Economic Shifts Render Children Vulnerable to Poverty

The increase in child poverty in the Midwest since 2000 by 29 percent, compared to 12 percent for the entire United States, is largely due to macroeconomic trends rather than family characteristics such as parent’s employment status, level of education, or nativity, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty in a report entitled “The New Poor” released last month. The Midwest accounts for nearly half of the increase nationwide.

As the report documents, “the Midwest has experienced a 29 percent increase in the number of children living in poor families, rising from 2.2 million in 2000 to more than 2.8 million in 2004. With over 634,000 children added to the poverty rolls of the region, this rise in child poverty was by far the largest in any of the four regions over the last five years and has been the driving force behind the overall increase at the national level.”

The Midwest, which has yet to recover fully from the 2001 recession, is the only region in the country where poverty increased among children with employed parents. Even so, the Midwest’s increase in child poverty rose the most not only among children whose parents were employed but also among children whose parents did not have a college education. This was not the case for other regions in the United States. In the South, for example, the rise in poverty occurred the most among immigrant children compared with the children of native-born parents.

Service-sector jobs—jobs that pay lower wages, have fewer options for full-time employment, and are less likely to offer health insurance or paid leave—have gradually filled the loss of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest. But such jobs, the report concludes, are not enough to keep families out of poverty. Public benefit programs (food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Medicaid) are a necessary buffer for harsh economic trends.

See http://nccp.org/media/npr06_text.pdf. For more information, contact Wendy Pollack at 312 263 3830 ext. 238. Tina Hernandez Lasquety and Andrew Hammond wrote this article.