child poverty uk essay

The impact of poverty on early childhood

For most parents, bringing a baby into the world and nurturing a young child brings both great joy and intense love, but it also comes with many changes, and sometimes stress, pressure and anxiety. Those pressures and stresses are likely to be much greater for families who are struggling to make ends meet.  In the UK today, more than one in four families with a child under five are living in poverty .  

Experiencing poverty can cause harm at any age, but particularly for the youngest children. This is when the foundations for their physical, emotional and social development are being laid. A substantial body of research shows that family poverty is associated with and can cause poorer academic attainment and social and emotional development. Perhaps not surprisingly, poverty can be highly detrimental if it is persistent, experienced in the first three years of life and combined with other disadvantages. Given this, addressing early childhood poverty is a vital part of the jigsaw of support needed to enable young children to flourish.

The harm that poverty can inflict begins during pregnancy and is shaped by the health and well-being of parents and their socio-economic status. Gaps in development between disadvantaged and advantaged children emerge very early on. Poverty impacts are also not the same for everyone and are further compounded by inequalities in relation to parents’ ethnicity, health and economic status. By the time a child reaches 11 months there are gaps in communication and language skills, and by the age of three inequalities in children’s cognitive and social and emotional skills are evident. A large body of analysis shows how these early disadvantages can go on to affect children’s development in later life.

Importantly, this is not to say that economic disadvantage inevitably leads to poor long-term outcomes; other factors – family circumstances, wider family support, social networks and connections, educational resources and public services - all play a vital role and can mitigate the effects of poverty.

Younger children are more likely to be in poverty than other groups 

Poverty here is defined as not having enough material resources such as money, housing, or food to meet the minimum needs - both material and social – in today’s society. While there have been some key changes over the last two decades, there is one constant – children are markedly more likely to experience poverty than adults or pensioners and it is younger children who are most at risk .

This is the result of a combination of factors including the costs of children and that households with younger children are less likely to have two parents in full-time work parents. The latest figures show that there are some 4.2 million children living in poverty in the UK, a rise of 600,000 over the last decade.

Most worryingly deep poverty has been rising, particularly affecting lone parents, large families, and people living in families with a disabled person. The Runnymede Trust found that Black and minority ethnic people are currently 2.2 times more likely to be in deep poverty than white people, with Bangladeshi people more than three times more likely.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report on Destitution in the UK 202 3 found that over 1 million children had experienced destitution at some point over 2022.

Poverty affects children’s material, social, educational and emotional well-being

Poverty affects young children’s experiences directly. Parents have less money to meet children’s material and social needs. The sharply rising costs of providing the basic essentials – food, warmth, lighting, housing costs, nappies, baby food, clothing - has created acute pressure for many families. Drawing on a survey of their service users, in 2022 Barnardo’s reported that 30% of parents said their child’s mental health had worsened in the previous four months, 16% said their child/ren had to share a bed with them or a sibling, and 30% were concerned about losing their home/being made homeless.

Recent research (Ruth Patrick et al. 2023 ) looked at the effects of benefit changes on larger families. It shows the many hardships that families are dealing with, the inability to meet their children’s needs and the stress and worry they feel as a result. But it also shows the resilience, strength and skills they employ to give their children the best possible life in the circumstances. Families spoke about the sheer amount of time it takes to manage on a very tight budget and its direct impact on children – from missing bath time to reading a bedtime story. This is affecting children’s educational outcomes. 95% of teachers surveyed by Kindred Squared believe that the cost-of-living crisis is going to impact school readiness next year.

Poverty gets under your skin; it takes a toll on the mental health of mothers, fathers, and wider family. The Family Stress Model, underpinned by research, shows the way in which economic stress - poverty, hardship, debt - creates psychological distress, lack of control and feelings of stigma. Not surprisingly, these stresses affect family relationships, both between parents and with children. Hardship, debt, deprivation and ‘feeling poor’ is linked to poorer maternal mental health and lower life satisfaction and this can make it more difficult to find the mental space to be an attentive and responsive parent. This in turn can affect young children’s social and emotional development and outcomes.

What can we do?

Explaining how poverty affects young children’s well-being and outcomes is important when it comes to developing effective responses: addressing poverty and hardship directly, supporting parents’, especially mothers’, mental health, and providing support for parenting.

The research also helps identify the protective factors that help to reduce the detrimental impact of poverty: wider family and neighbourhood support, good maternal and paternal mental health, access to high quality early education, warm parent-child interaction and financial and housing stability.

Early years professionals, health visitors, family support workers and many others are in the front line of the difficulties that families with young children are facing. They are responding to the legacy of the Covid pandemic and the rise in cost of living, working across service boundaries and in new ways, despite budgetary pressures.

Local services are working to meet the needs of families with young children in the round – including support for maternal mental health, parental conflict, parenting and the home learning environment. There are many voluntary initiatives, such as Save the Children’s Building Blocks, which combines giving grants to reduce the impact of material deprivation with supporting parents to play and learn with their children at home, initiatives to use local authority data to increase the take-up of benefit entitlements, and thebaby bank network, providing essential products and equipment as well as practical support for parents who are struggling.

Tackling early childhood poverty rests both on public policy which takes a holistic and joined up approach, as well as action at local level, whether that’s through local authorities, early years services in health and education, local businesses and community and voluntary initiatives.

In the Nuffield Foundation’s Changing Face of Early Childhood , we set out some core principles to address early childhood poverty including:

A multi-dimensional approach that reflects the range of socioeconomic risks and intersecting needs faced by families with young children.

Money matters - a financial bedrock for families with young children living on a low income, through improved social security benefits and access to employment, which takes account of the care needs of the under-fives.

Greater attention and investment in policies to support parental mental health and parenting from the earliest stage of a child’s life.

A more coherent, joined up and effective approach to early childhood would help to address the inequalities between children by supporting them early on in life and establishing deep roots from which they can grow and flourish.

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Poverty and child health in the UK: using evidence for action

Sophie wickham.

1 Department of Public Health and Policy, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

Elspeth Anwar

Catherine law.

2 Institute of Child Health, University College London, London, UK

David Taylor-Robinson

There are currently high levels of child poverty in the UK, and for the first time in almost two decades child poverty has started to rise in absolute terms. Child poverty is associated with a wide range of health-damaging impacts, negative educational outcomes and adverse long-term social and psychological outcomes. The poor health associated with child poverty limits children's potential and development, leading to poor health and life chances in adulthood. This article outlines some key definitions with regard to child poverty, reviews the links between child poverty and a range of health, developmental, behavioural and social outcomes for children, describes gaps in the evidence base and provides an overview of current policies relevant to child poverty in the UK. Finally, the article outlines how child health professionals can take action by (1) supporting policies to reduce child poverty, (2) providing services that reduce the health consequences of child poverty and (3) measuring and understanding the problem and assessing the impact of action.

Introduction

The latest figures suggest that in 2013–2014 there were 3.7 million children living in poverty in the UK—3 in every 10 children. 1 Furthermore, levels of child poverty are rising. For the first time in almost two decades, child poverty in the UK increased in absolute terms in 2011–2012. 2

Higher levels of child poverty are associated with worse child health outcomes. Children growing up in poverty in the UK experience a wide range of adverse child health and developmental outcomes, and are more likely to develop chronic conditions in childhood compared with more affluent children. 3 It has been estimated that eliminating child poverty in the UK would save the lives of 1400 children under 15 years of age annually. 4 Furthermore, the consequences of child poverty cost the UK economy £29 billion a year in 2013, up from £25 billion in 2008. 5

The high level of poverty found in the UK is associated with many negative child health outcomes. 6 For example, childhood mortality (aged 0–14) in the UK is significantly higher than similar countries in Europe. 7 In children under five, the UK mortality rate is the highest in Western Europe, double that of Sweden. 8 Figure 1 further shows that countries with a higher proportion of children living in relative poverty (below 60% median income) have higher infant mortality rates.

Child poverty and infant mortality in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Child poverty data are taken from EUROMOD figures, and infant mortality is taken from UNICEF (2014). EUROMOD, a European benefit-tax model and social integration.

To assist child health professionals to engage in the debate about child poverty, here we outline some key definitions, review the links between child poverty and a range of health, developmental, behavioural and social outcomes for children, 9 and provide an overview of current policies relevant to child poverty in the UK. Finally, we assess what further actions need to be taken and describe the important role that child health professionals can play.

What is child poverty?

The theoretical underpinnings of ‘poverty’, how it is defined and measured are important as these concepts influence the strategies and policies chosen to address poverty. In 1979, Peter Townsend defined poverty as:

Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack resources to obtain the type of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or at least widely encouraged and approved, in the societies in which they belong. (ref. 10 , p. 31)

This conception of poverty as being relative (rather than absolute) to a particular context recognises that standards of living change over time. The most widely used measure of relative poverty within the European Union is the proportion of individuals with household incomes less than a particular proportion of the current median of that population. For the purposes of international comparisons, UNICEF use a cut-off of 50%, whereas in the UK relative poverty is generally calculated as <60% of the median. 11 12 By contrast, absolute poverty is measured against a static threshold that only rises with inflation, even if society is becoming more or less prosperous. This measure indicates individuals living in poverty getting better or worse off in absolute terms. 12 In practical terms, living on an income of <60% of the median means that many families struggle to meet basic needs like food, heating, transport, clothing and the extra costs of schooling like equipment and school trips. 13

Being in receipt of income-related welfare benefits has also been used as a measure of poverty. In the UK, this can include being the recipient of income support, job seekers allowance, housing benefits, council tax benefits or working tax credit and child tax credit. Free school meal eligibility is a statutory benefit available to school-aged children from families who receive other qualifying benefits and is widely used as a measure of childhood disadvantage related to poverty, especially in educational analyses. 14 This is often used as an area based measure, like the income deprivation affecting children index, which is the percentage of children aged 0–15 living in income-deprived households on the basis of receipt of various welfare benefits. 15 Objective and subjective measures of material deprivation relating to lack of resources available to individuals that society deem important have also been used as child poverty measures. Subjective measures may include factors such as the extent to which children have birthday celebrations, appropriate clothes for all weather, holidays and parents with access to a car. In general, researchers have found similar patterns of association of poverty with child health outcomes whichever measure of poverty is used. 16

Children can move in and out of poverty over the course of their lives. In the Millennium Cohort Study, a representative sample of children from the UK born in 2001, about half (47%) of children experienced relative poverty one or more times between the age of 9 months and 11 years, and 9% of children experienced persistent poverty (in all five waves of the study; S Wickham, E Anwar, B Barr, et al . Unpublished data: experiences of poverty in the UK Millennium Cohort Study).

Health and social consequences of child poverty

Children living in poverty in the UK are more likely to: 9

• die in the first year of life
• be born small
• be bottle fed
• breathe secondhand smoke
• become overweight
• suffer from asthma
• have tooth decay
• perform poorly at school
• die in an accident

Even for children with genetic conditions like cystic fibrosis with no socio-economic bias in incidence, poorer children experience poorer outcomes, including worse growth, poorer lung function, higher risk of Pseudomonas infection, worse employment opportunities and ultimately poorer survival. 17 18 Figure 2 shows the association between levels of child poverty and a range of child health outcomes in local authorities in England. 19

Child poverty and percentage of children seriously injured or killed in a road accident; obese at reception age; admitted to hospital with a mental health condition and infant mortality in Local Authorities in the UK. The size of the dot is proportional to population of each local authority. Data are from Public Health England (2015).

There has been some debate about the extent to which the relationship between poverty and health outcomes for children is causal or attributable to other factors. However, a recent systematic review of the literature concluded that a family's income makes a significant difference to children's outcomes: poorer children have worse cognitive, social-behavioural and health outcomes in part because they live in households with low incomes. This relationship was found to be independent of other factors that have been found to be correlated with child poverty (eg, household and parental characteristics). 20 The review suggested that out of the 34 studies only 5 found no effect of child poverty on the various outcomes; this was mainly due to their methodological limitations. 20 The authors highlight that longer durations of child poverty have a more severe effect on children's outcomes than short-term experiences of poverty.

Alongside these health-damaging impacts, living in poverty is associated with negative educational outcomes and adverse long-term social outcomes. Child poverty impacts on children's school readiness: by age five, children from the poorest fifth of homes in the UK are already on average over a year behind their expected years of development. 21 By age 11, only three-quarters of the poorest children reach the government’s Key Stage 2 levels compared with 97% of children from the richest families. 22 Only 21% of children from the poorest quintile, measured by parental socio-economic position, attain five good General Certificate of Secondary Education (grades A*– C) compared with 75% for their rich counterparts. 22 Recent evidence suggests that child poverty is associated with structural differences in several areas of brain development, and this may account for the differences in academic achivements. 23 Two recent studies from the USA show how child poverty influences the development of specific areas of the brain that are critical for the development of language, executive functions and memory. 23 24 This then impacts education prospects, job opportunities and future lifestyle choices. 25

We know from longitudinal studies that children growing up in disadvantaged circumstances have a higher risk of death in adulthood across almost all conditions that have been studied, including mortality from stomach cancer, lung cancer, haemorrhagic stroke, coronary heart disease and respiratory-related deaths, accidents and alcohol-related causes of death. 26 27 These studies demonstrate that exposure to child poverty is a critical issue not just for child health, but also for adult health. Though the focus of this paper is on poverty, there is a social gradient in many of the health outcomes listed above, with greater social disadvantage leading to greater health impacts. This is powerful evidence that social and economic conditions do not just affect poor children but exert their influence across the entire social spectrum. 9 28 This has profound policy implications as the effect of policies on child poverty are then multiplied across children’s life courses. As children's lives unfold, the poor health associated with poverty limits their potential and development across a whole range of areas, leading to poor health and life chances in adulthood, which then has knock-on effects on future generations. 29

Research gaps

That poverty is bad for child health is not in doubt. What is unclear is how and when social disadvantage leads to ill health, that is, how it ‘gets under the skin’. Poverty has been highlighted as the most important social determinant of child health in high-income countries. 6 30 But poverty is likely to be the cause of wide-ranging effects on health exerted through a myriad of biological, behavioural, environmental and psychosocial mechanisms that are still not well understood. 8 Poor health outcomes might be the result of cumulative exposure to disadvantage, 31 or exposure during sensitive or critical periods, or both of these. 28 For example, Seguin and colleagues have identified the importance of chronic cumulative poverty for outcomes such as asthma 32 and obesity. 33 Furthermore, poor health, particularly during critical periods of childhood and adolescence, may limit future development with subsequent effects on social position and health later in life. 25 A better understanding is needed of the specific pathways through which exposure to adverse childhood socio-economic circumstances, and particularly poverty, affect specific health and social outcomes in particular conditions and contexts. 6 20 34 Elucidating the mediating components of pathways will help identify times and circumstances that are amenable to intervention.

Cross-national comparisons may yield useful information in order to explain both the differences in child poverty rates in rich countries seen in figure 1 and how any policy differences impact on child health and well-being. 11 Strategies to reduce child poverty and the consequences of child poverty generally involve three key components—early childhood education and care, income redistribution through the benefit and tax systems, and policies to increase the employment chances and wages of families living in poverty. 35 While there is evidence that all three components are likely to be effective at reducing child poverty, less is known about whether some approaches are more likely to lead to greater health benefits than others. Further investigation is needed into the interaction between different policy approaches and the determinants of child health in order to prioritise policies that are likely to have the greatest impact not only on child poverty but also on child health.

What is the UK currently doing about child poverty?

Within the UK, several targets have been previously set to eradicate child poverty (see box 1 for details). Figure 3 shows the trends in child poverty over recent years. The UK was the first European country to systematically implement and evaluate policies aimed specifically at reducing child poverty. 36 In particular, the Labour government set targets to reduce and eventually ‘eradicate’ child poverty, within 10–20 years. Though significant progress was made, the 2010 targets to halve child poverty were missed.

UK policy on child poverty

1999: Ending Child Poverty by 2020 : In 1999, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair made a commitment to halve child poverty by 2010 and eliminate child poverty by 2020. After many years of being a neglected issue, child poverty was on the political agenda.

Key actions to reduce child poverty included getting parents into work and a more progressive tax and benefits system (especially to those targeted at children such as child benefit and child tax credit).

2010: The Child Poverty Act was passed with cross-party support. The Act enshrined the child poverty promise in law and required the government to produce a national Child Poverty Strategy. The coalition government, elected in May 2010, pledged to maintain the goal of ending child poverty in the UK by 2020.

Although relative poverty fell substantially in the decade after the 1999 Tony Blair pledge to end child poverty, from 3.4 million children then to 2.6 million children, the 2010 child poverty targets were missed. Critics argued that not enough parents moved into work, and work did not pay as well as it should. The proportion of poor children who came from working households increased.

2011: A new approach to child poverty: tackling the causes of disadvantage and transforming families’ lives 2011–2014 was published to fulfil the obligations under the Child Poverty Act 2010 to set out plans for tackling child poverty. It provided a framework for ending child poverty by 2020.

2014: The child poverty strategy, 2014 to 2017 was published with two main aims to engineer a shift away from supporting families through income transfers towards tackling the root causes of poverty by enabling more parents to enter work and earn more. Second, to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty through raising the attainment of poor children so that they will be better off as adults.

The strategy was criticised by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission for falling far short of what is needed and a missed opportunity to get back on track towards meeting its legal obligation to end child poverty by 2020. After a decade of falling levels, independent projections from both the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and the New Policy Institute (NPI) suggested that child poverty will increase by 2020.

2015: The Welfare Reform and Work Bill removes the government's duty to end child poverty by 2020 and changes the target for child poverty in the UK, moving away from a measure based on income to focusing on the ‘root causes’ of poverty such as unemployment and family breakdown.

There is concern that many of the proposed changes in the Bill will either push more children into poverty or limit the government's ability to properly monitor levels of child poverty across the UK. In particular, the income cap and changes to tax credits have also been strongly criticised for negatively affecting families with young children.

New definition of child poverty has also been criticised for having a moral and judgemental dimension. As there has also been an increase in the proportion of children in poverty living in a working family, critics argue that reporting on a measure focused on children in workless households will not get to the heart of understanding child poverty in the UK.

Trends in relative child poverty over time using data from Housing Below Average Income statistics.

The current UK government has now abolished the Child Poverty Act and with it the target to eliminate child poverty by 2020. Alongside removing these targets, there has been a shift in how the UK government plans to measure child poverty from a focus on income-based indicators to factors related to ‘family breakdown, debt and addiction’ 37 outcomes that conflate the consequences of child poverty, with the cause—a lack of material resources. 38

Recent analyses of current policies implemented in the UK in response to the economic crisis show that children are among the groups being hit hardest. 39 We know that family incomes have fallen considerably during the recent economic downturn and have continued to decline as other economic indicators improve. 40 Children's services are being disproportionately hit by current austerity measures, with early years budgets facing significant cuts. 41

In the Summer Budget 2015, the chancellor announced more cuts to the welfare system to take the UK from a ‘low wage, high tax, high welfare economy’ to a ‘higher wage, lower tax, lower welfare country’. 41 A report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation analysis shows that it is poor children who are going to be hit hardest by these changes, 42 with lone parents and families with children who depend on welfare support seeing their incomes significantly reduced. Although the controversial proposal to cut child tax credits was recently scrapped in the Chancellor's Autumn budget, these cuts will still be introduced later with the replacement of tax credits with a new system—Universal Credit. 43 The government has argued that these cuts to in-work welfare benefits will be offset by the introduction of a higher minimum wage—referred to as a National Living Wage (NLW). The latest analyses, however, suggest that lone parents will still lose out, and for couples with children, both will have to work full time on the NLW to get close to a decent standard of living. 43

What needs to be done?

What child health professionals can do (both as individuals and as providers of health services).

All children have a right to the best possible health, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UK government, therefore, has a legal and moral responsibility to ensure that all children develop to their full potential. Based on recommendations made by the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, there are a number of ways that, as individuals or collectively, child health professionals should take action on the social determinants of health and reduce child poverty. 44 45

Support policies to reduce child poverty

Child health professionals and their professional associations can advocate for policy action on the social determinants that support parents’ capacity and ability to care for children. 46 We need child health professionals to advocate for more equitable welfare reforms, with the test that they must protect children as the most vulnerable members of our society. 2 This will include labour market, tax and transfer polices that aim to lift all families with children out of poverty.

We propose advocacy for policies that: 28

• provide sufficient income support for an adequate quality of life for all families with children;
• provide affordable housing;
• provide affordable, high-quality early years childcare;
• provide affordable public transport;
• provide better social security support for families caring for children with chronic illness;
• prioritise active labour market programmes to achieve timely interventions to reduce long-term unemployment;
• tackle in-work poverty, through the introduction of a true living wage;
• support parents into employment in order to maximise household incomes.

Provide services that reduce the health consequences of child poverty

In order to reduce the consequences of poverty, a commitment to universal services and a focus on proportionate universalism (services provided to everyone, but with a scale and intensity that is proportionate to the level of need) that supports all children, particularly in the early years, is a critical and cost-effective investment, and these services should be protected. 47 The Healthy Child Programme, for example, is based on a model of ‘proportionate universalism’. 48

Some of the key actions recommended in the Marmot review 28 and Field 49 include:

• protecting investment in early years services;
• shifting expenditure towards the early years wherever possible;
• providing high-quality and consistent support and services for parents during pregnancy;
• provision of high-quality universal services in childhood;
• routine support to families through parenting programmes, children's centres and key workers, delivered to meet social needs;
• providing support so that all children can access a healthy diet in the early years;
• providing high-quality home visiting services;
• focusing on narrowing the educational attainment gap at all stages.

It is vital to take a whole family approach to the care of children, with appropriate involvement of the full range of social services support available to families living in disadvantaged circumstances that may help to mitigate some of the effects of poverty. Child health professionals need to speak up for their patients within management settings. At a community level, they need to advocate for a greater connectivity between general practitioner practices, hospitals, schools, community centres, benefit services and sure start centres to support parents to access all the benefits and services they are entitled to and work to reduce any stigma associated with using these services. 42

Measure and understand the problem and assess the impact of action

Child health professionals have a key role in conducting high-quality research investigating the links between child poverty and health and investigating the impact of changes to service provision on health inequalities. This is a critical moment for children and families in the UK, facing changes to preventative services in the community at the same time as levels of child poverty increase. Important changes include the transfer of public health commissioning duties to local authorities (eg, the Health Visitor Implementation Programme) and the impact of cut backs to the role of children's centres in delivering the early years agenda. 50 There is a clear need for a better understanding of the impacts of changes to services on the most disadvantaged, improved data and monitoring at an individual and population level. 2

Conclusions

A wealth of evidence demonstrates the toxic impact of child poverty: in physical changes in brain structure and poor health and life chances. Child poverty is rising, and the UK government has abolished plans to attempt to eradicate it. Child health professionals need to act as advocates for more equitable welfare reform in order to protect the most vulnerable in society. Children are often not in a position to speak out for themselves and for this reason are offered special protection under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. 51 The arguments here are not just about the evidence. Reducing poverty and its impacts on children is morally and legally the right thing to do.

Contributors: All authors contributed to literature interpretation, manuscript drafting and revisions. All authors agreed the submitted version of the manuscript.

Funding: Research at the UCL Institute of Child Health and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children receives a proportion of the funding from the Department of Health’s National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centres funding scheme.

Competing interests: DT-R, SW and BB are supported by a Wellcome Trust small grant (ref number: WT108538AIA). BB is supported by a National Institute of Health Research fellowship.

Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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This study measures the extent to which growing up in poverty makes children more likely to be poor as adults. It compares teenagers from the 1970s with those from the 1980s. Undertaken by Jo Blanden and Steve Gibbons of the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE, the study finds:

• Poverty persists across the lifecycle. Living in poverty at age 16 increases the chances of living in poverty in the early thirties.
• The persistence of poverty from the teens into the early thirties has risen over time, with teenage poverty having a greater impact on later outcomes for teenagers in the 1980s compared with teenagers in the 1970s. The link between poverty in teenhood and adulthood continues through to age 42, regardless of whether or not a person is recorded as poor in their thirties.
• Many of the negative effects of teenage poverty are a consequence of other characteristics of disadvantage, such as low parental education, unemployment and poor neighbourhoods, rather than poverty itself.
• For those who were teenagers in the 1980s, these disadvantages are more likely to lead to the individual being a poor adult. This partly explains the increased persistence of poverty found, but poverty itself plays a bigger role over and above these characteristics.
• Poverty in adulthood is associated with low education, lack of employment and employment experience and, for women, single parenthood.
• Earlier disadvantage is associated with all of these later outcomes. However, the rising relationship between poverty across generations cannot be explained by just a couple of these factors; all are important. The persistence of poverty is complex; responses will need to be multi-faceted, long-term and joined up.
• The researchers conclude that eliminating child poverty will, on its own, have a limited role in improving outcomes for children growing up in poverty. While it might have had some beneficial effects among those who were teenagers in the 1980s, ending income poverty will not be sufficient unless the other characteristics of disadvantage are also addressed.

This study examines the magnitude of the link between child poverty and poverty later in adult life using members of two cohorts from two national datasets, one group in their teens in the 1970s and the other in their teens in the 1980s.

The study looks at the following questions:

• How great an impact does living in a poor family as a teenager have on the chances of living in poverty in the early thirties?
• How much has this impact changed between the two cohorts that were teenagers in the 1970s and the 1980s?
• How far do other characteristics at age 16 and in adulthood explain these links?

How far do the effects of early disadvantage continue to be felt as individuals reach middle age (42 for those who were teenagers in the 1970s)?

The size of the link between poverty across generations

The study finds evidence of a significant persistence of poverty from teenhood to the early thirties. This persistence is measured by comparing the chances (or ‘odds’) of being poor if one’s parents are poor with the chances of being poor if they are not (the ‘odds ratio’).

Of those who were teenagers in the 1970s:

• For those whose families were poor when they were 16, 19 per cent of those with poor parents are poor and 81 per cent are not. Individuals are four times more likely to be non-poor than poor in their early thirties.
• For those with parents who are not poor, 90 per cent are not poor in later life while 10 per cent are poor. In this case, individuals are nine times more likely to be non-poor than poor if their parents were non-poor.

Calculations based on the odds ratio find that, for those who were teenagers in the 1970s, the chances of being poor as an adult double if they were poor as a teenager. Similar calculations for the earlier cohort show that those who were teenagers in the 1980s are nearly four times as likely to be poor in adulthood (see Figure 1). Therefore, comparing the persistence of poverty across the cohorts indicates that the strength of this persistence has approximately doubled.

Figure 1: How teenage poverty affects the odds of being poor as an adult: change over time

Poverty in middle age.

For teenagers growing up in the 1970s, teenage poverty doubled the odds of being poor adults. Being poor as a teenager in the 1970s also doubled the odds of being poor in early middle age (age 42) by 2000. For this group, teenage poverty is therefore as strongly related to middle-age poverty as it was to poverty in earlier adulthood.

This is perhaps surprising: we might expect the influence of teenage poverty to fade as the years go by. One explanation could be that teenage poverty influences poverty in early adulthood, and this then links through to poverty in later life. However, accounting for poverty at age 33 has very little impact on the odds ratios for poverty at age 16. The link between poverty in teenhood and adulthood continues through to middle age, regardless of whether or not a person is recorded as poor in their thirties. It is also clear that the association between poverty at different points in adulthood is much stronger than that between childhood poverty and adult poverty.

Understanding why poverty persists

It is extremely difficult to pin down the factors that cause the persistence of poverty. Income poverty goes hand in hand with numerous other forms of deprivation, some of which are consequences of the lack of resources in the household and others of which lead to poverty in themselves. Many of these aspects of deprivation may be a result of other underlying factors that are very hard to measure and which persist through individuals’ lives. For all these reasons, it is extremely difficult to really understand the causal processes that lie at the route of the persistence of poverty through the lifecycle.

In order to gain some understanding of how poverty is transmitted across generations the researchers examined the link between teenage poverty and adult poverty when the other characteristics of the child’s family are held constant. This enables us to find out whether it is disadvantage in general rather than income poverty that is harming children’s life-chances. It also enables the analysis of which aspects of disadvantage are particularly harmful.

The results of this exercise make it clear that:

• Poor teenagers in the 1970s grew up to be poor because of more general family background disadvantages, in particular, parental non-employment and low education. Poverty itself had little or no direct effect over and above these teenage family factors.
• For teenagers in the 1980s, poverty had a direct effect on the chances of ending up in poverty, even allowing for differences in these same aspects of family background. Certainly, family background differences account for much of the persistence from child poverty to adulthood, but the odds of a poor teenager being a poor adult were much larger than for a non-poor teenager.

This provides some grounds for suggesting that redistribution could have had a beneficial impact for those growing up in the later cohort.

A similar analysis tells us which adult characteristics help to explain the persistence of poverty between teenhood and adulthood. Unsurprisingly, being out of work, having a partner out of work or having little accumulated work history are the factors most closely associated with poverty – both for adults in middle age and in their thirties – though low education plays an important role too. Our understanding of the persistence of poverty can be improved by analysing which of these characteristics are most closely linked with disadvantage and poverty in the teenage years.

The study finds that earlier disadvantage is associated with all of these later outcomes. One of the reasons for the stronger persistence among those who were teenagers in the 1980s is that teenage poverty became more closely linked to the likelihood of a person being out of work in their early thirties. The main factors linked to being out of work in adulthood are low education, lone parenthood and ill health. However, educational attainment does not explain the rise in persistence: the risk of poor teenagers in the 1980s ending up without qualifications was not much greater than for poor teenagers in the 1970s. Compared with a girl in the 1970s, a poor teenage girl in the 1980s was at higher risk for lone parenthood, and at higher risk for incapacity through illness in her thirties. These facts can explain part, though not all, of the rise in the intergenerational persistence over this period – but only for women.

This study presents two main new findings on the extent of the persistence of poverty.

• First, the persistence of poverty from the teens into the early thirties has risen over time, with teenage poverty having a greater impact on later outcomes for teenagers in the 1980s compared with teenagers in the 1970s. This finding adds to the wider evidence that family background has had a growing impact on later outcomes between these cohorts.
• Second, the link between poverty in teenhood and adulthood continues to have a bearing through to middle age for those who were teenagers in the 1970s (born in 1958). This is the case regardless of whether or not the person was poor in their thirties. In other words, an adult who was a poor teenager continues to be at higher risk of poverty by middle age even if they were out of poverty in their thirties.

The findings on why poverty persists are less clear-cut, and reveal multi-dimensional causes. The results suggest that initiatives to improve skills and employment opportunities are probably the only sensible way to tackle the problem of persistent poverty and that there is no quick fix available through other more specific interventions. Despite the lack of specific policy prescriptions that can be drawn, it is clear that children in poverty are more likely to grow up to be poor, a result that highlights the importance of the policy agenda to reduce child poverty and disadvantage but not through income transfers alone.

About the project

The data used are from the National Child Development Study (all children born in a week in 1958) and the British Cohort Study (all children born in a week in 1970).

The core data used are on income and other characteristics at age 16 for both cohorts, as well as information on later income and characteristics at age 33 for the first cohort and age 30 for the second cohort. The study also uses this information on income at age 42 for the older group.

Jo Blanden is a lecturer in economics at the University of Surrey, UK and Steve Gibbons is a lecturer in economic geography in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the London School of Economics, UK. Both authors are research associates in the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.

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Child poverty in the UK

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Child poverty taskforce

The role of the taskforce is to oversee the development and publication of an ambitious cross-government child poverty strategy to reduce and alleviate child poverty. The aim is to improve children’s lives and life chances now and address the root causes of child poverty in the long term.

Meeting dates and frequency

The taskforce should meet regularly from August 2024 through to publication of the strategy in spring 2025.

Terms of reference

Child poverty taskforce terms of reference ( PDF , 117 KB , 2 pages )

We will publish the strategy in spring 2025.

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[email protected]

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