# data[].attributes.body
The Walls family lives in poverty. Throughout the novel they struggle with being able to afford basic necessities like food, having a place to live, and electricity.

# data[].attributes.body
Rose Mary Walls has many mental health issues through the book. Although Rose Mary never got a diagnosis, there were many symptoms.

“When that happened, mom would refuse to got out of bed, even when Lucy Jo showed up to drive her to school, honking impatiently”(Walls 207).

# data[].attributes.body
When Lori was young she was bitten by a scorpion, but her father didn’t believe in traditional hospitals.

“She had gone into convulsions, and her body had become stiff and wet with sweat. But Dad didn’t trust hospitals, so he took her to a Navajo witch doctor who cut open the wound and put a dark brown paste on it and said some chants and pretty soon Lori was good as new”(Walls 13).

# data[].attributes.body
Homeless people who are not in a shelter home or are just living  on the streets for example, tend to have more health problems such as HIV infections, mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse, tuberculosis, and other conditions.

# data[].attributes.body
In The Glass Castle Jeanette’s father deals with alcoholism and he often causes many disruptions in the Walls family life. Her father often steals money to buy alcohol and becomes violent with others.

“She’d been reading books on how to cope with an alcoholic, and they said that drunks didn’t remember their rampages, so if you cleaned up after them, they’d think nothing had happened. ‘Your father need to see the mess he’s making of our lives,’ mom said. But when dad got up, he’d act as if the wreckage didn’t exist, and no one discussed it with him. The rest of us has to get used to stepping over broken furniture and shattered glass” (Walls 112-113)

# data[].attributes.headline
Understanding the Relationship Between Poverty and Addiction

# data[].attributes.subject
Understanding the Relationship Between Poverty and Addiction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Understanding the Relationship Between Poverty and Addiction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The relationship between addiction and poverty is complicated. Lower income people are slightly more likely to struggle with drug or alcohol abuse, but this doesn't necessarily mean that poverty causes addiction. In some cases, financial troubles are the result

# data[].attributes.body
As a person develops an addiction it’s most likely that person will have problems preforming at work, such as arriving late, missing shifts, failing to meet deadlines for projects, or getting into arguments with colleagues which can then lead to them losing their job. Once they lose their job it’s hard for them to find another one, some might take money from their retirement savings to pay for drugs and alcohol instead of saving it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What the findings from the HOST baseline survey and the research on the cognitive effects of poverty make plain is that mental health services are desperately needed in poor communities. Addressing trauma and mental health problems is critical to facilitating healthy brain development in poor children, freeing psychological bandwidth for schoolwork, and preparing children to overcome the challenges associated with extreme poverty.

# data[].attributes.body
The Walls family experienced episodic homelessness. They usually didn’t stay long in one town and often didn’t have a place to stay.

“Later that night, Dad stopped the car out in the middle of the desert, and we slept under the stars” (Walls 18).

# data[].attributes.body
Jeanette’s family was struggling with money and often times Jeannette and her siblings went hungry. Jeanette was forced to find food for herself.

“When other girls came in and threw away their lunch bags in the garbage pails, I’d go retrieve them” (Walls 173).

# data[].attributes.body
Chronic homelessness is described as people who have long-term housing rather than just an emergency arrangement. Most individuals that are in this type of homelessness are likely to be older and have “hard-core unemployment”, they also may be suffering from a disability or an addiction.

Transitional homelessness is where the people stay in the shelter only once or for a short period of time. These people are usually younger and may have become homeless due to a catastrophic event and have been forced to live in a shelter before making a transition into more stable housing.

Episodic homelessness is when a person is frequently in and out of homelessness. Most likely they are young or chronically unemployed and experience medical, mental health, and sometimes substance abuse, also known as addiction.

# data[].attributes.body
Basic Facts About Children in Poverty

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A boy holds his little brother's hand after picking him up at the bus stop in Biddeford, Maine, April 2020. (Getty/Gregory Rec)

For more on this topic, see 'The Basic Facts About Women in Poverty'

Introduction and summary

In America, nearly 11 million children are poor. That's 1 in 7 kids, who make up almost one-third of all people living in poverty in this country. This number should be unimaginable in one of the world's wealthiest countries, and yet child poverty has remained stubbornly high for decades Across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is made up of 37 countries including Denmark, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom, the United States is consistently ranked as one of the worst in child poverty rates.

As the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting recession continue to devastate the United States, children are facing the consequences of failed leadership. Since April 2020, the share of children with at least one unemployed parent has consistently remained above reported rates during the peak of the Great Recession. More than 4 in 10 children live in a household struggling to meet basic expenses, and between 7 million and 11 million children live in households in which they are unable to eat enough because of the cost. When the pandemic forced schools to shift to distanced and virtual learning, it worsened the barriers to quality education for low-income children and pushed their parents, particularly mothers, to choose between caregiving and employment. Without serious interventions, an economic recovery will leave low-income and marginalized people-and their children-behind. Already, some calculations are finding that the child poverty rate has increased dramatically since the onset of the coronavirus crisis.

In America, nearly 11 million children are poor. That's 1 in 7 kids, who make up almost one-third of all people living in poverty in this country.

Child poverty is solvable. Some recommendations set forth in this report include:

Securing the right to basic needs for all families with reforms to food assistance, housing supports, and health care programs

Easing financial burdens through strengthened unemployment insurance, permanent paid family and medical leave, higher minimum wages, affordable child care and universal preschool, and better tax credits that cover all low-income families

Prioritizing structural reforms that address generational poverty and historic marginalization with policies that target the racial wealth gap and inequitable school systems

Basic statistics about children in poverty

Measuring poverty

America's child poverty problem is persistent and structural-and in many ways, the official statistics undercount the severity of need across the nation. The official poverty measure, as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau, has long been criticized as narrow and outdated, in large part because it determines the resources a family needs based on a bare-bones food budget from the 1960s. It does not take into account major expenses such as housing or child care, nor does it account for geographical differences in costs of living.

Because of this recognized failure in capturing the experiences of people facing economic deprivation, another measure, known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), was introduced in 2011. That measure counts resources such as nutrition benefits and housing subsidies, along with costs such as taxes and out-of-pocket medical expenses; it also determines a poverty threshold using a more diverse set of necessary expenses-not just food. The SPM isn't perfect either, but it does help show the impact that government programs can have on reducing poverty.
Figure 1
In 2019, 14.4 percent of all children under the age of 18 in the United States were living below the official poverty measure. About 6 percent were living in deep poverty, defined as 50 percent of the federal poverty measure, and almost one-quarter were living in poverty or at risk, defined as 150 percent of the official measure. When using the SPM, which counts noncash benefits from government programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and measures poverty more comprehensively, the child poverty rate in America is 12.5 percent.

Children of color across most racial categories are more likely to experience poverty than their white counterparts. (see Figure 2) Black, Hispanic, and American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN) children have the highest rates of poverty. And while the broader category of Asian American and Pacific Islander children have lower rates of poverty, disaggregated data from past years show that serious disparities based on ethnicity persist with significantly higher rates for Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Burmese, and Hmong children, for example.
Figure 2
Black, Hispanic, and AIAN children are also disproportionately represented among children living in poverty. For example, while around 14 percent of children in the United States are Black, they make up more than one-quarter of children living below the poverty line.

The poverty rate for children also differs by age, with the youngest children most likely to live under the official poverty line. (see Figure 4) Children under the age of 5 have a poverty rate of 15.5 percent, compared with 14.9 percent for children between ages 6 and 11 and 12.9 percent for those between ages 12 and 17. Those differences are due, in part, to the higher expenses associated with younger children, such as child care, and because parents tend to be earning less earlier in their careers, when their children are younger.

Child poverty rates differ greatly depending on their family structure. (see Figure 5) At a rate of 36.4 percent, more than one-third of children living in households headed by an unmarried woman live in poverty, while 6.4 percent of children in married couple households do.
Figure 4
The analysis: Why are so many children poor in the United States?

The causes of child poverty cannot be separated from those of adult poverty. Expenses associated with raising children are one of the many reasons that families fall into poverty, along with job losses and pay cuts, a transition from a two-parent household to a single one, and a family member developing a disability.

Factors that make it difficult for people to meet their basic needs mean their children also grow up with economic instability and deprivation. The United States does not have a comprehensive social safety net to fully shield kids from the emotional, physical, neurological, and generational impacts of such instability.

The following are just some of the reasons why the United States' poverty rate is so high.

America's economic systems are not designed to support all families

Because America's current policies do not guarantee a reasonable standard of living, a child's economic security is deeply intertwined with their caregivers' experience in the labor market. Changes in caregivers' work have largely driven changes to the child poverty rate over the past several decades.

Persistent economic inequality

Stagnant wages

If wages had increased at the same rate as broader economic productivity, more than 4 million fewer children would be in poverty in a full-employment economy.

Labor market discrimination and other economic forces

Since the early 1990s, family structure has played a much lesser role in child poverty rates than some experts claim. And in those decades, the profile of unmarried parents has shifted; parents are now more likely to be fathers raising children alone or cohabiting with a partner than in previous years, and the share of single mothers raising children without a spouse or partner now hovers at around 50 percent, compared with 88 percent in 1968.

Racist and sexist narratives such as the notable myth of the "welfare queen"-a term popularized by President Ronald Reagan to invoke white Americans' racial resentment and tie welfare to an image of undeserving Black women receiving government assistance-permeate rhetoric and perpetuate the lie that poverty is a result of personal and cultural, rather than structural, failings. However, high rates of child poverty in what the census defines as "single, female-headed households" and disproportionate rates of poverty for children of color can be attributed, in large part, to the many manifestations of racism, sexism, ableism, and other discrimination in the labor market.

Occupational segregation and the resulting wage gaps

This occupational segregation, along with other factors of discrimination, also contributes to racial and gender wage gaps. For example, Black men, on average, earned 70 cents for each dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men in 2019; Black women earned 63 cents. Those cents compound over a lifetime, depressing savings and limiting day-to-day expenses to the detriment of those workers' children.

Lack of work-family policies to support caregivers

For caregivers, and especially solo mothers, a lack of paid leave and child care support can force people to cut back on the hours they work, leave the workforce entirely, or sacrifice necessary time with their families in order to pay the bills.

Those disparities are exacerbated by a lack of affordable child care, which is one of the biggest expenses for families today. Without better options, parents must consider working fewer hours, taking a pay cut, or leaving their jobs to ensure their children are cared for. For families in poverty, whose jobs already tend be unstable, inflexible, and inadequately compensated, the decisions surrounding child care can have dire consequences for their family budgets and potential future employment.

Unemployment

Low wages are not the sole factor perpetuating child poverty and making it difficult for families to make ends meet; other labor market factors such as unemployment play an important role as well. Losing a job is one of the leading triggers for falling into poverty. The United States' inadequate safety net for jobless people leaves millions of children vulnerable to the prolonged negative impacts of poverty. And, once again, discrimination and systemic racism built into the labor market means that Black people face persistently higher rates of unemployment than whites, contributing to racial disparities in the poverty rates among their children.

Barriers to employment

Racial and gender wealth gaps

Reaching basic living standards is tied to work

Children do not work and cannot earn their way out of poverty, but they face long-term harm because the right to having their basic needs met is not guaranteed. No child, regardless of their caregivers' experience with the labor market, should experience poverty. Yet the social safety net, in its inadequate and fragmented current form, includes burdensome work requirements, excludes those with no or very little income, and leaves jobless people and their families with few stable options.

Other structural inequities compound harm for children experiencing poverty

Such circumstances exist because economic inequality is inextricably linked to other structural inequities in incarceration, education, housing, health, and more. And those inequities are inextricably linked to America's long history of racism and discrimination, compounding barriers particularly for children of color across the country and severely limiting economic mobility.

These examples of the many structural inequities in U.S. policy underscore the need to understand child poverty as a result of lawmakers' decisions even beyond the narrow definition of the economy.

Recommendations: How to end child poverty in America

While America's disastrous child poverty rate is the result of a complicated structure of economic and social systems, the solutions to the problem are actually quite simple. Policymakers need to make sure every child has access to the basics-food, housing, and health care-and ease the financial burdens that families face when raising children. The millions of children living in poverty right now do not have the luxury of waiting for changes that can take decades to fully realize. Thus the push for more immediate assistance must be paired with a forward-thinking strategy to fix policies that promote inequality, limit economic mobility, and perpetuate marginalization.

These solutions must be available to all children and families; policy barriers based on one's involvement with the criminal justice system, immigration status, ability, and other factors only ensure that attempts to end child poverty will fail.

The following recommendations are just some of the policy solutions that can contribute to ending child poverty in the United States.

Secure the right to basic needs for all families

Strengthen food assistance programs

Programs such as SNAP and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) are fundamental in ensuring that families can afford to eat. Both programs have been tied to positive outcomes for mothers and infants, and children with access to the programs can experience significant health gains and improved long-term health, educational, and economic outcomes.

Despite the clear advantage of funding and supporting nutrition assistance programs, they have been the target of regulatory attacks and budget cuts. SNAP's current design means that it is efficient-lifting 2.5 million people out of poverty in 2019-and targeted in times of crisis, but its restrictive eligibility requirements and inadequate benefit amounts limit the program's reach. The WIC program provides nutrition assistance and support programs for more than 4.5 million infants and children, but analysis shows that less than half of all eligible children actually participate, in part due to barriers such as transportation and misconceptions about eligibility, as well as stigma around receiving benefits.

To strengthen the program to better meet the needs of all children, Congress must increase SNAP benefits to more reasonably match a household's food budget (and recognize the differing food needs depending on a child's age), eliminate restrictive asset limits, consider expansions to the goods that SNAP benefits can buy, and address barriers to participation. Lawmakers must also ensure that the WIC program is fully funded and that all of its benefits, including those beyond food assistance such as breastfeeding counseling, are available to all eligible families.

Ensure universal free meals at school

Instead of a means-tested program that can add burdens for both families and school administrators, with complicated paperwork for applications and reimbursements, lawmakers should enact a universal free lunch program at public schools and child care centers.

Fully fund the Section 8 housing voucher program to reach all eligible families

Three-quarters of very low-income families pay more than half of their incomes on rent.

Due to the program's funding structure, it only receives as much funding as Congress allocates to it each year, even if there are more eligible families than there is money. As a result, millions of low-income families are often left with limited options and impossibly long waits for a voucher to become available. Fully investing in the program so that all eligible families receive a voucher-paired with better enforcement and mechanisms against discrimination-would help millions of children live with a roof over their heads.

Ensure affordable health care for all children

The federal government must ensure that all children, no matter their household incomes, have access to comprehensive and affordable health care. Doing so would not only create better health outcomes and future opportunities for those children but would also remove a financial burden for parents.

Future changes to the health care system must ensure stable, affordable coverage for low-income children and provide early and consistent screening, diagnostic, and treatment services so that children have access to the comprehensive and preventive health services that they need.

Ease financial burdens and provide money to help families

Expand and strengthen unemployment insurance

Ensure access to permanent national paid family and medical leave and paid sick leave

Policies that support workers' health and caregiving responsibilities also protect children from economic insecurity and instability. The United States is the only industrialized country without a national paid leave program, leaving many low-wage and part-time workers-who are disproportionately women-without a viable option for paid time off in times of need.

Raise the minimum wage and eliminate subminimum wages for tipped and disabled workers

America's minimum wage has not changed in 10 years-and for longer than that time, it has not kept up with inflation, productivity, or the rising costs families face. Gradually raising the federal minimum wage to $15, as proposed in the Raise the Wage Act, would help almost 10 million parents, including 4.6 million single working parents who need a living wage to ensure financial stability for their kids. The legislation would also phase out the subminimum wage for tipped workers and workers with disabilities. According to a Congressional Budget Office analysis, more than 500,000 children would be lifted over the federal poverty line by increasing the minimum wage alone. And already, evidence from state-level minimum wage increases show that the policy can create record-breaking reductions in the child poverty rate.

Ensure affordable child care and universal preschool for all children

Investing in affordable, high-quality child care and universal preschool is a smart decision-not just for the economy and families as a whole but also as a strategy to reduce child poverty in the coming years.

Expand and strengthen child tax credits

Study after study has shown that cash transfer programs can make a big difference in alleviating poverty. These programs allow people to spend the money where it makes the most sense for their families rather than dictating how or when they can use it. The American tax code already includes a program, known as the child tax credit, to disperse payments to low-income families with children. Although it is meant to help offset the cost of raising children, the phase-in structure of the credit means it intentionally excludes the lowest-income families who stand to benefit the most.

To strengthen the child tax credit, lawmakers must pass legislation to increase the benefit and make it fully refundable, disbursed monthly rather than as a one-time lump sum, and indexed to inflation. Most importantly, they must eliminate the minimum earnings requirement to ensure that the most vulnerable children are able to receive the benefit. This would allow the credit to function much like a child allowance that offers cash benefits to families to help them raise children, a policy used in countries that have more successfully reduced child poverty such as Australia, Germany, and Canada. Changes to America's credit are essential for helping families achieve financial security and stability-and research shows that these changes alone would reduce child poverty substantially.

A supplemental young child tax credit targeting additional funds to families with kids under the age of 6-and created with the same conditions as the expanded child tax credit above-would provide support during some of a child's most formative years.

Make structural changes to address generational poverty and marginalization

Conclusion

Child poverty in America is persistent, structural, and solvable, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only made it clearer that the existing structures to address child poverty and protect children from hardship are inadequate. Policies that tie basic living standards to a narrow definition of work and exclude families with the lowest incomes only serve to exacerbate the negative impacts of living in poverty-but it doesn't have to be that way.

To ensure that all children are able to thrive, policymakers must focus on supporting children and their families by tackling inequality and discrimination in the labor market, strengthening the social safety net, and addressing structural marginalization across policy areas. The recommendations outlined in this report all tackle those goals; with political will and moral clarity, an America where no child is poor can become a reality.

About the author

Areeba Haider is a research associate with the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Taryn Williams, Alexandra Cawthorne-Gaines, Rasheed Malik, Diana Boesch, Robin Bleweis, Khalilah Harris, Thomas Waldrop, Lily Roberts, Lorena Roque, Jaboa Lake, David Ballard, and Kenny Lo for their thoughtful contributions and Kyle Ross and Justin Schweitzer for fact-checking.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Basic Facts About Children in Poverty

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Introduction and summary In America, nearly 11 million children are poor. That's 1 in 7 kids, who make up almost one-third of all people living in poverty in this country.

# data[].attributes.body
New research shows that those who live in poverty experience worse mental and emotional well being. In kids it is important to address trauma in order to have healthy brain development. In adults it is important to address stress and anxiety and many in poverty do not get the mental health assistance they need.

# data[].attributes.body
In America, nearly 11 million children are poor. That’s about 1 in every 7 kid in America. Many families struggle to make ends meet, but there are many causes of child poverty.  Many parents, especially single mothers, struggle to pay for basic child care needs. As of 2017, the US Department of Agriculture of raising one child from birth to age 17 can cost $233,610.