After watching the documentaries regarding child poverty in America, I had a lot of strong emotions. My first emotions had to do with the most obvious issues of children being poor, hungry, and homeless. Nobody, especially children, should have to experience those kinds of things in a developed country like the U.S. I also got strong waves of emotion watching children take on adult stress and roles. Shaun, for example, admitted that at age 13, he had already taken on a father figure role in his home. He, as well as some of the other children across the documentaries, also admitted to suppressing their feelings when it came to their hardships. These children felt not only the stress coming from their parents, but also took it upon themselves to hold in their own stress in order to save their parents from that added despair. You could just see how pained their parents’ pain made them. It was also striking to hear these children describe adult things such as making money/food stretch and timing and foregoing bills. The children’s stress was so visible, and it hit home.
When thinking of solutions to the issues surrounding child poverty, child tax credits come to mind. While I’m sure these provide periodic bursts of relief for struggling parents, I also realize that the money they are refunded cannot be saved and applied to the coming year’s worth of expenses. There are bills to pay, necessities to buy, etc. Even more, the child tax credit program was implemented far before either of these documentaries were filmed, and not one person mentioned them as being helpful at all. In my opinion, families, especially those headed by single parents, need a more frequent, reliable form of stimulus. For families such as the ones featured in these films, anything helps. An extra $50…$100…$300 dollars would’ve kept food on their children’s plates, or maybe it would’ve kept the hot water on. I truly believe that families below and near the poverty line need more of a cash safety net. Not only could it help provide life’s necessities, as people in a developed country should have, but it can also help stimulate the economy. More cash means more dollars spent in the market.
Speaking of the market, I also couldn’t help but notice the fact that some of the families in the documentaries lived in what appeared to be ghost towns. One of the children walked through her town scrounging up aluminum cans for money, and she could point to countless empty buildings and say, “this used to be…”. As she did this, I realized that the absence of businesses in her town also meant the absence of jobs. This child in particular talked a lot about how her mother had to be very careful when it came to using her car’s gas, but what if she didn’t have to go far to make money? Similarly, another family drove two total hours a day to get their father to his job. Unsteady unemployment is a huge contributor to poverty. We need more well-paying jobs, especially in under-stimulated areas of society (which also happened to have the most poverty).
We’ve talked about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and how detrimental they can be on a child’s development into adulthood. The children in these films dealt with bullying, food insecurity, housing insecurity, and parents’ tempers. These children had already experienced as much, if not more, stress than others see over the course of their entire lives. It was clear, to me at least, that these children were extremely pessimistic about their own life outcomes. In the film that revisits some of the children 5 years later, not a single one showed up happy and full of life. They were tired. They wanted out. They hadn’t seen success. Having a happier, healthier society begins with improving the lives of children. And to do this, I think we need to offer families and local economies more support.
Documentaries we watched included:
Growing up Poor in America (2020)
Poor Kids (2017)
Poor Kids (2012)
I am so glad you mentioned the child tax credit. Increasing that and making it refundable was done as the 2020 documentary was being filmed, so the documentary did not capture the way this increase in consumption affected the lifestyles of those families. We know statistically that the increases in SNAP benefits and the child tax credit made a tremendous improvement (decrease) in child poverty (if we use the measure of poverty that examines post-tax / post-benefit actual consumption). Having been in farmers markets selling produce in the summer of 2021 I can testify to the huge increase in purchasing power the benefits created (money that partly came to me as I was selling expensive peaches, berries, and cherries to families that now could afford them for their children).
You also point out the importance of considering the environment and community economic life. As social workers who are interested in ending poverty, we must be concerned with the well-being of employers, businesses, entrepreneurs, local banks and credit units, and we must support main street civic boosters and chambers of commerce (up to a point), because we have common interests in the well-being of our local economies, for it is the local economy that offers a good chance for people to find their way out of poverty.
You also paid attention to the way poverty inflicted ACEs on the children, and you are aware of how this torment and stress experienced by the children degraded their quality of their human existence. By tolerating the existence of poverty for children in our society, we are stealing years of life from them. The stresses of poverty raise health problems, which in turn shorten the lives of adults who experienced poverty as children.
When our society finished the project of defeating the ethno-nationalist imperialism of the Nazi and Japanese empires, there was a near consensus that we should create a world in which all people would be free from the tyranny of poverty and deprivation (one of the four freedoms: freedom of speech; freedom of worship; freedom from want; freedom from fear). We have lost our way, and instead of conquering the belligerent dictator "poverty" and his goons "want", we accept them as useful allies in our society to compel workers to take unpleasant jobs and submit to the caprice and whims of their employers or would-be employers. We have the power to end poverty in our society, and with it, we would end a significant portion of the social ills and medical or behavioral problems our citizens face. The quality of our workplaces would improve, and our tax burdens would not substantially increase in a way that altered our standards of living. Yet, we lack the vision and political will to end poverty, and the children in these documentaries damn us all by the tragedies we force them to experience by our unwillingness to restructure our economy to remove the scourge of poverty.
