State has lagged

Editor’s note: This is the second story in a series looking at child poverty in Jay County. The series will continue with additional stories and editorials over the course of the next few weeks.

Fifteen years ago, Indiana was a star when it came to its child poverty rate.

But it hasn’t been just Jay County that has struggled with the problem over the last decade. The state as a whole has faltered as well.

From 2000 through 2002, the Hoosier state’s child poverty rate hovered around 12 percent, a full five percentage points better than the national average. Even as that number began to grow in the ensuing years, it still remained below the national average.

That changed during the Great Recession.

Child poverty in Indiana climbed all the way to 22.6 percent in 2011, 1.6 percentage points higher than the national average. It has been above 20 percent every year since 2010. And since 2000, the state rate has increased by twice as much as that of the nation.

“When you come out of a recession, things you would look at would be unemployment and wages,” said Indiana Youth Institute vice president for advancement Glenn Augustine. “And while Indiana’s unemployment rate certainly is not high, it could be that we’re still seeing Indiana lag behind the nation in wages. And oftentimes, child poverty and poverty in general are numbers that tend to lag behind economic recovery.”

Indiana Bureau of Workforce Development and Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers bear that out.

The state’s unemployment rate of 4 percent in December was half a percentage point better than we saw nationally.

However, Indiana wages lagged behind the national average by more than $6,000 per person in 2015. While the average American worker has seen wages increase by 23.3 percent since 2006, Hoosier workers have seen their pay go up by just 19.6 percent.

And as the state has lagged behind the nation, so has Jay County lagged behind the state. Its per capita income in 2015 was $39,662, which is 6 percent less than the state average.



Definition and impact

When we talk about child poverty, what exactly do we mean?

Poverty is defined based on income as compared to family size and composition. So, the line is different for a single-parent household with one child compared to a two-parent household with five children and so on.

A two-adult, two-child household is considered to be in poverty if its annual income is below $24,036.

Breaking that down further, it amounts to $16.46 per person per day for all living expenses. Even if the adults were to cut back on their own needs and spend two-thirds of their annual income on their children, it would still amount to just $21.95 per day per child.

What that means in a more general sense is that children who grow up in poverty may not have access to the key resources that are a given for those in middle- or upper-class households. Those include access to enough food and healthy food, adequate healthcare and educational resources.

“A child growing up in poverty tends to lag behind his or her peers when they go to school,” said Augustine. “They’re less likely to have books and computers around through which children can gain knowledge, start to build those blocks that they need to enter school and be ready to learn.

“The research bears it out that oftentimes children in poverty have outcomes that are not as good as their peers who come from homes with a higher income, just because of the fact that there are so many challenges there.”

Next: What resources are available?