Benefits for Children

According to this article child poverty has steadily increased in the U.S. over the last two decades, despite government programs and other non-profit efforts to improve the situation.  What everyone seems to be ignoring is adult poverty.

This increase in child poverty points to a bigger problem: Adult poverty.  Children are in poverty because their parents are in poverty.  Most of these relief programs focus entirely on the children, with little concern for the adults.  A few programs (like the Earned Income Tax Credit) take the entire family into account, but even many of those only do so incidentally.  This leads to several problems.

The first problem is that providing only for the children will only help the problem partially.  A program designed to help children that provides housing assistance will not provide enough to take care of all housing needs, because it does not account for the needs of the adults.  This results in the assistance being spread too thin.  Likewise, a program like WIC, which is designed to help only the children and the mother will be watered down when the father needs to eat as well.  A program that helps children who are in poverty, but not the parents is missing some essential things.

The second problem is that the mental and emotional impacts of poverty are not reduced significantly, if the parents still have to deal with it.  A child might go to a free preschool, which will benefit the child, but free preschool will not improve the ability of the parents to care for the child.  The child will still have to deal with being in poverty.  The child will still be impacted with the constantly high level of stress of the parents, and will likely learn poor stress management and decision making skills as a result.  Instead of having uneducated poor people, poor children will grow into well educated poor people.  Programs designed to help children in poverty are great, but some of the effects of poverty can only be relieved by helping the parents.

Besides all of this, it seems extremely hypocritical to be willing to help people until they are old enough that we feel comfortable blaming for their own problems.  It may be clear that children are not at fault for their problems, it is not always clear that poverty is rarely the fault of the adults either.  The recent recession has caused a shift in public opinion over this blame thing.  More people are beginning to realize that poverty is often not the fault of those who are in poverty.  It seems rather cruel to deny aid to people once they reach an age where they are no longer considered a child.  A child who grew up in poverty, with or without aid or assistance, is more likely to remain in poverty as an adult, through no fault of their own.  Reliving just the poverty of the children will do little to help the situation, because much of the problem is that parents in poverty are unable to teach their children how to avoid poverty (and this propagates through generations).  If we really want to help children to escape poverty, we need to help their parents as well.  The article cites studies and data that show that despite better education and many programs designed to help children in poverty, the poverty rate for children is increasing.  This is evidence that helping only the children is not enough.  We need to help the adults as well, or this problem is just going to get worse.  Why, if children have the right to live above the poverty level, can anyone think that adults should not have this right?