Poverty and American Children

Research shows that poverty hurts children in many ways.

Experts and policy makers do not agree on how to stop the link between poverty and children's welfare.

Learning more about how poverty affects children can help children's well-being.

The subject of children in poverty has been studied for many years.

After World War II, experts found psychological reasons to explain why people were poor.

Caseworkers and academics thought that they could just "intervene" in poor families' psychology to keep them from being poor.

The economic system was not analyzed as a source of poverty until 1963 and afterward.

Newer studies look at poverty as the cause of psychological problems, not problems as the cause of poverty.

Unemployment and lower education lead to poverty, and poverty creates stress in parents.

Children's emotions can be hurt by stressed parents.

Stressed parents may not take care of children before or after birth, causing problems for children.

Children's health and development is at risk.

Poverty keeps parents from getting good health care for their children.

There are more children in poverty in 2003 than 1997 who do not have health insurance.

Poverty can lead to physical, psychological, and environmental neglect: a repeating cycle of problems.

Poor children may have problems with cognitive development.

Poverty is a bigger cause of cognitive problems than neglect because poverty causes

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who need health care most, actually get much less health care: Among all poor children under six years of age, 21 percent of those without health insurance had no usual source of care, compared with 4 percent of poor children covered by insurance (Wolfe, 1999, p. 9). Here is an important point about Wolfe's research. She is quoting from the National Center for Health Statistics in 1998. even more important is that her research shows that the rate of poor health for children in poverty is getting bigger, not smaller, over the years. "The ratio of poor to nonpoor children . . . 1.95 for children in 1987, but by 1996 it was 2.7" (Wolfe, 1999, p. 10). Thus health is getting worse for poor children, not better. Wolfe is in favor of giving health insurance coverage to all children. But the real point is that it does not matter whether poor parents are substance abusers or just too stressed to get good health care. The real point is that, for different reasons, they do not get the right kind of health care for their children (Bradley & Corwyn, 1999). Poor parents also don't have social support because usually all of the people they know are just as poor as they are. They are constantly worrying about basic survival, not about getting
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Approximate Word count = 3782
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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