Growing Up Poor: The Effects on Achievement, Parenting and Child Care
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The May 15 COSSA congressional breakfast seminar, Growing Up Poor: The Effects on Achievement, Parenting and Child Care, brought three leading social scientists to Washington to discuss their research and its implications for policy makers. The seminar was attended by congressional staffers, federal agency officials, and interest group representatives.
After a brief welcome by COSSA Executive Director Howard Silver, Greg Duncan, Professor of Education and Social Policy and faculty associate in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, spoke about the role played by parental income in promoting child and adult achievement; the role of timing of economic deprivation during childhood, especially poverty very early in life; and how welfare reform might affect children’s poverty and development.
Duncan indicated that there are several reasons why financial resources or income “might make a difference for child development.” Financial resources, according to Duncan, enable families to buy higher quality learning environments and higher quality day care, to move to better neighborhoods, and to enroll their children in private schools or higher education. Financial resources reduce the stress in relationships between parents and the relationships between the parents and children.
Family income, according to Duncan, matters most for children in early childhood — while making little difference for children after early childhood — for three reasons. First, mental ability, personality, and physical development are most malleable in early years. Second, the family is the most important context for a child’s development. Third, family income is often lowest in a child’s early years. He noted that periods of deep poverty early in childhood “appear to have the biggest effect on a child’s potential development.”
In conclusion, therefore, Duncan declared yhat policy decisions should focus “first and foremost on situations producing deep poverty for young children.” He also suggested that families with very young children be exempt from the work requirements and sanctions and time limits of welfare reform. Duncan recommended a reconsideration of other policies that might be restricted to families with young children, including: refundable tax credits and child allowances. Finally, he suggested the adoption of a system in which families can borrow money on future anticipated earnings to provide for their children today.
Parenting Stress
Vonnie McLoyd, Professor of Psychology and research scientist at the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan, followed Duncan and focused her discussion on how economic disadvantage affects parenting behavior and how this, in turn, influences children’s development. McLoyd told the audience that socioeconomic disadvantage and negative life events (or “stressors”) have “significant implications for parenting.” Mothers who experience high levels of stressors, according to McLoyd, “perceive parenting as more difficult and less satisfying . . . [and] tend to be more critical towards the child, less affectionate,less responsive, and spend less time with the child.”
McLoyd discussed how parenting behavior contributes to the negative effects of economic disadvantage on children’s development. She summarized research showing that the differences in cognitive and academic functioning between “poor and non-poor children” is partly the result of the “academic and language stimulation that children receive at home.” This interaction includes: reading and talking to the child; teaching the child the alphabet, numbers, and colors; and having toys in the home that assist in learning. In fact, she noted that the amount of emotional support and cognitive stimulation in a child’s home environment accounts for one-third to one-half of the disadvantages in verbal, reading and math skills among persistently poor children in elementary and middle school.
Research, McLoyd said, suggests the need for concrete social services that ease the stress (or stressors) of poverty. In addition, the research justifies increased efforts to shore up the services component of the Head Start Program. There is evidence, according to McLoyd, that “Head Start and other preschool education programs make a difference in terms of poor children’s academic readiness [and have] positive effects on children’s socioeconomic functioning.” She recommended that more resources be devoted to job training programs that teach parents to hold better jobs.
Child Care Dilemma
Aletha Huston, Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professor of Child Development and Research Associate in the Center for Population Research at the University of Texas at Austin, concluded the seminar by focusing on child care issues. Huston noted that child care is an issue that is “high on the public agenda these days.” Child care is particularly important for low-income mothers who have to find work because of welfare reform. Huston pointed out the policy dilemma that surrounds child care: the ability to provide more children with child care while at the same time improving care. Huston stated “there is a real danger that a lot of it [child care] will not be very good quality.”
Child care, according to Huston, is based on two goals: 1) as an adjunct to women’s work force participation and 2) as early education to promote cognitive and social development. Over the last several years, child care programs have seen increased government funding, especially federal, state, and local subsidies for people with low incomes. Huston noted that in 1996 the federal government passed legislation that “combined funding streams into one program of block grants to states.” This system, she said, made the child care programs more efficient, but removed the entitlement feature. She added, however, that “more federal money will be needed” to provide more child care and ensure the high quality of that care.
Huston then focused on the overall quality of child care programs. This is, she said, “especially important for children of low income families for all the reasons that you’ve heard from the other two speakers.” She referred to a child care staffing study that shows that the quality of care is directly related to wages, turnover, and benefits. She also noted that the child care profession suffers from three serious problems: low wages, lack of adequate training, and a high staff turnover rate of 31percent.
She concluded that there should be more quality requirements for child care programs mandated by the federal government. She also called for increased evaluation of the child care programs. She said that “we don’t know very much about what’s happening as a result of these subsidies . . . we really need to be conducting some research.”