by Dana Damiani

Poverty levels in New York have been fluctuating for decades. The state Comptroller’s Office recently put out a report showing that in 2014, childhood poverty rates in New York matched national levels. Then, rates improved during the COVID-19 pandemic when many families were granted additional child tax credits. However, now nearly one in five children in New York are living below the poverty line, according to the state’s most recent report.

“No child was born destined to be in poverty,” Larry Marx, the CEO of the Children’s Agenda in Rochester, said. “We have choices that we can make, like state tax credits that can be expanded that would fit families out of poverty.” The Children’s Agenda is a not-for-profit that works with the state and families to support children in need.

“That is a limit no one should be living anywhere near,” he said. “That’s $30,000 for a family of four with two children. There’s no way to pay for basic needs of food and shelter and medicine and transportation at that kind of salary level. It is unimaginable that kind of level of desperation and hardship. It just makes me think we live in medieval times to allow families to sink to that level of stress and scramble and hardship.”

The report says more than 2.7 million New Yorkers were living in poverty in 2022 and 735,742 were children. Under the Official Poverty Measure, 18.8% of New York’s children were in poverty that year.

“It causes enormous stress on the part of the parents, and that just permeates every part of family life,” Marx said. “When families are struggling to try to get to two jobs and borrowing cars or using the bus, getting you with their children four or five in the morning to make sure that their children are in school, and that they’re able to get to work or trying to make the $100 stretch for the rest of the month so that food can be on the table, deciding whether sometimes lunch or dinner is the more important of the two. That’s so incredibly stressful.”

Although this stress impacts the entire house, Marx says it can be detrimental to younger children.

“It’s particularly hard-hitting on children in their earliest years,” Marx said. “Those are the years when their brains and bodies are forming. By the time a child reaches kindergarten at age 5, about 80% of the brain growth that happens in a human being will have happened. All the neutral connections [are] established. So the youngest children 0 to 5 suffer the most from poverty, which is the case. They are disproportionately more younger children, 0 to 5 in poverty than older children.”

These demographics can have long-lasting effects as children continue to develop and mature.

“There’s not a single aspect of a child’s life that isn’t touched by a family being in poverty,” Marx said. “Whether it’s their educational outcomes, whether it’s their health outcomes or their mental health outcomes. Everything. Every corner of a child’s life: their opportunities to play their access to green space in their neighborhoods, all of that is affected by the level of household income of the family. The consequences are perhaps there are less there’s less attachment to school. And so we know that chronic absenteeism is a humongous problem, not going to school, let alone being there and learning and graduating is incredibly harmful for the lifelong outcomes of teens and youth. It means they’re less likely to have permanent employment [and] less likely to have higher income opportunities. It’s humungous.”

The Children’s Agenda is advocating for more help from the state to curb these troubling child poverty rates.

“The U.S. Census showed people spend that money on household basic needs,” he said. “And when you have in Rochester over 30% of families being housing burdened, meaning that they can’t afford their rent or mortgage because it’s so much higher as a percent of their income than for the rest of us, that makes a huge, huge difference. So we can pass to Working Families Act. We could pass the Housing Voucher Access Program, which would essentially establish a new level of support for families in need of affording rent for their families. That’s another bill that has not veer another policy approach that hasn’t been adopted. There are all choices and the fact is the clock is ticking.”

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