Important gains for children have been found both in programs that boost income by raising parental employment and in programs that raise income without an increase in parental employment. Another may be by helping families afford better learning environments from child care through college. One way that the added income may help is, for example, by reducing severe poverty-related stress, a condition that scientists have linked to lasting consequences for children’s brain development and physical health. Researchers are still exploring the reasons why more adequate family income helps children over the long term. In addition, a recent well-known housing study found that housing vouchers that help poor families move to less poor neighborhoods before children turn 13 raise the earnings of these children by 31 percent when they reach adulthood. The findings come from studies of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), anti-poverty and welfare-to-work pilot programs in the 1990s, an earlier public assistance program for mothers, and various negative income tax experiments in the late 1960s through early 1980s, among others. Other economic security programs have been found to improve health outcomes at birth, raise reading and math test scores in middle school, increase high school completion and college entry, lift lifetime income, and extend longevity. In addition, women who had access to food stamps as young children had improved economic self-sufficiency in adulthood. For example, a study of the long-term effects of the introduction of food stamps (now known as SNAP) in the 1960s and 1970s found that young children who had access to food stamps grew up to have higher high school graduation rates and lower rates of certain health problems such as heart disease and obesity, as compared to similar disadvantaged children who lacked access to food stamps because their county hadn’t yet implemented the program. That is, income itself matters.Įconomic security programs can blunt these negative effects of poverty and bring poor children closer to equal opportunity. Economic security programs can blunt these negative effects of poverty and bring poor children closer to equal opportunity, numerous studies find. Further, these adverse outcomes happen “in part because they are poorer, not just because low income is correlated with other household and parental characteristics,” a recent systematic research review concludes. This pattern is especially clear for the poorest and youngest children and those who remain in poverty a long time during childhood. Children experiencing poverty tend to be worse off in a range of ways, including being more likely to enter school behind their peers, scoring lower on achievement tests, working less and earning less as adults, and having worse health outcomes. children spend a year or more below the poverty line before their 18th birthday. Government economic security programs such as food assistance, housing subsidies, and working-family tax credits - which bolster income, help families afford basic needs, and keep millions of children above the poverty line - also have longer-term benefits, studies find: they help children to do better in school and increase their earning power in their adult years.
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