DURHAM, N.C. — Before the pandemic, one-third of U.S. households with children were already “net worth poor,” lacking enough financial resources to sustain their families for three months at a poverty level, finds new research from Duke University.
In 2019, 57 percent of Black families and 50 percent of Latino families with children were poor in terms of net worth. By comparison, the rate for white families was 24 percent.
“These ‘net worth poor’ households have no assets to withstand a sudden economic loss, like we have seen with COVID-19,” said Christina Gibson-Davis, co-author of the study and professor of public policy and sociology at Duke University’s Center for Child and Family Policy. “Their savings are virtually nil, and they have no financial cushion to provide the basics for their children.”
The study is among the first to consider family poverty in terms of assets, not income. Using 1989-2019 data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, researchers analyzed net worth and income data from more than 19,000 U.S. households with children under age 18.
Among households with children, net worth poverty has been steadily rising over the past 30 years, the authors found. In 2019, a two-parent, two-child household was deemed to be net-worth poor if they had less than $6,500 in assets – or less than one-fourth of the federal poverty line.
Families in that category – those with perilously low levels of net worth — outnumbered families who were poor based on income.
“Uncovering this aspect of poverty, which hinges on wealth, is game-changing,” said Lisa Gennetian, co-author of the study and associate professor of early learning policy studies at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy.
“Most policies focus on income and families meeting their day-to-day needs,” Gennetian said. “These efforts are important. But our findings suggest that they are not helping families increase savings that help set children up for success.”
Notably, Black and Latino families were twice as likely to experience net worth poverty than to have poverty-level incomes.
“Reducing one kind of poverty isn’t helpful if another one is taking its place,” said Lisa Keister, study co-author and a professor of sociology at Duke. “Being net worth poor likely limits parents’ abilities to invest in their kids and shapes how they think about their kids’ future.”
The new research appears in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
“Even before the pandemic, many families with children were in a precarious situation,” Gibson-Davis said. “Things are not going to get better in the wake of COVID-19.”
This research was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Science Foundation (SES-2029790).
CITATION: “Net Worth Poverty in Child Households by Race and Ethnicity, 1989–2019,” C. M. Gibson-Davis, L.A. Keister, L.A. Gennetian. Journal of Marriage and Family (2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12742
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By Lisa Gennetian
Co-authors: Eldar Shafir, Princeton University; J. Lawrence Aber, New York University; Jacobus DeHoop, UNICEF
Child poverty is the one of the world’s biggest existing challenges and, far too often, it is coupled with uncertain, sometimes conflict-ridden circumstances leaving millions of children dispersed, disenfranchised and stateless. The most timely and perhaps devastating example of this comes with the reality we face today amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. An additional 150 million children have been plunged into poverty since the pandemic hit earlier this year – a 15% increase – meaning approximately 1.2 billion children now live in economic deprivation, according to an analysis by UNICEF and Save the Children.
Research shows that poverty, violence, neglect and unsafe environments have long-term consequences that can handicap children later in their lives and that poverty during childhood is associated with many greater risks that compromise education and children’s future economic self-sufficiency.
We know, based on mounting research evidence, that children thrive when they have stable, nurturing environments where there’s routine, responsive parenting, proper care, and quality nutrition and education. What we do not quite fully understand well is what kinds of policy can help both reduce the negative effects of poverty and foster the circumstances for children to thrive.
My colleagues and I make the case that cash transfers to families with children is a promising possible solution. Cash transfers are a general term for a government policy, or a private initiative, that gives money to eligible people as a way of supporting their economic well-being. The act of transferring funds to recipients can be done through bank accounts, mobile phones or in person. Prior to COVID-19, more than 1 billion people were recipients of cash transfers.
The economic rationale behind cash transfers is twofold: 1) to address public or private market failures by providing income to meet consumption needs when jobs and formal earnings are insufficient or unstable and 2) to fill gaps when public or private infrastructure to support basic needs (e.g., health, housing, food) is insufficient or absent. Beyond the economic rationale, cash transfers also promote principles of human rights, dignity, and social equity. Some cash transfers are unconditional (i.e. have no strings attached, allowing recipients to use the money in any way they see fit). This type of cash transfer is sometimes criticized for fueling laziness and disincentivizing work, even though there is little evidence to support this contention. In fact, the majority of cash transfers available to people prior to COVID19 included provisions that required recipients be enrolled in school or employed.
In this work, we delve deeper than economic theory and ask what the combination of psychology with economic theory and child development can reveal about the promise of cash transfers for specifically addressing family financial distress and instability, and support children’s development.
The combined theories of economics, psychology and child development contribute to a new interdisciplinary perspective. This perspective also points to ways that cash transfers can support the effectiveness of other investments and interventions for children by freeing up time and mental energy for caregivers and their children to participate. We back our argument by noting the promising evidence from general comprehensive reviews of cash transfers and then take a stab at summarizing a select set of case studies of cash transfers to families with children that used a randomized control study design for evaluation where relatively less is understood to date about impacts on children’s development.
Our claim is a bold one: the proposed behavioral insights informed interdisciplinary perspective gives us a lot of traction to think about cash transfers to families with children. Cash transfers to families with children are feasible and wise and conceptually grounded. A behavioral informed view can support smart, context based, design of cash transfers to families with children that can reap lots of returns. Such a policy is not a panacea for child poverty, but for sure can serve as an important companion and catalyst to the range of existing other strategies such as job development, and high quality and safe settings for children.
To learn more about Gennetian’s research on cash transfers, watch the below video overview, “Behavioral Insights and Cash Transfer to Families with Children” and a recent presentation from Gennetian during this October 14 webinar hosted by the Institute for Research on Policy, “Lessons From Cash Transfer And Basic Income Pilot Programs.”
DURHAM, N.C. – Researchers know that texting programs can greatly benefit young children’s literacy. Now new research shows that parents’ participation in such programs can be boosted exponentially with one simple tweak: automatic enrollment, combined with the ability to opt out.
The new research from the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy appears in the Journal of Child and Family Studies.
In recent years, mounting research evidence has shown texting to be an effective, low-cost, scalable approach for engaging parents in their children’s learning. Some studies suggest text message interventions via tips for parents on how to support their child’s development can put young children’s learning 2-3 months ahead.
Yet getting parents to enroll in these beneficial programs can be challenging. With that in mind, researchers designed a study to test strategies for increasing program participation.
In the study, researchers from Duke, New York University and Brooklyn College compare different enrollment options for the text-based early literacy program, Talk to Your Baby. The text-based 26-week course is designed to promote early language development for children up to 3 years old.
The researchers studied 405 mothers who were receiving newborn home visiting services through a free, city-wide program in New York City. Using a randomized controlled study, the researchers tested whether changing the enrollment option from opt-in to opt-out affects mothers’ take up and completion of the early literacy program. Participants were predominantly low-income and racially and ethnically diverse.
Results show that when automatically enrolled with a voluntary option to opt out, 88.7 percent of study participants stayed in the program for the full 26 weeks. In contrast, only 1 percent of mothers in the control group — who heard about the program through conventional recruitment flyers — voluntarily enrolled in the program. The findings suggest parents’ desire to participate in the program may be high but their ability to follow through is challenging, researchers said.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, these programs and other digital strategies for reaching parents can be especially beneficial, the researchers say.
“A lot of time is spent in developing excellent and developmentally appropriate content for these programs and relatively little time is spent understanding how to make it easy for parents to engage,” said Lisa A. Gennetian, lead author of the study and Pritzker Associate Professor of Early Learning Policy Studies at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “Preserving parents’ choice to enroll in programs, especially those that are universally accessible and free, matters and we learned from this study that automatic enrollment minimizes burden on parents and can have enormous benefits in ways that do not interfere with their freedom.”
The study is the among the first to show that automatic enrollment is a promising strategy for increasing participation in early language and learning programs.
The study also showed the decision to stay in the program or opt out remained consistent for various subgroups. For instance, it made no difference whether this was a first birth or whether the other received public benefits. Such characteristics are sometimes cited as interfering with program participation.
“Opt-out strategies are liberally used in many aspects of our life, from organ donations to decisions about retirement benefits, and they are effective when done carefully,” Gennetian said. “Why wouldn’t we make life easier for parents and apply the same strategy of automatic enrollment with the ease of opting out?”
This research was supported by the Bezos Family Foundation and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (R03HD090280).
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CITATION: “The Impact of Default Options for Parent Participation in an Early Language Intervention,” L.A. Gennetian, L.Z Coskun, J.L. Kennedy, et al. Journal of Child and Family Studies (2020).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-020-01838-7
DURHAM, N.C. – In just a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic swiftly and substantially worsened mental health among U.S. hourly service workers and their children – especially those experiencing multiple hardships, according to new research from the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University and Barnard College.
The study leverages real-time, daily survey data collected from Feb. 20, before the pandemic hit the U.S., to April 27, when it was well underway, to examine how the crisis affected parents’ and children’s mental well-being. The 645 survey respondents were parents of young children working in hourly service-industry positions in retail, food service or hotel industries in a large U.S. city. Nearly half (49.5%) of the participants were Black Americans, 23% were Hispanic Americans, and 83% were women.
The findings appear today in Pediatrics.
The surveys showed strong, immediate impacts of the pandemic on vulnerable families. Parents saw quick deterioration in their own mental well-being, reporting more frequent “negative moods” since March 14, the day after the first major restrictions in response to COVID-19 were announced. The majority of respondents experienced multiple hardships, including household job loss (60%), income decline (69%), caregiving burden (45%) and illness (12%).
“The COVID pandemic has created substantial hardship for working families,” said Anna Gassman-Pines, co-author of the study and associate professor of public policy at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “What’s worse is that the more hardship families experienced, the worse parents’ and children’s mental health.”
Not surprisingly, those who experienced two and three hardships reported more negative moods, worse sleep quality and more uncooperative child behavior than those who did not. For both parents and children, mental health was worst among those who suffered all four hardships.
“These results should raise concern, given the strong links between parental psychological well-being and the well-being of children,” the authors write.
Gassman-Pines and co-author Elizabeth Ananat of Barnard College suggest pediatricians should screen for mental health problems among children in their practices, with particular attention to children whose families are especially vulnerable to both the economic and health aspects of the crisis.
During the stressful pandemic, pediatricians should also help parents understand and watch for potential signs of mental distress, the authors write. Those may include uncooperative behavior and acting out.
The authors also urge the government to provide more support for families, through restarting expanded unemployment insurance benefits and increasing the generosity of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“What we really see here is that, as hardships pile up, the combined weight causes severe distress for families. Resilience only takes you so far, and the multiple dimensions of hardship caused by this pandemic — lost jobs, lost child care and education, sickness — are stretching families to the breaking point,” said Ananat. “Families need support, from their pediatricians and, hopefully, from the government.”
This research was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health (Grant #1R21HD100893-01), the National Science Foundation (Award # SES-1921190), the Russell Sage Foundation (Grant #1811-10382) and Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
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CITATION: “COVID-19 and Parent-Child Psychological Well-Being,” Anna Gassman-Pines, Elizabeth Ananat and J. Fitz-Henley II. Pediatrics. 2020; DOI: 10.1542/peds.2020-007294