More Children Living (and Lacking) in High-Poverty Areas ...

Concentrated poverty has a concentrated impact. This is not news, and it?s a very difficult story to make ?new? ? another, less amusing way that writing about family can feel, as Lisa Belkin put it in a recent column, like ?Groundhog Day.?

Earlier this week, The Times?s? Economix blog? posted on the strong correlation between teenage births and teenagers who live in places with a high level of income inequality, which are also likely to be areas of concentrated poverty (where 30 percent or more households fall below the federal poverty threshold). The Annie E. Casey Foundation recently highlighted national, state and city data showing that the number of children living in those areas of concentrated poverty has increased by 25 percent since 2000.

The effects of concentrated poverty are as tangled and complex as its roots. Children living in areas of concentrated poverty are more likely to live with parents who struggle to meet their material needs, and ?more likely to experience harmful levels of stress and severe behavioral and emotional problems than children overall.? Students in schools in these communities have lower test scores. They?re more likely to drop out.

These effects are seen even among the children of higher-income families in the same neighborhoods. Being surrounded by an atmosphere of poverty and a sense that there is little chance of income mobility does not tend, statistically speaking, to support good outcomes. And yet we?ve been unable to find or sustain programs and policies that consistently impact children in these communities; instead, with remarkable rapidity, they become adults, and parents of a new generation.

Yesterday, Ms. Belkin wrote a very funny piece for the Huffington Post on ?How Parenting Is Like Groundhog Day and Mad Libs.? The more things change in parenting media, the more they stay the same, she says, and that?s the way it has to be. Thus, two articles, 10 years apart, on early puberty, and her own repeated realization that she?s riffed more than once on topics like breast-feeding in public and the experience of having a child come home from college.

To write about parenting, though, you use a panoramic lens, not a close up. From this perch, the logic, and knowledge, and chronology of parenting doubles back and races ahead and folds in on itself. Parents give birth, and give in to tantrums, and give away brides ? all on the same page. Around here, a ?child? is simultaneously 6 days, 6 months and 16 years old.

A study will come out, or an essay will be written, or a blogger will opine, and the crowd will chime in. Few will notice that the same was asked, and answered, days, or months, or years ago. Because for you, back then, it was just noise. You can?t know what you don?t know until you need to know it.

I laughed, because it?s so true ? in a decade of writing about family, I?ve covered plenty of subjects more than once (in fact, in just a few months of writing here, we?ve already explored sugar twice and continued the long-running conversation about homework even more often).

But there are some topics I would strongly prefer not to write again and again. I had to, as the? Freakonomics Radio host Stephen J. Dubner said on a recent broadcast, ?ask Mr. Google? how many times, in those years of writing about parenting and about the politics and policies that affect our family lives, I have written about the impact of poverty on childhood. How many times I?d cited the Annie E. Casey Foundation. How many times I?ve opined on the ways we as a society punish children for the poverty, disadvantages, sins, or mistakes of their parents by providing them with less.

The answer? Often. A lot. Too many times to link. (And Lisa Belkin is no slouch in this department, either.)

This is not a version of Groundhog Day anyone wants to live in. So we hope for, work towards, and vote for change, even though it?s rare for us to agree on what that might look like.

But when the 2012 Annie E. Casey Foundation KIDS COUNT numbers are released, I have a feeling I?ll be right here, looking for another powerful adjective to highlight what too often feels like the same story. I suppose I?m putting my faith in, as Lisa put it, the force of ?all those repeated conversations nudging the needle a skootch at a time.?

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