Children
Policies give more kids summer jobs and health coverage
Published July 19, 2009 @ 09:20AM PT
Thanks to the stimulus and the expansion of CHIP earlier this year, nationwide more teens and kids of all ages, respectively, are benefiting from summer jobs and health coverage.
From the NYT: "13 states have invested millions of dollars this year to cover 250,000 more children with subsidized government health insurance." After the overall expansion of CHIP, the government estimates about 8M kids will remain uninsured. Tragically, about 2/3 of them are eligible but unenrolled. The federal government is providing grants to states to find this kids and enroll them.
In another positive development, $1.2B in stimulus funds is employing low-income, at-risk kids in summer jobs programs for the next two years. This infusion of money reverses - albeit temporarily - a declining trend in federal and state funds for youth employment initiatives.
Both of these programs symbolize a sensible up-front investment with long-term payoffs. Consider the jobs money:
For every year that teens work, their income in their twenties rises 14 percent to 16 percent, said youth employment expert Andrew Sum of Northeastern University. In addition, research shows that girls who have jobs are much less likely to become pregnant and boys are less likely to get involved in property crimes and drug use. High school graduation rates also go up for kids with work experience.
Of course, too few teens are being served by the stimulus money, just as millions of children continue to go uninsured. The goal here is to continue reducing the number of uninsured and idle children, and to build on the gains we're making now, turning some temporary fixes into permanent human development programs. Now all we need to do is retool our spending priorities just a bit...
(Photo by urthstripe)
"Urban" Woes Hit the Suburbs and Rural America
Published July 12, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
Quick, lock those gates!
As we've "revitalized" cities to attract the middle-class, our gentrification efforts have pushed working-class and low-income families beyond the city limits, to aging housing stock in older inner-ring suburbs and distant exurbs far from job centers. Over time, the suburbs have become home to a higher number of people living in poverty, even though cities remain home to a higher concentration of poor residents overall. So it should come as no surprise now:
Rural and suburban homeless make up about 1/3 of the overall homeless population, compared to less than 25% in 2007. West Coast states have the highest proportion of homeless residents, due to the foreclosure crisis.
Tellingly, a report from UNH found that children living in rural, cohabiting households almost doubled since 2000, whereas in cities the growth has been about 1% (the percentage of kids in cohabiting houses overall is quite small). Study authors think this is an "economic survival strategy" by single, rural mothers:
"We think that growing economic stress in rural America is in part driving this rapid increase of cohabiting in rural households," says report author William O'Hare, a Carsey Institute policy fellow and senior fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. "The jump in the share of rural children living in cohabiting households has occurred since 2000, when economic conditions in rural America began to deteriorate."
O'Hare and his co-authors Wendy Manning, Meredith Porter and Heidi Lyons state that for single rural women with children, joining a household with a man may be an economic survival strategy. While cohabiting families have poverty rates double those of married-couple households, they are less than half those for single-mother households.
The first step in warding off homelessness, perhaps?
(Photo of an abandoned farm by James Jordan)
Food Deserts Benefit From Farmers Markets
Published July 09, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Many have come to realize that the problem of food deserts is not that there is no food to eat at all, but rather, that fresh, affordable and healthy food are much harder to come by than the fried chicken and Big Mac's found on nearly every street corner. It is a problem of access and affordability more than anything else.
With the knowledge that Tennessee is one of the most food insecure states (particularly in regard to children) in the entire country, Vanderbilt University graduate student Darcy Freedman decided to conduct research to determine how to address issues of childhood obesity, family nutrition and food security issues in four of Nashville's underserved communities.
What she found was that families do not only need help accessing fresh food, they also need help learning how to eat healthy and understanding why it is so important to their health. And thus, the Veggie Project was born.
Is Pregnancy a Smart Economic Strategy for Low-Income Teens?
Published July 08, 2009 @ 12:53PM PT
Following up on the vibrant conversation (mostly happening at PB) concerning the post yesterday about providing incentives for teen girls to avoid pregnancy, graduate high school and go on to college, commenter Marissa Pherson offers some interesting links about our over-blown shrieking about the costs of teen pregnancy for low-income women and society. I want to tread carefully here, because two posts on this topic in 24 hours makes me feel a bit like your average liberal dood blogger cavalierly discussing the lives of women in the abstract.
The first link is to an LA Times article that points to a popular piece of research that asserts, based on a natural experiment, that teen pregnancy is a smarter economic strategy for young women and society - as the women turn out to work more and pay more in taxes over the long-term than women who delay childbearing into their 20s. This is because the teen mothers have more time and ability in their adult years to work; effectively, they get the child rearing out of the way during their less productive years.
Interesting concept. Compare it now to research that shows that women who delay childbearing until they're over 30 enjoy higher wages over the lifecourse - the premiums, it turns out, are biggest for college-educated women, and women in managerial positions. In fact, "higher expected career earnings lead women to postpone childbearing." What's that now about incentives?
The Economic Impact of Childhood Hunger
Published July 02, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
For the last several years, many education experts have been calling for longer school days, weeks and years as a way to halt the competitive disadvantage being felt by American students in a global workplace where countries such as China and India keep their children in school for significantly more time.
The case has been made that the U.S. economy is suffering, in part, because our students simply cannot complete professionally with more highly educated foreigners.
A new Feeding America report supports this claim and states that--in addition to scaled back schooling--childhood hunger in the U.S. is a "contributing factor to the nation’s economic woes and puts America at a competitive disadvantage."
Workers' Rights Advance at a Glacial Pace
Published June 30, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
The Wall Street Journal heralds the advancement of family leave policies in Democratic-led states, noting in particular "Colorado and Nevada signed laws within the past month that give employees unpaid leave for school-related events, becoming the first states to do so in a decade."
Forgive me if I'm less than ebullient when I learn that in CO, it's 18 HOURS ANNUALLY unpaid for parents to attend school meetings (e.g., PTA conferences), though Nevada's gone all nutty in its generosity and allowed any school activity (e.g., soccer games). And that only 11 states have expanded on the Family Medical Leave Act from 1993.
Meanwhile, states (Dem and GOP alike!) gear up to fight Obama's plans to expand Medicaid to cover about one-third of the current uninsured. In fairness to them: they're too broke to pay for it. Point to the feds: States won't have to pay for it for awhile.
Welcome to the U.S.A.! Please check your family leave policies, universal healthcare, and workers' rights with the Immigration agent. Thank you for visiting the land of the free, harried and insecure!
(Photo of Worthington Youth Boosters "soccer tots". Looks like that little girl's parents couldn't make it. Photo by geocam20000)
A Deadly Lack of Access to Healthcare
Published June 30, 2009 @ 06:42AM PT
A small but important success story is emerging from tales of stimulus spending: $500,000 of $2.5B allocated is already in use expanding health clinic access for poor and/or rural communities. The article contrasts homeless teens receiving dental care post-stimulus with the tragedy of a young man who died from an infected tooth that required only an $80 extraction, which he could not afford.
Unfortunately, these kids need to pack in as much care as they can as this $2.5b comes down, because it's a one-time infusion for our health clinic "system". By 2025, rural and poor areas should suffer from a shortage of doctors exceeding 150,000. Combined with "the drag of poverty" on these communities, it's perhaps not as much of a surprise, though shocking and horrifying still, that there is such disparate healthcare outcomes across the country:
