Which Statement Best Summarizes How American Families Are Changing - T-Tees - Your Answers Await, Life's Questions Unraveled

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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.