Homeless Children Found to Cope Well--at a Price : Youth: Study shows them to be resilient but often subject to depression, disobedience and chronic illnesses.
Although they face problems most children don’t even know about, homeless children are remarkably robust and resilient, a Stanford study has found. Reasonably healthy and surprisingly well-adjusted, they not only attend school fairly regularly but act like “little adults,” helping their parents figure out how to pay bills, get food and find places to sleep.
But the study also shows that there are limits to this resilience. Even short bouts of homelessness damage children psychologically and physically in ways that often do not show up until after their families find permanent housing.
This surprising, at times dismal, portrait of children without homes was drawn by researchers at the Stanford Center for the Study of Families, Children and Youth. The report, which comprises nine separate studies, is thought to be the most comprehensive analysis to date on homeless children and their parents.
Previous studies have focused on “the numbers, the obtrusiveness and the personal deficiencies” of homeless men and women who are seen panhandling on city street corners, said Sanford Dornbusch, a Stanford sociologist and director of the project. “This study was designed to focus on the processes that lead families into and out of homelessness and the impact that homelessness has on those families, especially on children.”
The general perception is that homeless people are drug users, alcoholics or mentally ill. That often is not true, according to the researchers, especially among Latinos and blacks who make up a disproportionately large percentage of the population of homeless families.
The families are usually homeless because they do not have enough money to pay for housing and have neither family nor friends with enough room in their houses or apartments to help.
The conclusions are based on interviews with 1,021 adults and 1,720 children in the California counties of Santa Clara and San Mateo in 1990 and 1991. Although based on reasonably affluent sections of Northern California where housing prices are especially high, the findings can be generalized throughout the state and nation because of the number of subjects involved and the in-depth nature of the interviews, Dornbusch said.
While no one knows for certain how many homeless children there are nationwide, an estimated 1 million children will be without a home for some period of time this year, according to social scientists. In California alone, there are a minimum of 190,000 homeless youths, according to Children Now, a Los Angeles-based organization. These children and their mothers, according to the National Academy of Sciences, are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population.
Although the vast majority of homeless families were headed by single parents, mostly mothers, nearly one in three families included a father and mother, a finding that surprised the researchers.
Another unexpected finding is that many homeless children attend school--nearly 90%. This is a far higher figure than had been previously estimated, according to Dr. Ellen Bassuk, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of a mid-1980s study on the homeless in Massachusetts.
In the past, schools have been attacked for having inflexible registration procedures for homeless children, but enrollment procedures appear to have changed to accommodate the growing number of homeless children.
Although there are no reliable statistics on how many complete high school and go on to college, there is at least one highly publicized student at Stanford now: Lupe Vasquez, a homeless youngster who lived with her family in a shelter in Ventura County, graduated second in her class at Oxnard High School and is a junior at Stanford.
But for most homeless youngsters, school does not seem to be enough to overcome the trauma of having no place to call home.
According to the study, many of the children cannot even imagine that they ever will go to college, let alone graduate. While 68% of a sample of all secondary school students in the two counties studied thought they would earn their college degrees, only 43% of the homeless children had such expectations.
Like children everywhere, homeless children tell of their dreams of growing up to be ballerinas, sports stars, doctors, lawyers. But few believe their dreams will come true. Some doubt that they will ever lead normal lives.
When asked what he thought he would be when he grew up, one 12-year-old boy replied, “I won’t have a job. I’ll do nothing, just sit around, if I have a place to sit around--if I’m not dead.”
Homeless children are “survival-oriented,” the researchers found. When given three wishes, they do not escape into fantasy but have concrete desires about getting a bed to sleep in, a car to drive, food to eat.
As one formerly homeless mother described her 2 1/2-year-old daughter, “She’s a 35-year-old midget. She’s aware of too much.”
By quietly postponing the expression of their own needs, they often help their parents, but they clearly pay a price for their stoicism. Once their families find permanent housing, many formerly homeless children start to exhibit physiological, psychological and behavioral problems, according to their parents. The most common reported problems are depression, sadness, disobedience, chronic illnesses such as asthma and acute illnesses such as colds and skin diseases.
Just as homelessness seems to rob children of their childhood, so, too, it robs them of their parents. While they are homeless, children seldom play with their parents or have fun with family members. When asked about his most recent memory of a family outing, one child said, “Six months ago we went to the park.”
A 6-year-old girl in a family shelter was asked what makes her happy. “When my mom plays with me. She hardly ever does.”
Despite their problems, homeless children often are more compassionate than other children. They are not hardened but seem to have “an uncommon” level of concern for human suffering.
Perhaps one reason for this is that they are still living with their families. The same cannot be said for runaway teen-agers. More than half of homeless adolescents are what is known as “street teens” who are so afraid they will be sent home or placed in foster care that they shun all contact with service providers. Parental drug addiction and alcoholism often drive many teen-agers to leave home, the study found. More than half of homeless teen-agers have been physically abused, more than a third sexually abused.
For them, life on the street is very difficult, though apparently not as bad as living at home. About 88% say they panhandle to support themselves, 62% report stealing, 40% say they deal or carry drugs, 42% report prostitution.
The vast majority have experienced the death or suicide of friends and have attempted suicide themselves. They also have a high rate of health problems, including strep throat, bladder infections, anemia, malnutrition, venereal diseases, stomach ulcers, hepatitis and scabies. Nearly all are sexually active and though they said they knew the dangers of AIDS, nearly half have unprotected sex.
“Why would I worry about dying from AIDS in the future when I don’t know if I’m going to survive until tomorrow?” one 16-year-old explained.
Although no one knows for sure how to get homeless teen-agers out of their difficulties, the solution for homeless families is fairly clear: permanent housing.
Since most subsidized housing programs are either closed or have long waiting lists, it is often more a matter of luck, of someone extending a helping hand than anything else, the researchers said.
This runs counter to the popular notion that many of the homeless could get out of their predicament simply by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, the researchers said. The study found there are almost no discernible differences in energy or resourcefulness between families who find permanent housing and those who remain homeless.
One of the most troublesome aspects of the study was how horrible many homeless families feel when they have to deal with overworked counselors at social service agencies. Homeless families report that they suffer a higher incidence of verbal abuse from the staff members of agencies than from the general public.
As one mother put it, “The only time I feel like a bum is when I come home (to the shelter).”
Programs for Homeless
There are gaps in taxpayer and charity assistance programs that make it difficult for homeless families to find housing, counseling and medical care, according to the Stanford Studies of Homeless Families, Children and Youth. Among the problems:
* About half the homeless teen-agers are afraid to make use of homeless shelters because of laws requiring officials to try to reunite them with family members, many of whom have been abusive or uncaring.
* Homeless families served by state and local agencies get adequate emergency medical care at shelters but dental care is in short supply, in part because few dentists volunteer at shelters and because Medi-Cal, which provides health care assistance to poor people, covers tooth extractions but not fillings.
* There is no quiet place for homeless children to study and no system for providing them with school buses or public bus passes when their families relocate, forcing the children to transfer schools. Although children may enroll in school, their attendance decreases as the number of schools they attend increases.
* Government housing assistance has not kept pace with demand. The state’s Housing Assistance Program, which helps poor families with security deposits and the first month’s rent, has been curtailed; the waiting list for Section 8, the largest subsidized housing program, has been closed. Limits on the number of people per room and prohibitions against children of different sexes from sharing a bedroom make it especially hard for large families to find subsidized housing.
* Homeless families face discrimination in the private rental market. Even when they have cash to pay their rent, landlords do not trust them and often are unwilling to be flexible in receiving deposits in installments.
