequences.

White children born to poor high school dropouts are 12 percentage points more likely to be persistently poor (that is, poor for at least half their lives from birth through age 17) than white children whose poor parents earned a diploma. The comparable number for black children is 21 percentage points. The difference between white children whose parents did not finish 12th grade and whose parents have education beyond high school is 30 percentage points. For black children, the figure is 45 percentage points.