Child Poverty - Causes

Causes

With a lot of children in lose they can despair and just die by accident. The majority of poverty-stricken children are born to poor parents. Therefore the causes such as adult poverty, government policies, lack of education, unemployment, social services, disabilities and discrimination significantly affect the presence of child poverty. Lack of parental economic resources such as disposable income restricts children’s opportunities. Economic and demographic factors such as deindustrialization, globalization, residential segregation, labor market segmentation, and migration of middle-class residents from inner cities, constrain economic opportunities and choices across generation, isolating inner-city poor children.

The loss of “family values”, or decline of the nuclear family, illegitimacy, teen pregnancy, and increased numbers of single mothers, is also cited as a major cause of poverty and welfare dependency for women and their children. Kids resulting from unintended pregnancies are more likely to live in poverty; raising a child requires significant resources, so each additional child increases demands on parental resources. Families raised by a single parent are generally poorer than those raised by couples. In the United States, 6 of 10 long term poor children have spent time in single parent families and in 2007, children living in households headed by single mothers were five times as likely as children living in households headed by married parents to be living in poverty.

Many of the apparent negative associations between growing up poor and children’s attainments reflect unmeasured parental advantages that positively affect both parents’ incomes and children’s attainments, like parental depression.