Study Says Poverty Persists for Kids of Working Poor

A booming national economy has drawn millions of poor parents off of welfare rolls and into jobs, but many of their children still live in poverty, according to a comprehensive assessment of the nation’s youngest poor released Thursday.

In 1996, the most recent year for which data are available, 5.5 million children lived in poverty across the nation, and 63% of them lived in families with at least one working parent, according to Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty.

The number of poor children has declined since peaking at 6.4 million in 1993, shortly after the last recession. In that year, however, only 55% of poor young children came from working-poor families.

The finding that kids with working parents represent a growing segment of the nation’s poor children underscores a central fear of many state officials and welfare analysts. New requirements that welfare recipients find jobs may be driving many parents off public assistance, but the jobs that these adults can command frequently do not lift their families above the poverty line, which was $12,516 in 1996 for a family of three.

As welfare reform progresses, experts say, the result could be a rising tide of working poor struggling to stay afloat without any federal promise of a life raft. It is the children of these families, some fear, who are at greatest risk of going under.

“All my instincts tell me that folks are struggling out there, trying to put it together,” said David Liederman, executive director of the Child Welfare League of America. “They’re doubling and tripling up, and they’ll survive as long as they can. And then when they can’t do it any longer, their kids will come into the foster care system.”

The center’s report observed that children living with unmarried mothers were still five times more likely to be poor than were those living with married parents. But living with both parents was no assurance of clearing the poverty hurdle; more than one-third of young children in poverty were living with two parents.

In fact, the poverty rate for children under 6 living in “traditional” two-parent families--in which father worked full-time and mother stayed home--doubled to 14% between 1975 and 1996.

Those findings, said ChildTrends economist Richard Wertheimer, all point to an emerging reality in the U.S. economy: Increasingly, it takes two parents--and two earners--to maintain a household’s grasp on middle-class status.

Experts say the 1996 federal welfare reform law also has contributed to the child poverty rate.

From 1993 to 1997, more than 6.7 million Americans--almost two-thirds of them children--have dropped off the nation’s welfare rolls, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The rate has accelerated since August 1996, when welfare reform became law.

Even before welfare reform, a strong economy generated many jobs for parents and helped lift many children out of poverty, according to the report. In 1993, 26% of all children under 6 lived in poverty, a rate that dropped to 23% in 1996. At the same time, however, the center’s data show that the living conditions of many children did not significantly improve when their parents went to work.

“The combination of a robust economy and the social messages that poor parents are receiving are putting more parents to work. But it’s had a modest anti-poverty effect” for children, said J. Lawrence Aber, director of the National Center for Children in Poverty.

Several state officials carrying out welfare reform acknowledged Thursday that while aid recipients were flocking to work, the number of families with children in poverty has been difficult to budge.

“Basically, we’re seeing it improve gently, but not as strongly as you would hope to see in a solid economy,” said Vermont’s secretary of human services, Cornelius Hogan.

Researchers say little is known about what happens to the children of low-income parents making the transition from welfare to work. Among the children of working-poor parents who either cannot or do not receive public assistance, researchers have found, a mother’s decision to work often improves her children’s overall well-being.

But when a mother goes to work under new welfare requirements, researchers are less sure that her employment will improve her children’s well-being, as judged by such diverse measures as family income, health-care access, quality of day care and academic achievement.

“We’re looking at parents who have not necessarily entered employment because they want to or have skills equivalent to those who’ve avoided welfare,” said Sheila Smith, author of a report on working-poor children for the New York-based Foundation for Child Development. “These parents may be more depressed, have less work history, have fewer psychological and job resources.”

The Columbia University report did not provide details of child poverty by state. But a recent U.S. Census Bureau report found that the number of children in poverty surged by 44% in California between 1989 and 1993 before declining by 5% over the next two years.

In 1993, according to the census report, the child poverty rate in Los Angeles County was 36.6%.