The latest child poverty monitor has been released, but nothing has changed. Let me predict: commentators & politicians will argue over poverty measurements, the ‘real’ numbers, parents will be blamed, social investment mentioned and our focus will slide oh so gently away from an unpalatable and difficult reality.
Meanwhile the moral debt builds, the tower of wasted potential trembles, the hole of human misery grows deeper, darker and wider. And children and families are left in the shadows. They are left in the respiratory wards of our hospitals, the barren rooms of our early childhood centers and the hopeless cells of our prisons. Yet if we choose to we could mend this tear in the fabric of New Zealand. We could value all lives equally and make things right for these families and their children. We just need to understand 6 things:
- Child poverty exists using multiple measurements and it matters because it leads to poor outcomes for children & families that cost the country around $10billion a year. This is criminal waste of amazing potential.
* AHC: After housing costs; BHC: Before housing costs. Source: Perry, 2016. Household Incomes in New Zealand
Figure 1. Rates ‘Poor’ Children in New Zealand
- We need to focus not on the metrics but on what works to change the outcomes and what works is money. Money works first & foremost, to lift stress in families under enormous pressure and improve outcomes. But it needs to come early.
- Intervention needs to come very early – pre birth preferably- and certainly in the first five years of life because that is when stress and resource scarcity in a family seriously impacts on a child’s physical, mental and behavioral development. The toxic impact of stress can last a lifetime.
- Older children, young adults and even grown adults don’t respond as we would like to interventions and appear sometimes to make poor decisions in the face of positive inputs even. This is because reversing the toxic stress effects from infancy is hugely difficult. Brain connections have been made, behaviours have been set and while the brain is plastic and malleable at all ages it is an expensive, intensive uphill battle to change things for adult who was not invested in as a baby.
- We can change outcomes, there are policies that work, but families, yes families, parents, grandparents, whanau, not just children, need the right support to provide a nursery of opportunity for their children.
- We provide unconditional money for a vulnerable group of people at one end of the life spectrum (the elderly) because we believe it to be the right thing to do and it works. We can choose to do the same when the seeds are vulnerable and just emerging, as well as when the plants are in maturity. If we choose to give this support things will change. It is in our power to give all children in NZ the opportunity to thrive.
About the Author
