Children's development is one of the main focuses of the Low-Income Working Families project.
Child Poverty
Living in concentrated poverty stifles the life chances of adults and children. Efforts to transform neighborhoods of extreme poverty into places of opportunity must grapple with concentrated disadvantages including distressed housing, failing schools, joblessness, poor health, and violence. The brief, "How to Evaluate Choice and Promise Neighborhoods," provides a framework for designing evaluations of two federal initiatives seeking to address neighborhood deficiencies simultaneously, the Department of Education's Promise Neighborhoods effort and the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Choice Neighborhoods program.
The U.S. child poverty rate has fluctuated between 15 and 23 percent for the past four decades, but far more children—37 percent—live in poverty at some point during their childhoods. Being poor at birth strongly predicts future poverty status. Using the PSID, the paper, "Childhood Poverty Persistence: Facts and Consequences," finds that 49 percent of children who are poor at birth go on to spend at least half their childhoods living in poverty.
Vulnerable Youth
The LIWF team explores racial and ethnic differences in transitioning to adulthood including high school graduation, college enrollment, college completion, and full-time employment to determine to what extent differential adult outcomes can be explained by other vulnerable circumstances and risk behaviors.
The fact sheets, "Transition to Adulthood: African American Youth and Youth from Low-Income Working Families," examine the transition to adulthood for two groups of youth using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort. Low-income African Americans are compared to low-income white youth, and youth from low-income “high-work” families are compared to low-income youth from moderate-work and nonworking (i.e., low-work) families.
School Transience in North Carolina
"Student Transience in North Carolina: The Effect of School Mobility on Student Outcomes Using Longitudinal Data" explores how the mobility of low-income working families affects the educational performance of children in schools. The paper describes the school mobility rates for elementary and middle school students in North Carolina and presents estimates of the effect of school mobility on the performance of different groups of students, including minority and disadvantaged students.
Children of Immigrants Data Tool
The Children of Immigrants Data Tool enables users to generate detailed charts of the characteristics of children age 0 to 17 nationwide and for individual states and the District of Columbia in 2005 and 2006. Statistics on 21 features include citizenship and the immigrant status (foreign vs. native-born) of children and their parents; children's race, ethnicity, and school enrollment; parents' education and English proficiency; and family composition, income, and work effort. A companion publication, "Children of Immigrants: National and State Characteristics," highlights key national data and variations across states.
Child Care Choices
The LIWF project studies factors that influence child care choices among low-income working families and how family characteristics constrain child care choices to help policymakers craft policies that address the needs of these families.
Latest Research
