Poor for How Long? Chronic Versus Transient Child Poverty in the United States

Author(s):  
Sara Kimberlin ◽  
Jill Duerr Berrick
ILR Review ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Jäntti ◽  
Sheldon Danziger

The authors compare the incidence and some of the causes of child poverty in Sweden and the United States in selected years using data from the Luxembourg Income Study. The U.S. sample is restricted to white non-hispanic children to present the most favorable comparison with Sweden's more homogeneous population. When parents' labor force participation and demographic characteristics are taken into account, the proportion of children in families whose income prior to social transfers and taxes was below the poverty line (defined as 40% of median disposable income adjusted for family size) is very similar in the two countries. Because all poor children in Sweden received transfers and many in the United States did not, however, and because transfers were more generous in Sweden, a much lower percentage of children in Sweden than in the United States were poor after social transfers and taxes, regardless of parents' work effort or other characteristics.


2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. S67-S75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Smeeding ◽  
Céline Thévenot

Author(s):  

This article analyzes social problems linked to child poverty in the United States from the perspective of social conflict theory. Specifically, this article depicts the poverty meas-urements used to evaluate poverty issues in the United States. It also describes the United States’ efforts to reform social welfare policies to decrease child poverty. This article aims to educate social work students about factors directly connected to child poverty, such as unemployment, low wages, family structure, education, and immigrants. In doing so, this article uses social theories such as social conflict theory to understand what aspects of American culture are linked to the persistence of child poverty. Finally, this article dis-cusses the long-term plans and massive efforts required to reduce the causes of poverty.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachary Parolin

Black children in the United States are more than twice as likely as white children to live in poverty. While past research has primarily attributed this phenomenon to the family structure of black children, this paper investigates how state-level heterogeneity in social assistance programs contributes to the black-white child poverty gap. I find that racial inequities in states’ administration of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program contributed to the impoverishment of approximately 256,000 black children per year from 2012-2014. State-year panel data demonstrates that states with larger percentages of black residents are less likely to prioritize the ‘provision of cash assistance’ but more likely to allocate funds toward the ‘discouragement of lone motherhood.’ Neutralizing inequities in states’ TANF spending priorities would reduce the black-white child poverty gap by up to 15 percent – comparable to the reduction effect of moving all children in single-mother households to two-parent households.


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