Poverty amid plenty
Life is becoming harder for children in some key
industrialized countries. Slowly but surely over the last 15 years, some of the
world’s most powerful economies have tilted in an ominous new direction —
towards the devaluation of children — flouting the conventional wisdom that
child neglect and deprivation have no place in rich nations. Most dramatically in
the United States, but also in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United
Kingdom, a significant number of children are failing to thrive.
The United States has by far the highest percentage
of children living in poverty: 20 per cent, which represents a 21 per cent
increase since 1970, as shown on page 3. Three other ‘Anglo-American’ countries
— Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom—are at or near the 9 per cent mark.
Yet, in most other rich countries, child poverty rates are a fraction of the United
States rate. (1) In Western Europe and Japan, for example, child poverty rates
typically hover around 2 to 5 per cent. (2)
The problems of children in Anglo-American nations
today range from elemental issues of safety and shelter to more complicated
issues of psychic health and educational performance. Child poverty rates,
school drop-out rates and teenage suicide rates are all on the rise. In the
United States, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores for college-bound students
are 70 points lower than they were 20 years ago. In the United Kingdom, the
number of adolescents taking their own lives grew by 41 per cent during the
1980s. In New Zealand, the number of reported child-abuse cases has doubled in
six years. And in Australia, the number of homeless children has increased by a
third since 1980. According to one recent blueribbon committee, “Never before
has one generation of children been less healthy, less cared for or less
prepared for life than their parents were at the same age.” (3)
These tendencies are particularly ironic given the
new level of public commitment to children by world leaders. At the World
Summit for Children, held in September 1990 at United Nations Headquarters in
New York and attended by approximately half the world’s Presidents and Prime
Ministers, governments formally adopted a set of goals to improve the life
circumstances of children. These included controlling major childhood diseases,
halving the incidence of child malnutrition and reducing by a third the death
rate in children under five years old. Most countries agreed to draw up
national programmes of action to implement the goals.
Despite such impressive initiatives, a large gap
between rhetoric and reality remains. A case in point: The 1990 World Summit
urged all countries to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a
document seeking to lay down minimum standards for the survival, protection and
development of all children. As of 31 August 1993,146 nations had ratified it;
the United States has yet to do so. But without the full commitment to young
people of the world’s richest democracy, we cannot go beyond “the edge of a new
era of concern for the silent and invisible tragedy that poverty inflicts on
today’s children and on tomorrow’s world.” (4)
The root causes of child neglect in rich nations have
to do with new forms of scarcity in both public resources and parental time. In
the financial sphere, policy makers display a weak and eroding commitment to
children. For example, during the 1980s, governments pursuing laissezfaire policies
reduced housing budgets, cut back on welfare payments to poor families and
denied large numbers of working mothers the right to spend a few weeks at home
with their newborn babies.
In the United States during that decade, less than 5
per cent of the federal budget was spent on programmes that supported families
with children, while approximately 24 per cent of federal resources was spent on
persons over the age of 65. (5) Canadafollowedasimilarpattern. By 1990, per
capita government spending on senior citizens was 2.7 times greater than that
allocated to the young. (6) In these two countries, at least, the resources
invested at the beginning of life are now dwarfed by the resources consumed at
the end of life. American and Canadian policy makers have tended to socialize
the costs of growing old and to privatize childhood at a time when fragile
family structures make it particularly difficult for parents to carry the
entire child-raising load.
In the Anglo-American world, this failure to invest
public money in children has been aggravated by a growing time deficit. Over
the last two decades there has been a sharp decline in the amount of time
parents spend caring for their children, a trend that has been particularly
pronounced in the United Kingdom and the United States. According to Stanford
University economist Victor Fuchs, American children have lost 10 to 12 hours
of parental time per week. (7) The time parents have available for their
children has been squeezed by the rapid shift of mothers into the paid labour
force, by escalating divorce rates and the abandonment of children by their
fathers, and by an increase in the number of hours required on the job. In the
United States, the average worker is now at work 163 hours a year more than in
1967, which adds up to an extra month of work annually. (8) In a similar vein,
time spent on the job in the United Kingdom increased by two hours a week
during the 1980s. (9)
Much of this new parental time pressure is, of
course, involuntary, provoked by falling wage rates and escalating housing
costs. But whatever the reasons behind the parental time deficit, it has had
extremely negative effects on children. Unsupervised ‘latchkey’ children are at
increased risk of substance abuse, and children with little or no contact with
their fathers are less likely to perform well at school.
The failure to invest either public resources or
private time in the raising of children has left millions of youngsters in this
important group of Anglo-American cultures fending for themselves, and coping
more or less badly with the difficult business of growing up in the 1990s.
True, many children continue to be raised in supportive communities by
thoughtful, attentive parents; but looming larger is the overall drift, in both
government policy and private adult choices, towards blighting youngsters and
stunting their potential. An anti-child spirit is loose in these lands.
In contrast, the negative trends have not extended to
continental Europe — or to Japan, for that matter. In the traditionally
Catholic countries of southern Europe, families and communities have remained strong
enough to continue to provide a supportive environment for raising children,
despite some slippage over the last decade. And in the welfare states of
Scandinavia, comprehensive and aggressive social policies have compensated for
family disintegration and created conditions that allow children to flourish.
What these nations share is a wider and deeper vision of collective
responsibility for children.
Child poverty in rich
nations: Where taxes and transfers help the least
The UK and the US have the highest child poverty
rates among the eight industrialized countries shown below — 27.9% and 22.3%
respectively of their children 17 years or younger live below 40% of the adjusted
median family income, according to 1986 figures. France also has a high child
poverty rate — 21.2%, according to 1984 data. However, while France and the
other continental European countries reduce their child poverty rates
significantly through taxes and transfers, in the US the rate goes down only
1.9% to 20.4% after families receive all forms of cash income plus food stamps
and other benefits and pay their taxes (if any). Direct comparison of income
and poverty across a wide range of countries was made possible by the
Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database.
Poverty rates measured as percentages of children
living below 40% of the adjusted median family income in each country.
*The ratio of the US poverty line for a three-person
family to the adjusted median income was 40.7% in 1986. Thus, the 40% line is
close to the official US poverty line.
**Includes all forms of cash income plus food stamps
and similar benefits in other nations, minus federal income and payroll taxes.
Income is adjusted using the US poverty line
equivalence scale.
Source: Timothy M. Smeeding, ‘The War on Poverty:
What Worked?’ Testimony to the Joint Economic Committee, the United States
Congress, 25 September 1991.
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