Poverty is one of the most pervasive conditions associated with children with special needs. Already generally recognized as one of the main factors correlated with a large number of social problems, poverty is, in a way, such a large umbrella that one wonders if it is a cause or an effect. However, on the topic, we can definitely say that poverty is an apt way of summarizing the existence of a large number of contributing factors that make a family less likely to be able to adequately support a child with special needs. .
Poverty as a causal factor
Poverty, the lack of adequate money, on the part of parents can directly contribute to the birth of a child with special needs through a large number of direct physical stressors, including (but not limited to):
• Poor nutrition: A malnourished fetus is likely to be born prematurely or with a low birth weight, both of which are definitely related to special needs diagnoses.
• Neglect: Poor parents are significantly more likely to neglect their children simply out of necessity, leaving them alone or in inadequate care so they can seek opportunities to pay the bills.
• Abuse: Poor parents are also significantly more likely to actively abuse their babies, being unable to deal with the stress of caring for a child while struggling with money and/or addicted to mood-altering drugs or the mind that make them act. abusively
• Exposure: Obviously, homelessness or inadequate housing is much more common for poor parents, which can cause developmental problems in babies.
• Illness: Inadequate medical care is one of the characteristics of modern poverty; a child of poor parents is much more likely to have the early signs of a disease go unrecognized, or recognized and not treated, until the opportunity for prevention has passed.
In short, chronically poor families are much more likely to have children with special needs, and they are also the least likely to be able to handle the stress of raising a child with special needs.
Single parent family, poverty and special needs
A significant 8% of children born into two-parent families live at or below the federal poverty level. That statistic alone is grim enough, but it’s important to note that in recent decades, the percentage of children born to single mothers has skyrocketed to 38%, with 32% of single-parent children living below the threshold. of poverty. That averages out to 22% of all American children who are ‘born poor’ and are therefore at significantly higher risk of being born with special needs, as described above.
In short, if we intend to seek a political solution to the growing number of children with special needs who are overwhelming our schools, there is an obvious area to start: with the elimination of poverty. Recent efforts in Utah, as well as a significant number of experiments a few decades ago in Canada and the US, have shown that we have the resources we need to do it, but not the political will.
Costs for children with special needs
According to a report titled Expensive Children in Poor Families, of 2,000 families interviewed who accepted welfare:
• 45% reported that they had spent out-of-pocket money on specialized clothing, food, transportation, medicine, medical care, or child care for their children. The average cost for families reporting such costs: $143 in the previous month. These children were not necessarily considered to have special needs, but families specified “specialized” goods or services, implying that generic offerings were not appropriate for their children.
• The average family supporting at least one child with a moderate or severe disability had to spend enough time and effort to support the child who lost an average of $80 of job opportunity each month.
• Unless a family received SSI disability benefits for their child, out-of-pocket expenses that would otherwise have been covered by SSI reduced the total effective income of the family such that 12% of families who would otherwise otherwise they would have been considered well below the poverty level.
The effects of children with special needs on public assistance
While there is public assistance that is specifically directed to families of children with special needs, this section deals only with non-targeted public assistance of the type that is generally available to families without such children. The same report found that:
• Families were more likely to receive assistance if they had a child with special needs, and
• That probability increased with each additional child with special needs, and
• It also increased with the severity of the disability each child faced.
In other words, just as one might intuitively predict, the more difficult a given group of children is to deal with in terms of medical or social needs, the more likely it is that the family supporting that child will receive non-specific public assistance. . Or, put more succinctly, having children with special needs makes families qualify for and seek public assistance.
In addition, the study found that there were only two significant destinations for families of children with special needs receiving welfare: they left welfare but began receiving SSI for disability, or they stayed on welfare. The effect of having a severely disabled child was equivalent to twice as strong a dependency on public assistance as the effect of the family losing a parent, implying that the cost of a severely disabled child is greater than the income increased by one parent by a significant amount.
We have now seen how poverty is a major cause of special needs in children born into poor families, and how having one or more children with special needs causes families to fall into poverty. The vicious cycle here should be immediately apparent: being poor makes it more likely that you will have a child with special needs, which in turn makes it more likely that you will remain poor for the foreseeable future. This is a problem that desperately needs a solution.