Poverty and Child Development:
Scientific Advances and Policy Implications
J. Lawrence Aber, Ph.D.
Professor of Applied Psychology and Public Policy
Institute for Human Development and Social Change
New York University
Comments prepared for the:
National Summit on America’s Children
Cannon House Office Building
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C.
May 22, 2007
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Speaker Pelosi, Chairman Miller, Representative DeLauro, Representative Fattah and
distinguished Members of Congress. Thank you for convening this “National Summit on
America’s Children” and for asking me to participate on this panel addressing issues of “Income
and Family Support”. This afternoon, I want to briefly update Members on: first, a few basic
facts about child poverty and family economic security; second, recent advances in the scientific
understanding of the effects of poverty and hardship on children’s development; and third,
possible policy implications of these scientific advances.
A Few Basic Facts
Nationwide, 18% of all children live in families with incomes below 100% of the Federal
Poverty Line (about $20,000/year for a family of 4). This amounts to 13 million children living
in poverty across the U.S. Especially relevant to this Summit, the poverty rate tends to be higher
for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers than for school-age children (20% vs. 16%). Child
poverty rates also vary greatly across race/ethnic groups (White children: 10%, Latino children:
28%; Black children: 35%), and states (from 7% in New Hampshire to 27% in Mississippi).
As troubling as these statistics are, they only tell part of the problem. Research consistently
shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty level to make
ends meet. Children living in families with incomes below this level—for 2006, $40,000 for a
family of four—are referred to as low income. An additional 21% of all children live in such low
income families that earn “too much” to be officially poor but too little to reach self-sufficiency
and basic economic security.
Low family incomes mean substantial economic and material hardships for too many of
America’s children. For instance, 16% of America’s children experience significant food
insecurity and 41% of families who rent pay more than 1/3 of their income on rent. (For these
and other details, I refer you to the National Center for Children in Poverty’s website
www.nccp.org and their fact sheet on “Who are America’s Poor Children?”)
Scientific Evidence
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Over the last decade, converging evidence from both experimental and longitudinal research
makes one point crystal clear: Poverty has a pervasive negative effect on children’s health,
learning and development. (Poverty also has a negative effect on children’s future life chances,
which Dr. Rucker Johnson from U. California, Berkeley, will describe in a few moments).
We have unequivocal evidence that poor children are more likely than non-poor children to
manifest developmental delays and learning disabilities (Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997;
Klerman, 1991), to have lower IQs (Brooks-Gunn, Klebanov, & Duncan, 1996; Duncan, BrooksGunn, & Klebanov, 1994), and to repeat a grade or to drop out of school (Brooks-Gunn &
Duncan, 1997; Children’s Defense Fund, 1997). Even after controlling for relevant parent
characteristics (e.g., education), poor children begin kindergarten with significantly lower
achievement in math, reading, and general knowledge than their higher income peers (Gershoff,
2003; Lee & Burkham, 2002; West, Denton, & Germino Hausken, 2000) and increasingly fall
behind as they progress through school (Fryer & Levitt, 2004, 2005; Rathbun & West, 2004).
Children from poor families are also at greater risk for experiencing behavioral or emotional
problems such as antisocial behavior (Aber, Bennett, Conley, & Li, 1997; Duncan & BrooksGunn, 1997; Miech, Caspi, Moffitt, Wright, & Silva, 1999; Takeuchi, Williams, & Adair, 1991),
as well as internalizing behavior problems, such as depression (McLeod & Shanahan, 1996;
Miech et al., 1999; Takeuchi et al., 1991). Similarly, poor children show difficulties with aspects
of social competence including self-regulation and impulsivity (Takeuchi et al., 1991), abilities
associated with social-emotional competence (Eisenberg et al., 1996).
Bolstering the case that family income matters for children are findings that with increases in
family income, children’s cognitive-academic skills and social-emotional competence indeed
improve (for reviews and examples, see: Dahl & Lochner, 2005; Duncan & Brooks-Gunn, 1997;
Gershoff, 2003; Gershoff, Aber, & Raver, 2003; Mayer, 2002; McLoyd, 1998; Seccombe, 2000).
There is clear evidence from both natural experiments (Costello, Compton, Keeler, & Angold,
2003) and randomized experiments (Morris & Gennetian, 2003) that increases in family income,
particularly among poor families, have positive impacts on children. It is incontrovertible that
living in poor or low income families remains a significant barrier to children meeting their
cognitive and social potential.
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While the deleterious effects of poverty on children’s health, education and development should
be concerning enough, two recent reports presented to the Committee on Ways and Means in the
U.S. House of Representatives have highlighted the economic costs to the country posed by such
high child poverty rates. One report by the Government Accountability Office concluded that
higher poverty rates in the general population are associated with slower economic growth,
particularly in areas of concentrated poverty (Nilsen, 2007). A second report, published by the
Center for American Progress, estimated that child poverty costs the U.S. $500 billion per year,
roughly equivalent to 4% of GDP, through reductions in productivity and economic output,
increases in crime, and increases in health expenditures (Holzer, Schanzenbach, Duncan, &
Ludwig, 2007). Both reports conclude that interventions aimed at augmenting parents’ human
capital, improving disadvantaged schools and neighborhoods, and providing more income
supports are indicated and stand a fair chance of helping poor and low income families.
The convergence of the longitudinal and experimental scientific research allows us to conclude
that those negative effects of poverty and low-income on children’s health, education and
development are causal. Much like earlier research on the effects of smoking, we now know for
certain what most of us always suspected: poverty is bad for children’s development and the
nation’s wellbeing.
Recent Scientific Advances
The most recent research on poverty and child development has now turned away from asking
the question “does poverty have an effect?” to questions of “how? by what mechanisms?” and
“what can be done to reduce child poverty and ameliorate its negative effects?”. You’ve heard
the advice of Nobel Laureate James Heckman (which has been echoed by others today):
INVEST EARLY in our most vulnerable children. But in what? How? My research colleagues
and I have developed an “evidence-based conceptual framework” to guide future scientific
research on these questions and to inform policy development (Gershoff, Aber & Raver, 2003).
This framework is presented in Figure 1. It looks complicated but I hope it tells a clear story.
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At the family (micro) level,
1. It is important to consider not only income, but also other factors (like material hardship)
when considering how economic disadvantage influences children’s development.
2. Income and hardship influence children’s development in large measure through parents:
their investments in their children; the stress they experience in raising children and
making ends meet; and their behaviors toward their children.
3. The specific paths of influence from socio-economic disadvantage through parenting to
different features of children’s development can provide a scientific guide to how to
target programs and policies.
At the community and policy (macro) level,
4. The family system is embedded in the institutions and neighborhoods in which families
and children live.
5. Different policy and program strategies are aimed at different features of the familymicro-level model. (In Gershoff et al. (2003), we lay out in detail how specific human
capital policies, income policies, in-kind supports, parenting and two generation
strategies, and child-directed strategies target different parts of the family micro-system.)
In Figure 2, I present the key results from a study that used this conceptual framework to
understand how low family income and material hardship influence parenting and children’s
development in a large and nationally representative sample, the Early Childhood Longitudinal
Study (which is directed by the National Center for Education Statistics in the U.S. Department
of Education). In these analyses, we clearly identified two distinct paths of influence: one goes
from low family income to low-parent investment to non-optimal cognitive/academic
development of young children (we call this the Family Investment path); the second goes from
high material hardship to high parent stress and harsh/punitive parenting behavior to non-optimal
social-emotional development of children (we call this the Family Stress path).
In short, income matters: low income constrains parents’ ability to invest time and money in their
young children; and low parental investment constrains young children’s cognitive/academic
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development. In addition, material hardship matters: material hardship generates parental stress
and harsh-punitive parenting styles which in turn constrains young children’s social-emotional
development. Finally, these constraints on the development of children in low-income families
contribute to the growing inequalities of development across childhood, adolescence and
adulthood in the U.S. These are some of the key processes by which poverty gets into family
relationships and into kids’ heads and hearts.
Potential Policy Implications
What are some potential implications of these scientific advances in our understanding of
poverty’s effects on parents and children for the policy choices facing the nation? I wish to
highlight three main implications today.
First, they suggest that U.S. social policies and programs should be reformed to more effectively
target family income and material hardship as key upstream determinants of non-optimal
parenting and children’s development. If very low family incomes can be significantly and
predictably increased, if material hardship can be significantly and predictably reduced, parents
will invest more in their children and stress out less. In turn, children will learn more and act out
less.
Second, federal, state and local governments should build on those policy strategies that are
already in place that can help poor families effectively increase their incomes and reduce their
material hardship. Positive work incentives built into some types of welfare reforms (like the
New Hope Project in Milwaukee), increases in the minimum wage, improving the uptake and
benefit levels of Food Stamps, and expansion of the federal earned income tax credit are four
good examples. Perhaps the single best opportunity on the national policy horizon and
consistent with these scientific findings to increase income available to children in poor families
would be to make the Child Tax Credit fully refundable. Then, the CTC would function for poor
families the way it does for middle income families in the U.S., as a home-grown version of a
“children’s allowance”. (Cross-national comparative research clearly indicates that social
policies like children’s allowances help explain why child poverty rates are so much lower in
most other advanced industrial democracies than they are in the U.S.)
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Third, and finally, we must continue to support the most rigorous and creative scientific research
on the causes and consequences of child poverty and experimental social policy research on how
to reduce poverty and protect children from its negative effects. In my home town of New York
City, we have begun to do just that. Our moderate Republican Mayor, Michael Bloomberg,
named a blue-ribbon antipoverty commission. The Commission identified evidence-based
strategies that were ready to be brought to scale in the City (like Nurse-Family Partnerships
which have been shown to reduce family stress and harsh-punitive parenting). It also identified
exciting new strategies developed in other countries (like the UK and Mexico) to reduce child
poverty and increase family investments in children’s human capital (like Conditional Cash
Transfers). City government and the private sector are adapting and pilot-testing them in NYC
to see if they are ready to be brought to scale. (Fellow panelist Gordon Berlin’s organization,
MDRC, is designing the evaluation.)
In keeping with the message you’ve heard throughout the day, I urge you to harness the best
science available to craft the income and family supports needed by the youngest and most
vulnerable of America’s children. Reducing poverty and material hardship will not solve all the
problems America’s youngest children face. But it will make virtually every other problem
we’ve discussed today easier to solve. Thank you.
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Figure 1.
Heuristic
HeuristicModel
Model
Federal -, State -, and Community -Level Policy and Program Interventions
Parent - and Family Level Predictors of
Income And
Hardship
Parent Work Status
 Job Prestige
 Education Level
 Parent Marital Status
 Race -Ethnicity
Family
Income
Poverty

Financial
Hardship
Parent
Investment
Child
Physical
Development
Parent
Behavior
Child
Cognitive
Development
Parent
Distress
Child Social Emotional
Development
Neighborhood - and Community -Level Influences
From: Gershoff, E. T., Aber, J. L., & Raver, C. C. (2003). Child poverty in the United States: An evidence-based conceptual
framework for programs and policies. In F. Jacobs, D. Wertlieb, & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of Applied Developmental
Science: Promoting positive child, adolescent, and family development through research, policies, and programs. Vol. 2
(pp. 81-136). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
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Figure 2.
.13
.05
Family Highest Education
.45
Marital Status
.30
Father Work Status
.51
Family Income
-.17
African-American
-.15
.15
Hispanic-American
Asian-American
Other Race-Ethnicity
Family Size
-.04
.52
R2 = .43
.20
Mother Work Status .14
Parent
Investment
.22
.04
.13
R2 = .33
-.58
-.05
.01
Parent
Stress
-.23
Material
Hardship
2
R = .34
-.02
Child
Cognitive
Competence
.81
2
R = .35
.70
.18
-.88
-.06
.38
Child
Social-Emotional
Competence
R2 = .26
Positive
Parenting
Behavior
R2 = .66
.43
-.11
-.08
CFI = .972, RMSEA = .066, AIC = 41,714.76, 2 (445) = 41,484.76
Note. Standardized paths are shown; all paths are significant at at least p < .05 except for the
dashed path which was not significant.
Gershoff, E. T., Aber, J. L., Raver, C. C., & Lennon, M. C. (2007). Income is
not enough: Incorporating material hardship into models of income
associations with parent mediators and child outcomes. Child Development,
78, 70-95.
9
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