Child poverty - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Child poverty refers to the phenomenon of children living in poverty

Poverty

Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...

. This applies to children that come from poor families or orphans being raised with limited, or in some cases absent, state resources. Children that fail to meet the minimum acceptable standard of life for the nation where that child lives are said to be poor. In developing countries these standards are lower and when combined with the increased number of orphans the effects are more extreme.

Definition

The legal definition of children in most countries is 'persons under the age of eighteen',
while biologically the transition from childhood to adulthood is said to occur with the onset of puberty. Culturally defining the end of childhood is more complex, and takes into account factors such as the commenc ement of work, end of schooling and marriage as well as class, gender and race. According to the United Nations Children's Fund

United Nations Children's Fund

United Nations Children's Fund was created by the United Nations General Assembly on December 11, 1946, to provide emergency food and healthcare to children in countries that had been devastated by World War II...

(UNICEF) "children living in poverty are those who experience deprivation of the material, spiritual and emotional resources needed to survive, develop and thrive, leaving them unable to enjoy their rights, achieve their full potential or participate as full and equal members of society". The ChildFund International (CFI) definition is based on Deprivation (lack of materialistic conditions and services), Exclusion (denial of rights and safety) and Vulnerability (when society can not deal with threats to children). Other charitable organisations also use this multi-dimensional approach to child poverty, defining it as a combination of economic, social, cultural, physical, environmental and emotional factors. These definitions suggest child poverty is multidimensional, relative to their current and changing living conditions and complex interactions of the body, mind and emotions are involved.

Measuring child poverty

The easiest way to quantify child poverty is by setting an absolute or relative monetary threshold. If a family does not earn above that threshold the children of that family will be considered to live below the poverty line. Absolute poverty thresholds are fixed and generally only updated for price changes, whereas relative poverty thresholds are developed with reference to the actual income of the population and reflect changes in consumption. The absolute poverty threshold is the money needed to purchase a defined quantity of goods and services. While there is no exact standard used to set the threshold, and they vary from country to country, it generally reflects the minimum income needed to acquire the necessities of life. Certain organisations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, use the absolute poverty threshold of US$1 a day to measure poverty in developing countries. Since the 1960s, the US has used an absolute poverty threshold adjusted for family size and composition to determine those living in poverty.

Europe and a lot of other developed countries use a relative poverty threshold, typically 50% of the countries average income. Relative poverty does not necessarily mean the child is lacking anything, but is more a reflection of inequality in society. Child poverty, when measured using relative thresholds will only improve if low-income families benefit more from economic advances than well-off families. Measures of child poverty using income thresholds will vary depending on whether relative or absolute poverty is measured and what threshold limits are applied. Using a relative measure, poverty is much higher in the US than in Europe, but if an absolute measure is used then poverty in some European countries is higher. It is argued that using income as the only threshold ignores the multidimensional aspect of child poverty, which includes consumption requirements, access to resources and the ability to interact in society safely and without discrimination.

A 2003 study conducted by researchers out of Bristol attempted to provide a scientific basis for measuring severe deprivation based on levels of adequate nutrition, safe drinking water, decent sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education, and information. Measurable values were attributed to each indicator and these were used to establish how many children were living in poverty. The values included; heights and weights more than 3 deviations below the international median, children with access only to rivers and other surface water, no access to toilets, no immunisations, no access to medical advice, living in dwellings with more than five people per room, no school attendance and no access to newspapers or other media. Out of a population of 1.8 billion children from developing nations, 56% were below at least one of these measurements. In Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia this number increased to over 80%, with the rural children from these areas the worst affected.

The Young Lives Project is investigating the changing nature of child poverty by following nearly 12 000 children for 15 years in four countries (Ethiopia, Peru, Vietnam and India) chosen to reflect a wide range of cultural, political, geographical and social contexts. Every three to four years researchers will collect data on the children and their families health, malnutrition, literacy, access to services and other indicators of poverty. Reports are available for these four countries that comparing the initial data obtained in 2002 with data from 2006. Peru, Vietnam and India have shown economic growth and a reduction in poverty over this time, but large inequalities still exist between rural and urban areas, and among ethnic groups. This is particularly obvious in India, a country with the second largest population of billionaires but also home to 25% of the worlds poor. Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world, has also shown slight economic growth and reduction in poverty. Inequalities still exist, with boys more likely to be malnourished than girls and more absolute poverty in rural areas, although relative poverty is higher in urban areas. This data was collected before the 2008 drought and the recent increase in food prices, which have had a severe impact on the ability of Ethiopia to feed its population

Capability Approach and the Child Development Index

Recently, debate among philosophers and theorists on how to define and measure poverty stems from the emergence of the human capability approach

Capability approach

The capability approach was initially conceived in the 1980s as an approach to welfare economics....

, where poverty is defined by the extent of freedoms that a person possesses. Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen, CH is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members...

, the creator of the capability approach, argues that there are five fundamental freedoms that should be available to all humans: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. He also suggests that they are all interconnected, where each freedom fosters and/or enhances the others.

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

Human Development Index

The Human Development Index is a composite statistic used to rank countries by level of "human development" and separate "very high human development", "high human development", "medium human development", and "low human development" countries...

attempt to accomplish.

In light of this, a UK initiative, Save the Children

Save the Children

Save the Children is an internationally active non-governmental organization that enforces children's rights, provides relief and helps support children in developing countries...

, has also developed a measurement of child poverty based on measures of capability, called the Child Development Index

Child Development Index

The Child Development Index is an index combining performance measures specific to children - education, health and nutrition - to produce a score on a scale of 0 to 100. A zero score would be the best...

(CDI). CDI is an index that combines performance measures specific to children – primary education, child health, and child nutrition – to produce a score on a scale of 0 to 100, with zero being the best with higher scores indicating worse performances. According to Save the Children, each of the indicators was chosen because they were easily accessible, universally understood, and clearly indicative of child wellbeing. Health measures under-five mortality rate

Mortality rate

Mortality rate is a measure of the number of deaths in a population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit time...

; nutrition measures the percentage of children under five who are moderately or severely underweight

Underweight

The term underweight refers to a human who is considered to be under a healthy weight. "Underweight" means weighing less than what is expected to be a healthy person . The definition is usually made with reference to the body mass index . A BMI of under 18.5 is usually referred to as underweight...

(which is two standard deviations below the median weight for age of the reference population); and education measures the percentage of primary school-age children that are not enrolled in school. In terms of opportunities and capabilities, CDI is the most appropriate measurement of child poverty.

Prevalence

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

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

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

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

Causes

The majority of poverty-stricken children are born to poor parents. Therefore the causes like adult poverty, such as government policies, lack of education, unemployment

Unemployment

Unemployment , as defined by the International Labour Organization, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively sought work within the past four weeks...

, social services, disabilities and discrimination

Discrimination

Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group. The term began to be...

significantly affect the presence of child poverty. Lack of parental economic resources like disposable income

Disposable income

Disposable income is total personal income minus personal current taxes. In national accounts definitions, personal income, minus personal current taxes equals disposable personal income...

restricts children’s opportunities. Economic and demographic factors such as deindustrialization

Deindustrialization

Deindustrialization is a process of social and economic change caused by the removal or reduction of industrial capacity or activity in a country or region, especially heavy industry or manufacturing industry. It is an opposite of industrialization.- Multiple interpretations :There are multiple...

, globalization

Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...

, residential segregation

Residential Segregation

Residential segregation is the physical separation of cultural groups based on residence and housing, or a form of segregation that "sorts population groups into various neighborhood contexts and shapes the living environment at the neighborhood level."...

, labor market segmentation

Labor market segmentation

A labor market is seen as segmented if it "consists of various sub-groups with little or no crossover capability". Segmentation can result in different groups, for example men and women, receiving different wages for the same work...

, and migration of middle-class residents from inner cities, constrain economic opportunities and choices across generation, isolating inner-city poor children.

The loss of “family values

Family values

Family values are political and social beliefs that hold the nuclear family to be the essential ethical and moral unit of society. Familialism is the ideology that promotes the family and its values as an institution....

”, or decline of the nuclear family

Nuclear family

Nuclear family is a term used to define a family group consisting of a father and mother and their children. This is in contrast to the smaller single-parent family, and to the larger extended family. Nuclear families typically center on a married couple, but not always; the nuclear family may have...

, illegitimacy, teen pregnancy, and increased numbers of single mothers, is also cited as a major cause of poverty and welfare dependency for women and their children. Children resulting from unintended pregnancies

Unintended pregnancy

Unintended pregnancies are those in which conception was not intended by the female sexual partner. Worldwide, 38% of pregnancies were unintended in 1999 . Unintended pregnancies are the primary cause of induced abortion, resulting in about 42 million induced abortions per year...

are more likely to live in poverty; raising a child requires significant resources

Cost of raising a child

The cost of raising a child varies from country to country.-Developing countries:According to Globalissues.org, "Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day." This statistic includes children. On this number, it costs roughly US$900 to raise a child for a year,...

, so each additional child increases demands on parental resources.
Families raised by a single parent are generally poorer than those raised by couples. In the United States, 6 of 10 long term poor children have spent time in single parent families and in 2007, children living in households headed by single mothers were five times as likely as children living in households headed by married parents to be living in poverty.

Many of the apparent negative associations between growing up poor and children’s attainments reflect unmeasured parental advantages that positively affect both parents’ incomes and children’s attainments, like parental depression

Depression (mood)

Depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a person's thoughts, behaviour, feelings and physical well-being. Depressed people may feel sad, anxious, empty, hopeless, helpless, worthless, guilty, irritable, or restless...

Developed countries

Many published studies have demonstrated strong associations between childhood poverty and the child’s adult outcomes in education, health and socialization

Socialization

Socialization is a term used by sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists and educationalists to refer to the process of inheriting and disseminating norms, customs and ideologies...

, fertility

Fertility

Fertility is the natural capability of producing offsprings. As a measure, "fertility rate" is the number of children born per couple, person or population. Fertility differs from fecundity, which is defined as the potential for reproduction...

, labor market, and income

Income

Income is the consumption and savings opportunity gained by an entity within a specified time frame, which is generally expressed in monetary terms. However, for households and individuals, "income is the sum of all the wages, salaries, profits, interests payments, rents and other forms of earnings...

. Strong evidence suggests that children of low income parents have an increased risk of intellectual and behavioral development problems. Large negative associations between poverty during early childhood and academic outcomes have been consistently found in many studies. Furthermore, children in poverty have a greater risk of displaying behavior and emotional problems, such as disobedience, impulsiveness, and difficulty getting along with peers, and family poverty is associated with higher risk for teen childbearing, less positive peer relations, and lower self-esteem.

In terms of economic disadvantages, adults who experienced persistent childhood poverty are more likely to fall below the poverty line at least once later in life. Poor boys work fewer hours per year, earn lower hourly wages, receive lower annual earnings, and spend more week idle in their mid-twenties. Paternal income is also strongly associated with adult economic status.

Also, childhood poverty in the first three years of life is related to substandard nutritional status and poor motor skills; in contrast, poverty is also associated with child obesity – as they get older, poor children are more likely to have chronic health problems, such as asthma

Asthma

Asthma is the common chronic inflammatory disease of the airways characterized by variable and recurring symptoms, reversible airflow obstruction, and bronchospasm. Symptoms include wheezing, coughing, chest tightness, and shortness of breath...

and anemia

Anemia

Anemia is a decrease in number of red blood cells or less than the normal quantity of hemoglobin in the blood. However, it can include decreased oxygen-binding ability of each hemoglobin molecule due to deformity or lack in numerical development as in some other types of hemoglobin...

. These impacts probably reflect issues related to poverty including a substandard diet, inferior housing conditions, poor neighborhood environment, reduced access to goods and activities and the psychological stress stemming from these factors.

Developing countries

Using a relative measure of child poverty, an impoverished child growing up in a developing country

Developing country

A developing country, also known as a less-developed country, is a nation with a low level of material well-being. Since no single definition of the term developing country is recognized internationally, the levels of development may vary widely within so-called developing countries...

suffers more hardship than most children living in poverty in a developed country

Developed country

A developed country is a country that has a high level of development according to some criteria. Which criteria, and which countries are classified as being developed, is a contentious issue...

. Poverty in these countries is a condition usually characterised by a severe deprivation of basic human needs (UN,1995). It is estimated that one third of all children in developing countries (~674 million) are living in poverty, the highest rates being in the rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (over 70%). War

War

War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...

, disease

Disease

A disease is an abnormal condition affecting the body of an organism. It is often construed to be a medical condition associated with specific symptoms and signs. It may be caused by external factors, such as infectious disease, or it may be caused by internal dysfunctions, such as autoimmune...

, corruption

Political corruption

Political corruption is the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal acts by...

, lack of resources and harsh environmental conditions afflict many of these countries, contributing to their poverty. These factors are a major cause of death, which in turn leads to a higher number of single parents and orphaned children. All UN member states have ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, with the exception of the United States and Somalia, which aims at reducing violations to a number of rights relevant to reducing child poverty in different countries). A review published by UNICEF in 2009, found declines in under five mortality, less child malnourishment, increases in breastfeeding, improved water systems and better education access. It also states that despite these improvements 24 000 children still die each day from mostly preventable diseases, 150 million 5-14 year olds are involved in child labour and 100 million primary aged children go without schooling. There are still great inequalities within populations, with girls and children from rural areas more likely to suffer poor health, education and survival than boys and urban populations. Notable state attempts to tackle child poverty in the developing world, include Brazil's Bolsa Familia initiative (reaches 12 million households) and South Africa's Child Grant (7 million households. Elsewhere, child specific social protection policies and programmes are few and the institutions to implement them are often lacking.

Cycle of poverty

The cycle of poverty

Cycle of poverty

In economics, the cycle of poverty is the "set of factors or events by which poverty, once started, is likely to continue unless there is outside intervention."...

is when a family remains in poverty over many successive generations. For this reason reducing child poverty has been a focus of almost all governments as a way to break this cycle. Improving the quality of education provided to the poor is seen by most as the best way to break this cycle. Improving the environment the child grows up in, ensuring access to health, providing financial incentives (either through benefit schemes or reducing taxes) and promoting family values have all been suggested as ways to break the cycle.

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

Policy Implications

According to the Overseas Development Institute*, greater visibility for children's rights issues is needed in donor policies and attempts should be made to emulate the success achieved using gender markers to develop gender-sensitive development policy. They believe major influential players in the children's rights community - the UNICEF, UNFPA and NGOs, such as Save the Children, Plan and World Vision - should do more to highlight the impact of mainstream macro-policies issues on children. The Overseas Development Institute further suggests that an international commission be established to address the impact of the 3-F crisis (food, financial and fuel) on children as a platform for dialogue and new initiatives.

However, determining the appropriate policies for dealing with long-term childhood poverty and intergenerational economic inequality is hotly debated, as are most proposed policy solutions, and depends on the effects that most impact the region. In order to combat the lack of resources available in developed nations, policies must be developed that deliver resources to poor families and raise skill levels of poor children by building on successful welfare-to-work initiatives and maintaining financial work supports, such as Earned Income Tax Credit

Earned income tax credit

The United States federal earned income tax credit or earned income credit is a refundable tax credit primarily for individuals and families who have low to moderate earned income. Greater tax credit is given to those who also have qualifying children...

, refundable child care tax credits and housing vouchers. To effectively address economic, demographic and cultural changes, economic and social service strategies to reverse the factors that generated the urban underclass, such as providing jobs and social services policies that deal with the effects of isolation, should be implemented. Finally, in order to reduce the loss of “family values”, policies should be aimed at expanding economic opportunities especially for disadvantaged girls.

External links

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Definition

Measuring child poverty

Capability Approach and the Child Development Index

Prevalence

Causes

Developed countries

Developing countries

Cycle of poverty

Policy Implications

See also

External links