Poverty and its effects on school-aged children: Understanding the consequences of policy choices

While the news has been full of the increasing financial stress many Australians are facing with the withdrawal of JobKeeper and the Coronavirus Supplement, there has been little focus on what these changes mean for children. Australia has signed on to the Sustainable Development Goals, but have been criticised for the high levels of poverty, and child poverty in particular, with little progress in evidence across the years. In today’s post, Sharon Bessell (@BessellSharon) of ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy (@ANU Crawford) shares her important research conducted with children, who explain in their own words the stressors and constraints that poverty places on their everyday decisions, plans for the future, and family relationships. This provides fresh insight into how the less generous support settings will exacerbate wellbeing and opportunities for children and families in low-income households.

In 2015, world leaders pledged support for the Sustainable Development Goals – a global agenda to promote the wellbeing of people and the planet on which we are all dependent.

The first of the Sustainable Development Goals is to end poverty in all its forms, everywhere.  There are several targets associated with this goal. Including to ‘reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions’ by 2030 and to ensure appropriate social protection programs are in place for all.

Today, five years on, the world has changed in ways we could not have imagined in 2015. But the goal to end poverty is more relevant in Australia than ever – particularly because of the social experiment on which Australia embarked in response to COVID-19. In 2020, as the government took steps to mitigate the impacts of coronavirus, Australia demonstrated it is possible to reduce income poverty significantly though the adoption of social protection floors. However, in 2021, Australia demonstrated that it is possible to plunge many thousands – including children – back into poverty, through the removal of those social benefits. If we ever wondered how policy decisions impact people living in poverty, we have learned over the past year.

The numbers, dollar figures, and likely impacts of the reduction in Jobseeker have been widely discussed. The ways in which people used additional money to improve their lives has been well documented. What has been less discussed is the impact on children and the multidimensional nature of the poverty children experience.

We know the effects of childhood poverty are most often detrimental and persistent, but how do children perceive the impacts in their everyday lives? Photo by Charlein Gracia on Unsplash

Prior to COVID-19, I led a research project on children’s experiences of community. We worked with children between the ages of seven and twelve years to co-construct knowledge of what makes strong and supportive communities. Four of the six communities we worked in were identified as disadvantaged on a range of Australia Bureau of Statistics indicators. The families of many of the children were struggling financially, and on a number of other fronts.  From that research, we have some deep and disturbing insights into how poverty shapes children’s lives – and we can use that understanding to reflect on how recent policy decisions will impact them.

Three aspects of poverty that children spoke of are particularly revealing: insufficient income; limiting opportunities; time and relationships with parents.

Insufficient income

The children who participated in our research were young – aged between seven and twelve years. The research methods we used were designed to enable children to have time to raise issues that mattered to them: there was discussion of favourite and longed-for toys, games, and devices; the most fun parks and playgrounds; and the ups and downs of friendships. As the research unfolded and children felt more comfortable, they raised more issues, including the challenges of not having enough money to meet the most basic needs.  Food shortages were a problem for many children – and only one meal a day was affordable for some. Hungry tummies at the start of the day were helped in one school where a breakfast program ran daily. But not all schools had such programs every day, or at all. A nine-year old boy described his neighbours as ‘good’ and ‘always helpful’.  His main reason for this was because they provided food when his family could not afford to buy it – and for this he was grateful. When the modelling indicates dramatic increases in child poverty, we can be assured that children – like those who participated in our research – will wake up hungry, go to school hungry, and go to bed hungry. And based on our research, they will be reluctant to tell anyone, because of a sense of shame and a desire not to further worry their parents.

Children also talked about the housing stress that resulted from insufficient money. At one point in the research, a group of children – aged 9 and 10 years – debated whether rents should be capped. The discussion arose when one girl proposed capping rents because her mum found it so hard to make ends meet. She lived in a single parent family, and in especially hard weeks, she, her mum, and sister ate less. Other children described their own experiences of housing stress – including sharing accommodation with extended family members or friends, and moving regularly. Some wondered if caps on rents would extend financial hardship to people who build houses, which they felt might not be fair. The discussion continued for twenty minutes without any input from the researchers, as children balanced the housing unaffordability that many had experienced personally with broader principles of fairness.

Three things were apparent from this discussion, and from the research findings more broadly. First, most of the children who participated were deeply concerned with issues of social justice, and considered good communities to be those that supported and cared for people who need help. Second, children living in contexts of economic disadvantage experienced fear and uncertainty as their parents struggled to afford essentials, such as food and housing. Third, while parents often tried to protect their children from such fear and uncertainty, children understood deeply the nature and the pain of economic hardship.

Limiting opportunities

Children described the ways in which their parents tried to limit the impacts of poverty; in some cases they described their parents going without or borrowing to afford a special, much wanted item. More often, in our research, children described the ways in which they tried to protect their parents. The most common strategy was to throw away permission slips for school excursions or activities that they felt their parents might not be able to afford. In one school, the principal explained that there was an equity fund for these kinds of situations; but our research indicated that children did not know of its existence. Moreover, some said they would feel embarrassed to have to ask for help.

The effect of children’s management strategies was the denial of opportunities. Children were teaching themselves at a very young age, to behave in ways that negatively impacted opportunities for learning, social inclusion, and development – and, often, the fun of childhood. While children took their own decisions on many of these issues, they did so as a result of structural poverty and systemic failures, and in a context of powerlessness and what can only be called “choicelessness”.

Undermining Relationships

When children described the things that mattered most to them, relationships were inevitably at the top of the list. Tragically, from children’s perspectives, poverty often had devastating impacts on relationships. One of the most important, and confronting, findings of our research was the ways in which financial hardship and stress, job precarity, and housing insecurity impacted on parents, and on child-parent relationships. Low pay, long working hours, night work and weekend work, workplace injury, seeking but not finding work were all factors that children described as impacting negatively on their relationships with their parents – often because their parents were ‘grumpy’ or ‘sad’ as a result of these pressures. Not all of these issues arise from or are created by poverty – but many are.

Importantly, the situations described by children were not ones that arose from individual behaviours; rather they were related to deep structural inequalities and systemic failures, that placed parents in difficult – sometimes desperate – situations. All of this impacted on what children valued most: supportive relationships and time with the most important people in their lives. And for most children those people were their parents.

Children and Poverty in 2021

In the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the issues raised by children in our research are unlikely to be improving. By drawing on our pre-COVID research, it is possible to identify the ways in which the lives of children experiencing poverty are currently being shaped, how they are trying to cope, and what sacrifices they are forced to make.

The evidence suggests that some children will be most deleteriously impacted. Using a poverty line of 50% of median income, ACOSS and UNSW analysis shows the gendered nature of poverty in Australia.  Amongst couple families with children, 9.6% of those where the primary earner is male are in poverty, compared with 15.5% when the primary earner is female. Amongst single parent families, 17.5% are in poverty when the parent is male, and a shocking 37.2% when the parent is female. This disparity stems from ongoing gender inequality and problematic gender norms. From a child standpoint, the poverty of single parent families, particularly single mother families, is deepened by the time pressures on single parents, which are likely to be exacerbated by the increased compliance measures that have recently been introduced.

In 2020, with the adoption of coronavirus supplements, Australia demonstrated powerfully that poverty is not inevitable. Rather, it results from structural inequities, from policy choices, and from the level of poverty societies are prepared to accept. While insufficient income is at the core of poverty, the implications for children are multidimensional. Those implications include deep material deprivation; a lack of opportunities that may have lifelong consequences; and deleterious impacts on what children value most: their relationships with their parents. In line with the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals, poverty in all its forms can be dramatically reduced for all though well-designed and just social protection measures. The question now facing Australia is whether we are prepared to condemn some children to poverty across all these dimensions, when we have demonstrated we can prevent it.

This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here and follow us on Twitter @PolicyforWomen

Posted by @SusanMaury