KUFM/KGPR
T. M. Power
Are Montana’s Kids
Increasingly at Risk Because of the Economy?
We all are rightly concerned about our children’s future. One of humanity’s most powerful urges is to provide for their own children and for future generations. When we read that children are being disadvantaged and put at risk, most of us want to try to correct that threat. But to do so requires, at a minimum, an understanding of the source of that threat and what remedies might be effective.
The Casey Foundation recently released its state-by-state Kids Count report on risks to America’s children and the Montana summary received considerable media attention.
Two concerns have dominated that reporting. First, the high percentage of Montana children living in poverty and, second, the high percentage of children living in households where no parent works full-time. The explicit message has been that these and other characteristics of the Montana economy put our kids at risk, now and in the future.
Although it is certainly plausible that it is particular characteristics of Montana as a place that threaten our children, it is just as possible that it is not the place but the particular hurdles faced by low income households that put children at risk: for instance, single-mother families, teenage births, poor education and training, lack of health care for pregnant mothers and their young children, etc.
If we focus on the actual conditions of Montana’s children rather than economic measures we think might affect those conditions, the Kids Count data show that Montana’s kids are not doing badly compared to national averages. We have a smaller percentage of kids living in single-parent families and in households headed by high school dropouts; a smaller percentage of our kids are themselves high school dropouts and a smaller percentage of our teenagers are both out of school and out of work; we have fewer low-birth weight babies, lower infant mortality rates, and lower teen birth rates; more of our mothers received prenatal care and fewer of our births are pre-term. On the other hand, we have higher teenage accidental death rates primarily because of highway fatalities.
Although media reports have suggested that the risks to Montana’s children have increased over the last decade, the Kids Count report based on the 2000 Census shows that 9 percent of Montana children are living in “high-risk” families compared to 12 percent in the nation as a whole. Between 1990 and 2000, the Kids Count “family at risk index” declined 18 percent in Montana, leading Montana to rank 10th in the nation in terms of the rate of improvement in that index.
That data also shows that in 2000, 19 percent of Montana’s children lived in poverty compared to 17 percent nationally. But, as the National Academy of Sciences pointed out in 1996, that measure of poverty assumes that the cost of housing is identical across the entire nation, which it certainly is not. According to the 2000 Census, median housing costs in Montana were approximately 20 percent below the national average. The National Academy of Sciences urged that the measure of poverty take this fundamental economic fact into account. It still does not do so. That means that poverty rates are overstated in Montana and other less densely settled states and understated in the nation’s larger cities.
When the income of Montana’s families is adjusted for the lower cost of living, the poorest fifth of our population have almost exactly the same purchasing power as the poorest fifth of the national population. Interestingly, it is our middle and upper income families who sacrifice purchasing power to live in Montana, not our low-income families. That is not to say that our low-income families have it easy. They emphatically do not. The point is that their problems are not associated with their residence here in Montana. Changing the Montana economy will not eliminate their low-income status. Much more person- and family-specific steps need to be taken.
Or consider the concern with the number of families with no one working close to 40 hours per week, 50 weeks a year. The 2000 Census data indicates that 31 percent of Montana children live in such households, close to the percentage for the nation as a whole.[1] There has been little change since 1990.[2] It is not obvious that boosting the number of adults working full-time within families with young children will improve the well being of those children. One of the reasons that adults with young children work less than full-time is so that they can spend more time raising their children.
Most Montanans who are working part-time choose to work part-time because they have other important uses of their time such as child-rearing and other family care-giving, education and training, other job commitments, and other activities that are not monetarily oriented. The same surveys that collect the data on part-time employment ask those working part-time why they do so. In the 1990s close to 85 percent of Montana’s part-time workers indicated that they did not want full-time employment.
The standard for full-time employment also rings strangely in Montana. Working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year is not the type of employment all of use choose or, in our professions, is even possible: loggers cannot work during spring breakup, farmers, ranchers, and hired hands have downtime during the winter, teachers and professor do not teach during the summer, construction workers are limited by weather conditions, etc. In a rural state like Montana, the seasonality of many jobs would appear to be unavoidable.
Does all this mean that our families are not under serious economic stress? Of course not! What it means is that the source of that economic pressure is not primarily our residence here in Montana and the peculiar characteristics of the Montana economy. If we want to do something effective about children in low-income families, we have to focus not on the Montana economy as a whole but on the particular hurdles those families face as they try to provide for their children.
Focusing on particular people rather than on place and on the particular barriers they face rather than on the Montana-wide economy is what is called for. Economy-wide strategies such as creating more jobs will do little good for those we say we are concerned about and may amount to cynically abusing other people’s hard times in the pursuit of an altogether different agenda.