Poor Kids Rise With Adult Role Models

It’s a sociologic tenet that poor kids need a two-parent home to rise above the poverty when adults, but now researchers are suggesting living in neighborhoods with adults who have jobs can also be a big economic booster for them.

Believe it, says the WSJ story on economists who found an unexpected twist to the age-old problem of how to help poor kids be economically mobile later in life. For instance, “mobility for poor black children in Milwaukee County, Wisc., “edged up even as it deteriorated for poor white children,” according to Harvard University economist Raj Chetty, who has spent a decade working to understand what makes mobility possible … and why in some places the children of poor parents have been more able to move up than in others. Using anonymized census & tax data, Chetty & other researchers followed millions of Americans from childhood into adulthood. The surprising result: “Even in neighborhoods bordering one another, outcomes for poor children can be vastly different.” And, there seems to be a distinct correlation between how well off poor parents with steady jobs are and the kids being better off economically as adults.

Its’ not that researchers haven’t suspected this connection, but what’s new is that this research systematic and it “doesn’t rely on whether a child’s own parents are employed: Outcomes also improve for children who simply grow up in a neighborhood where more parents have jobs. In other words, their own parents might be unemployed, but if their schoolmates’ parents work, their outcome will be better.” Didn’t they use to call this “role models”?

Davd Soul