
Poverty hurts children in ways we're beginning to understand - Amorymeltzer
https://lithub.com/poverty-hurts-children-in-ways-were-just-beginning-to-understand/
======
altacc
In discussions about low income families I often see somebody comment along
the lines of blaming the parents for making bad choices and choosing to have
children they couldn't afford/care for/want. This is used as a reason not to
provide any social support to those families as they see it as rewarding bad
behaviour. But these children didn't make those choices and they now exist in
their circumstances through no fault of their own.

We're consistently condemning the children for the sins of their parents to
appease this view and severely reducing these children's potential, and in
doing so reducing the potential of the country. As this article shows, the
cost to a country's society and economy of poverty and low standards of living
is very large and over a long time span. Our governments should be doing more
to tackle child poverty as whilst it's not as bad as it used to be, we can
certainly do better.

~~~
wang_li
You cannot rationally hold the belief that people can be allowed to have as
many children anytime they want and that all children will be provided for
regardless of the ability of their individual parents to provide for them.
Such parents have shown they have no limiting factor, so the end result is
that all children will be poor as you divert greater and greater resources
from parents who act in more responsible ways to those who don't.

It's also a curious way to characterize it that "we're consistently condemning
the children for the sins of their parents." Seeing as "we" had nothing to do
with creating the plight of these children, "us" not acting to change it is
not us condemning them. That's like saying "we" are responsible for that child
that fell into the well and drowned recently as we didn't save him. Or that
"we" are condemning that fat guy to an early death because "we" aren't forcing
him to eat salad and go to the gym.

Not to mention that for every poor kid in this country (assuming you meant the
US when you said "the country") there are a five to ten in southeast Asia with
a lower standard of living. How do you justify tapping the productivity of a
Boeing working in Renton to provide for a poor kid in Mississippi who has no
more connection to that worker than a poor kid in Cambodia, while
simultaneously not ensuring that that Cambodian kid has the same standard of
living and opportunities you want to give to the Mississippian?

I will agree that it's a very unfortunately situation, but I'm not going to
lower the standard of living of my own family that limits their chances of
having their best life so as to provide for the child of a stranger who
doesn't give the same care and thought to me and mine.

~~~
altacc
Whether or not you believe in helping others is a personal choice. Most
societies across the globe and throughout history have recognised the need for
community & solidarity in order to survive & thrive.

> Such parents have shown they have no limiting factor...

You make it sound like there’s an infinite loop of childbirth which will
eventually use up every last dollar in the world, but that’s not what happens
in reality when people have enough money to keep having children. There are
also potential options to combat this, through incentives, support, education,
etc...

Your point about it being worse in other countries is common enough. My reply
tends to be that for every problem in the world we don’t find the worse
example out of all 7.6 billion of us and start there. We start where we can
and then try to keep going as much as we can.

> I'm not going to lower the standard of living of my own family

Not everything is a zero sum game. Currently the US right seems to frame a lot
of centrist/left policies as significantly detrimental to the lifestyle and
income of the average person. There is plenty of economic resource out there
which we can utilise before we make any significant impact on a typical
taxpayer’s lifestyle. Even then it would be minimal compared to the overall
improvements to the country.

~~~
wang_li
>You make it sound like there’s an infinite loop of childbirth which will
eventually use up every last dollar in the world,

It's not infinite, but we cannot provide every child in the world with the
same standard of living as that had by the average Norwegian, for example. And
given that a couple chose to give birth to a kid even though they could easily
see that they can't provide for the child and society can't provide for the
child. E: It shows they don't have a limiting factor.

>Not everything is a zero sum game. Currently the US right seems to frame a
lot of centrist/left policies as significantly detrimental to the lifestyle
and income of the average person. There is plenty of economic resource out
there which we can utilise before we make any significant impact on a typical
taxpayer’s lifestyle.

Life is certainly zero sum in many ways. If you take ten thousand dollars from
me this year and pay it back to me fifteen years later by saying "hey, the
average productivity, prosperity, happiness went up by 30%" that doesn't undo
the fact that you prevented me from sending my child to a better school. I
will never have the opportunity again to send my five year old to a great
preschool because next year that kid will be six and that one year of more
nurtured development will never be able to be regained.

Currently the US doesn't pay for everything it does on an annual basis.
Approximately 25% of spending is borrowed. And of the total four trillion
dollars in spending, around sixty percent of that is for social security,
medicare, medicaid, social safety net programs, chip, snap, and etc.
Additionally, less than 40% of households are net tax payers. You really can't
make dramatic changes in social programs without also dramatically impacting
people's lives.

~~~
blessmyheart
Let's look at this as someone from a higher socioeconomic level than you may
do. Maybe you should have taken having a child more seriously. Anyone who
decided to have children (or had an unplanned pregnancy) six years ago should
have been smart enough to have saved up more money so that a single unplanned
$10,000 expense would not wreck his child's academic chances.

------
rdlecler1
Housing is an enormous tax, and rent seeking just transfers money from the
poor to the rich. Rather than giving everyone money, I would prefer to see a
market solution where we greatly lower the costs for things at the bottom of
Maslow’s pyramid.

~~~
tomnipotent
This.

I grew up on welfare, and I can't tell you how often my mom would talk about
section 8 housing and how that would change everything. Having to move was my
parents greatest nightmare - they would barely afford day-to-day things,
nonetheless first/last/deposit.

~~~
rb808
> section 8 housing and how that would change everything

Sorry can you clarify - do you mean she wanted to be eligible? Or was eligible
but couldn't find a suitable place. I've always wondered if buying a property
to rent to section 8 tenants is a good idea or not. (investment wise or
charity wise)

~~~
opportune
Relative did this and found it was not a good move. Usually the types of
places that rent to section 8 tenants have very high cap ratios assuming you
collect rent every month... just think for a bit why other investors leave
those on the table considering how financially advantageous that would be.

Ok I’ll spoil it a bit: first, you still have to do maintenance on these
places like fixing the roof, plumbing, etc. and it doesn’t matter if you
bought it for pennies, it still has to be livable to rent. Second, section 8
doesn’t cover everything (at least for some) so your tenants will often not
make rent: the decision whether to continually take losses on renting or to
evict a family (possibly making them homeless) is up to you. And among poor
people you will have higher rates of things like hoarding or drugs so your
likelihood of dealing with that is high (approaching near certainty as number
of properties grows).

He ended up selling off his real estate “empire” in less than 5 years after
being threatened with a gun, evicting a family, and having one house get
entirely gutted one night (including wires and toilets)

~~~
imtringued
I am constantly thinking about ways to find a satisfying solution to these
problems. I feel like China is one of the few countries that actually managed
to do it. It's not just about having an export surplus. Before they could
export anything they still had to build the factories and get workers to move
there.

I think the answer is to find a way to drag up a limited group of people as
high as possible and then use the gains from those people to drag up the rest
to a medium level of wealth. The conventional theory of trickle down economics
completely ignores the second step. It's just an excuse to not do anything.

From what I can tell changing an existing community gradually is possible but
it will take much longer than creating an entirely new but also well designed
community. Find (or slowly create) a highly successful city and try to build
another city that follows the same success model. This is probably a good
answer for many developing countries but may not be enough in an already
developed country.

------
empath75
On some level you almost want to say "duh.", but having grown up in a very
lower-middle class household and being on the high side of middle class now,
the difference in how I was raised and how my kids are being raised is fairly
vast. I'm sometimes jealous of how easy my kids have it compared to me, to be
honest. I can only imagine where i'd be now if I had parents who were able to
provide the resources that I can give to my kids, in terms of connections and
education.

~~~
wonderwonder
absolutely, same boat. I have to think that my kids just not having to listen
to their parents constantly fight about money like I did has to go a long way.
Going to the store with friends and your parents have to pay with food stamps
carries a certain stigma. I had good parents who always worked hard (not
necessarily smart) and did the best they could for us, so I have no other
complaints but I was definitely very aware of being poor.

~~~
lopmotr
Why were they fighting if they were good parents? My parents were poor but
didn't fight. They just didn't buy much and they both accepted that and tried
hard to improve things.

~~~
ben_w
“Fighting” can cover a large range of actions, from arguing to violence.

If it’s the former, I can understand — e.g. frustration from a personality
difference where one of them wanted to spend money on something nice so that
life wasn’t just an endless pointless slog of dull grey, while the other
wanted to save the money for an emergency.

------
tasty_freeze
I just listened to an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast from last May:
[https://www.npr.org/2019/05/09/721733303/whats-not-on-the-
te...](https://www.npr.org/2019/05/09/721733303/whats-not-on-the-test-the-
overlooked-factors-that-determine-success)

The subject being interviewed is a Nobel Prize winning economist, James
Heckman. The starting point was noting that people who get a GED (on average)
score just as well on IQ tests as those getting an ordinary HS diploma.
However, their life outcomes tend to be much worse than those who got a HS
diploma the ordinary way. Why?

The economist said that 150 years ago schools taught reading, writing, and
arithmetic, but spent as much time on "character building" lessons: diligence,
persistence, working well with others, etc, but that mostly was removed by the
mid 20th century for a couple of reasons. One was that the character building
exercises were cast in terms of Protestantism, and as the US became more
diverse, there was a push against it. Second, psychology was in the thrall of
things that could be machine scored like IQ tests and looked down on squishy
character traits.

Anyway, although the GED students did as well on IQ tests, they did
substantially worse than normal HS graduates when scored on those other
personality skills (not traits, the economist said, since those things can be
taught to a large degree).

In the mid 60s a controlled experiment was run where a preschool for
impoverished kids were split into the treatment group and the control group.
The treatment group's teachers did non-standard stuff, eg, simply exposing the
kids to the larger world by taking them on field trips to parts of the city
they would never otherwise experience. They were read stories with those
character building traits about fairness, persistence, etc. The teachers built
relationships with the parents and emphasized how important the parent-child
relationship was and not to expect that learning is simply the teacher's job.
They provided child care for single/working mothers. This intervention lasted
two years of preschool, so basically ages 3-5.

The kids were tested at age 10 and everyone was disappointed that there was no
difference. But the economist (and others) revisited the test subjects decades
later and found there was a profound difference in outcomes. The treatment
group attained higher levels of education, had better incomes, better health,
and lower crime involvement. The children of the treatment group were
substantially better off in those regards than those of the control group.

~~~
emj
Sounds like a lot of variables to say that any one thing was what made that
experiment a success. Similarly I've heard that focus in preschool years can
have a very good pay back later on which supports what you say in a general
way.

------
clawedjird
In the US, conversations about poverty frequently appear to depict poverty as
a _choice_ , i.e. people bear moral responsibility for their poverty because
their decisions ostensibly produced it. In this thread, multiple comments take
this assumption for granted and embrace the goal of reducing poverty primarily
_for the sake of impoverished children - who bear no responsibility for their
position_. This approach seems incredibly primitive to me for a number of
reasons. First of all, show me an adult that _wants to live in poverty_.
Secondly, where do we draw the line between childhood and adulthood?

Does an impoverished 17 year old assume responsibility for their poverty on
their 18th birthday? What about their 20th? 25th? At what age can we expect
their lifetime of accumulated knowledge, experience, habits, etc. to deliver
them from poverty? Is it simply the age when they decide that they no longer
want to be poor and, thus, take the requisite actions to ensure their escape
from poverty?

Instead of basing our (American) assumptions about moral responsibility, as it
relates to poverty, on our religious heritage (i.e. the atavistic Protestant
ethic), why don’t we abandon our assumptions altogether and simply consult the
data (as the author of the linked book excerpt suggests)?

Emergent fields of research such as neuroscience, evolutionary psychology,
behavioral economics, and so forth offer a far different perspective than the
simplistic view I alluded to above. It’s understandable that some might prefer
a worldview that justifies the status quo and assuages the cognitive
dissonance associated with life in a highly stratified society, but that’s no
longer an empirically-defensible position. We should all work to make that
fact known, as is the OP’s source.

------
aty268
My dad was a very blue collar banker without a college degree at Bear Stearns,
and we went bankrupt when 08 bubble burst.

We moved from our multi million dollar house to live in a trailer park where I
slept in a bed with my brother and ate shitty food throughout middle and high
school.

I would be really interested to have someone study the long term effects of it
on me, because I think it's actually made me extremely ambitious and a little
crazy. I'm the only person who made it out of that shithole, and I have very
high standards for myself now. I just never stopped fighting, and probably
will never stop. I'm 22 and my blood pressure is off the charts, but I guess
that's the price you pay!

I guess I wonder how situational poverty (rich -> poor) affects you
differently than just normal poverty. I've never met another person in a
similar situation. Can anyone else relate?

~~~
dijit
I can relate, somewhat.

My ambition is (was) borne out of my absolute drive to never be in the same
situation I was when I was younger. Also allowed me to dig myself
unapologetically into my work and it was a way of escaping when I was younger
too.

But I’m 30 now, my ambition is waning. And a lot of what I learned during my
“hot passion” years is already sort of old and nothing is truly fundamental in
my area (devops/SRE/sysadmin).

If I had one bit of advice, it would be to try pacing yourself and think long
term, I wish I’d done university and bitten the bullet of it. I recently
failed a google interview for instance because I didn’t think about something
foundational in sorting. And that really struck me hard. If I’d gone to
university and actually focused on studying I would have been much better. But
I’m so risk averse that I would never risk taking time off working to study.

I think eventually you’ll settle. Based on my single data point. I’d prepare
for that.

~~~
aty268
That's good advice, interesting you didn't finish college. I'm working full
time as a Software Engineer now, I just kind of "worked" my way out of school.
I would bet this is pretty common among people who grew up poor.

------
saf5345throw
I never understood the hate on people becoming parents before they are
financially ready. There is a reason why the demographic shift is happening. I
was born when my mom was in her late 30s. My grandmother died in her 80s
before I even hit 18. How exactly are we supposed to maintain a stable
population in these circumstances? Having children suddenly became
unreasonably expensive but yet we pretend as if the parents are the ones who
did something wrong if they have children before their 40s. The situation is
basically a reverse tragedy of the commons. The individual is bearing the
entire cost of having children but then gets blamed despite the fact that the
public benefits from a stable population.

------
mam2
"Being rich is nice". No kidding.

------
aaron695
Poor people need more money.

There is nothing else to this article other than this tautology.

------
mekane8
I would love to see a universal basic income for families with children. My
only question is how to change the incentives so kids don't just become a
paycheck?

------
yters
What does poverty mean in our world? I would think the poorest person in any
western nation has more money and access to more resources than pretty much
anyone in prior history. Also goes for many developing nations, too. Is there
something else going on with poverty besides only amount of money on hand?

~~~
zozbot234
Relative poverty is really a proxy for social exclusion/marginalization. You
don't solve "poverty" by giving people more money, you solve it by
strenghtening local communities, building solid institutions and enhancing
social capital. This is the best foundation for solid middle-class values,
which in turn are the catalyst for self-sustaining growth in incomes.

(Of course meaning "poverty" in this relative sense, as opposed to the very
real material deprivation that's common in least-developed countries, which
often _is_ addressed to a surprising extent simply by providing more financial
capital.)

~~~
asdff
What does this mean in practice? In Los Angeles, local communities are some of
the strongest in the world. No one would say that poverty is solved, this city
is known as the city of the working poor.

~~~
yters
Do they have stable, two parent families? That seems to be one of the most
significant pillars of functioning society.

