Half of U.S. children will use food stamps, study finds

By Alfred Lubrano

Inquirer Staff Writer

In a stark and surprising finding, about half the children in the United States will be on food stamps at some point during their childhood, a new study of 29 years of data shows.

One in three white children and 90 percent of all black children - ages 1 through 20 - will use the program, according to the research, published this month in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

"This means Americans' economic distress is much higher than we had ever realized," said Thomas A. Hirschl, a sociology professor at Cornell University and a coauthor of the study with Mark R. Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

The survey finds that continued food-stamp usage signifies a kind of poverty that is "a threat to the overall health and well-being of American children, and, as such, represents a significant challenge to pediatricians in their daily practice."

The persistent poverty described in the survey dovetails with the findings of a U.S. Department of Agriculture study released Monday. It determined that 49 million Americans - 17 million of them children - were unable to consistently get enough food to eat in 2008. Nearly 15 percent of households were having trouble finding food, the highest number recorded since the agency began measuring hunger in 1995.

In Philadelphia, the latest available numbers show that of 327,228 individuals now receiving food stamps, 43 percent are children, according to Rachel Meeks, food-stamp campaign manager for the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger.

The Archives study, based on data collected between 1968 and 1997, does not measure the ongoing economic crisis.

"Our current recession will only add to this disturbing trend," Meeks said.

The problem runs deeper than the recession, said Mariana Chilton, public-health professor at Drexel University. "Childhood poverty shows a complete disinvestment in children," she said. "This is an extremely important survey - breaking news that's being read on Capitol Hill. It illustrates the ongoing tsunami of childhood poverty, an urgent public-health problem that's been widely ignored."

Donald Schwarz, a pediatrician who is Philadelphia's health commissioner, said the study confirmed what he saw locally.

"An awful lot of people think the poor spend unwisely. They have no clue how little the poor have, no sense of how hard it is."

This attitude has its consequences. In calculating whom to help with its treasure, for example, America has traditionally leaned toward the elderly over poor children, said Hirschl, one of the study's authors.

Per capita, the United States spends 2.4 times as much on the elderly as on children - around $22,000 in federal money per elderly person and nearly $9,000 per child - according to research released this month by analyst Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank.

At the same time, child poverty is nearly twice as prevalent as elderly poverty - 19 percent compared with 9.7 percent, Isaacs said.

'Voiceless'

"The number-one poverty program in the United States is Social Security," Hirschl said. "There is no such system for children."

That's because "children are voiceless and seniors are a more powerful voting bloc," said Sharon Ward, director of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center in Harrisburg.

In the past, welfare helped many poor children, but changes in 1996 moved thousands of women and children off the rolls, advocates say.

Today in Pennsylvania, 216,926 people are receiving welfare benefits, 72 percent of them children, Ward said. In 1996, when welfare was changed, about 600,000 women and children received benefits.

Still, the poverty rate has not changed much since 1996, which means that poverty has not been solved by welfare changes - only that many poor children who legitimately need welfare can no longer get it, advocates say.

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