The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash., Shawn Vestal column
By Shawn Vestal, The Spokesman-Review, Spokane, Wash. | |
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
This is not because the news is always bad, however. And sometimes, in the push to address very real problems, underlying improvements go unseen. When that happens, the crisis mindset can begin to seem false or incomplete, eroding the very belief that we need, as a society, to try to address these problems to improve the lives of poor children.
And so the new Kids Count report from the
In both
On several health measures, there are similar changes. Fewer kids lack health insurance, and in
Also, child and teen deaths are down, fewer teens abuse drugs and alcohol, and there are fewer low-birth-weight babies.
So -- good news for some kids, and it's the kind of good news that is really good for those individual kids who didn't die or who attended preschool or who might have had an unwanted child at age 15.
But.
The Kids Count report is also a confirmation of the discouraging news about the country's main wellspring of entrenched, multigenerational poverty: children growing up in poverty.
In 2012, 23 percent of American children lived in families making below-the-poverty-level income. That's 16.4 million children. That's an entire
The U.S. child poverty rate is an increase from 19 percent in 2005.
Also, more children live in entrenched high-poverty areas -- in pockets where the deepest forms of poverty put kids at risk of the worst kinds of lifelong consequences.
"When a family experiences poverty, that comes with a whole host of issues," said
"When you have a whole community living in poverty ... it moves beyond a family effect to a neighborhood effect."
And Pfingst noted that among communities of color, the poverty figures are particularly stubborn: More than a third of black, Latino and Native American kids in
"If we could tackle that, we could see far more substantial gains," she said. "And we're just not doing it."
Instead, the public discussion on poverty is often framed around the question of whether it even exists. There is a sustained political momentum behind the notion that poverty is a chimera -- that there really are no poor Americans, just lazy people buying lobster with food stamps -- and that programs to lift people out of poverty are some sort of political trickery by Democrats.
Wonderful variations of this kind of "thinking" are now a pandemic regarding the refugee children crossing the border. In what kind of country do politicians -- like
This ability to wrap the most callous and selfish indifference to the suffering of others inside a cocoon of logic and "Christian" belief is, perhaps, the deepest piece of the country's dynamic in terms of long-term poverty. Pfingst said there are many policy steps that could go a long way toward improving the picture for poor children: an improving minimum wage, workplace policies that provide paid leave for parents in crisis or illness, and a rethinking of a regressive tax structure like
But the first step would be to simply acknowledge it and believe in it. Two hundred eighty-eight thousand children in
"When you have so many kids living in these conditions, it is not from personal failures," Pfingst said. "It is systemic."
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