Support Working Families

This opinion piece was written by Dr. Jane Knitzer, Director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. It originally appeared on Press-Enterprise, www.pe.com, on October 15, 2005.

Because of Hurricane Katrina, America had a crash course in the faces of poverty—images of children and families in New Orleans with no way out. But America has not yet confronted the fact that this is not just a New Orleans or even a Louisiana and Mississippi reality; it's an American reality.

To get to real solutions, we need to build a state and national infrastructure that supports families as well as bridges and roads. This means facing and responding to the structural causes of poverty.

But we also need to acknowledge and develop a more systemic response to the complex family issues that trap children and their parents in poverty, putting social-science knowledge to work.

Using the federal government’s official poverty measure—which is about $19,000 annually for a family of four—12 million children are poor. That number has increased each year during the past four years. These rates vary by race (children of color are disproportionately poor); by age (the younger the children, the more likely they are to be poor); and by state—from 7 percent of children in New Hampshire to 25 percent in Arkansas. In California, 18 percent of children are poor.

Perhaps most stunning is that 5 million of these children, almost half of all poor children, live in families with incomes of less than half the poverty level. Imagine trying to provide even the bare necessities with less than $8,000 a year.

In fact, it takes an income of anywhere between one and a half to three times the current poverty level to meet basic family needs. Using twice the poverty level as a proxy, 38 percent of the nation’s children—some 29 million—are living in families with inadequate incomes. This is the reality that Katrina exposed.

For most low-income families, the causes of poverty lie largely in structural challenges: One-third of children in poverty have parents who work full-time and are still trapped. They struggle to get jobs that pay a living wage, to find schools that actually teach children, and to find child care and preschools that will nurture and stimulate their children.

About 19 percent of poor children lack health insurance, even though this has been a public-policy priority. Many more of their parents are without health insurance—not a recipe for success.

For some families, particularly those who have experienced trauma and/or generational poverty, the challenges are even more complex and made worse by mental health and parenting issues. Katrina aggravated these crises by stripping people of homes, physical and mental health, and hope.

We know what it takes for children to thrive: It takes a family with adequate resources; decent housing; healthy and nurturing parents (ideally two) or a loving grandparent; and success in school. To implement this vision, we need a bold, three-pronged agenda.

First, we need to craft policies and fiscal strategies to use the growing knowledge about how to help families in deep poverty, including addressing the emotional scars of poverty that reduce children’s aspirations and belief that they can have something better.

Second, we need to support poor and working families so that they can manage the two central challenges they face: providing economic security and nurturing for their children. At a minimum, the goal should be to see that through some combination of wages and/or benefits, all families have resources equivalent to twice the poverty level so that families can access decent, affordable housing, health care and child care.

Third, we need to provide a better cushion for those on the brink of poverty. Katrina has exposed the fault lines in American society. America’s promise is of equality, opportunity and justice for all. America’s reality is not.

After 25 years of talk about personal responsibility, it's now time to talk about our collective responsibility and build the public-private partnerships that will lead to the just society that American values hold dear.