Jess Berentson-Shaw
Gareth Morgan
Pennies
from
heaven
Jess Berentson-Shaw
Jess Berentson-Shaw
Designed by typeface.
Printed in Wellington, New Zealand by Wakefields Digital.
First published in 2017 by The Public Interest Publishing Company Ltd (PiP).
Enquiries to Phantom House Publishing:
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Copyright © 2017 by Morgan Family Charitable Trust.
All rights reserved; no part of the contents of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978-0-9941461-0-6
eISBN: 978-0-9941461-1-3
Dedication
This book is dedicated to those families and children who, in the green garden of New Zealand, are cast in shadow from the sun and struggle to thrive. Our hope is that this book may contribute in some small way to building a country where all families can tend to their children in a nursery full with opportunity.
Acknowledgements
Jess would like to thank Susan St John, Kitty Stewart, Deborah Morris-Travers, Marianne Elliott, Max Rashbrook, Jonathan Boston, Geoff Simmons and John McCrystal for their thoughts, comments and feedback on both the book and general subject matter.
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
CHAPTER 1.
The Weetbix Kids: Are All Kiwi Children Thriving?
Educational Achievement
Behavioural Issues and Mental Health
Teenage Fertility
Parenting Behaviours: Abuse and Maltreatment
Special Topic: Conflating Being Poor with Family Dysfunction
Parenting Behaviours: The Parenting Relationship
Parental Mental Health and Well-Being
Children’s Well-Being and Social Inclusion
Special Topic: Intergenerational Poverty – When Symptoms Become Causes
Crime
Summary: The Weetbix Kid Has It Good, but Others? Not So Much
CHAPTER 2.
Not Enough in the Land of Milk and Honey: Being Poor in New Zealand
Community Level Resources – The New Zealand Deprivation Index (NZDep)
Insufficient Income
Insufficient Material Resources
Insufficient Wealth and the Severity of Insufficiency
Number of Children Living with Insufficient Resources in New Zealand
Insufficiency of Resources Across Time
Number of “At-Risk” Children
Summary: Not Enough in the Land of Milk and Honey
CHAPTER 3.
Back to the Future: A Brief History of Policy and Poverty in New Zealand
Social Policy
Health and Education
Paid Parental Leave
New Zealand Superannuation: Universalism With a Cost
The Punitive Welfare State
What Has Happened to Economic Resources Over Time for New Zealand Children?
Material Wealth for Families with Children: We Don’t Know As Much As We Should
Trickling Up
Summary: Back to the Future
CHAPTER 4.
We Are Family: Who are New Zealand’s Poor?
Sole-Parent and Two-Parent Families
Special Topic: Sole Parents: Northern Europe Versus New Zealand
Number of Children
Educational Qualifications of Parents
Employment Conditions of Parents
Ethnicity
Family Poverty Severe for Some but More Universal than We like to Think
What Has Happened to Children’s Well-Being Since the 1980s in New Zealand?
Summary: We Are Family
CHAPTER 5.
Paying it Forward: How Deprivation Causes Poor Outcomes
Proving Poverty is a Major Cause of Poor Outcomes in Children and their Adult Selves
Special Topic: Growing Brains
The Investment Theory: The Impact of Material Resources on Children’s Well-Being
The Family Stress Pathway:
The Impact of Stress on Parent and Child Behaviours
The Toxic Stress Pathway: The Impact of Stress on Children’s Physical Development
Can an Absence of Well-Being in Childhood Cause Poverty Later in Life? The Greasy Pole
Summary: Paying it Forward
CHAPTER 6.
Show Me the Money: Does Cash Assistance Work?
Does Cash Assistance Work?
Conclusions about Cash Assistance Studies
Exploring Cash Assistance in Detail
Summary: Show Me the Money
CHAPTER 7.
On Targets: How Effective is Non-Cash Assistance?
Intervening in Families
Interventions in the Family – Multi-Disciplinary Programmes
Provision of services (e.g. medical/healthcare, food in schools, transport)
Special Topic: Factors that Might Make School Feeding Programmes More Effective
Housing Interventions (Low-Cost Housing, Rental Vouchers, Accommodation Supplements, Housing Quality Improvements)
Special Topic: Use and Availability of Community Housing and Accommodation Supports in New Zealand
Childhood Care and Education
Special Topic: Are Children in Poverty in New Zealand Receiving the Right Type of ECE?
Parental Employment Interventions (Welfare-to-Work and Mentoring)
Crime and Youth Justice Programmes
Restorative Justice and Reoffending
Special Topic: The Importance of Emotional Maturity and Sufficient Seriousness in Family Conferencing
Conclusion: Targeted (“Non-Cash”) Interventions
Summary: Cash Versus Targeted (Non-Cash) Assistance
CHAPTER 8.
Bang for our Buck: Comparing Cash and Non-Cash Assistance
The Costs of Cash Assistance versus Targeted Programmes
Will Unconditional Cash Assistance Work for Maori?
Summary: Cost-Effectiveness of Cash versus Non-Cash Interventions
CHAPTER 9.
Blow it All? What will Parents Do with Extra Cash?
Do Those in Poverty Currently Spend More of their Money On Tobacco and Alcohol?
Do Those in Poverty Drink, Smoke and Gamble More?
Given More Money, Will Families in Poverty Spend it on their Children?
Summary: Spending by Parents in Poverty
CHAPTER 10.
How Not to Do It: New Zealand’s Failing Family Support System
The Wicked Mess New Zealand Social Policies Create for Low-Income, Low-Opportunity Families and Children
The Breadwinner Paradigm of Working for Families is Straight from 1960s New Zealand
Sole Parents and Work in New Zealand: Why Paid Work at the Centre Does Not Work
Why Pay Child Support When the Government Just Takes it?
Punitive and Stressful Welfare that is Damaging Children
Welfare Conditions and Sanctions that are Creating More Harm for Children
Paid Parental Leave Helps the Most Well-Off Children and Families
Early Childhood Education (ECE): No Choice and Limited Evidence of Benefit for Low-Income Families
Special Topic: Parents, Policy and Poverty in New Zealand: It’s a Woman’s Problem
Summary: How Not to Do It
CHAPTER 11.
Money Matters: Delivering Unconditional Cash to Low-Income Families in New Zealand through Basic Income Payments
How Much Unconditional Cash?
How to Implement Unconditional Cash Assistance in New Zealand
Important Changes to Improve Child and Family Well-Being that Need to be Made Regardless
Option 1. A One-Year Child Universal Basic Income with Targeted Cash Assistance (or Basic Income) for Low-Income Families (accompanying Superannuation Reform)
Special Topic: Terminology of the UBI (Universal Basic Income)
Option 2. Three-Year Child UBI, Basic Income for Low-Income Families and Free Early Childhood Education (the ‘Gold Standard’ Policy Response)
APPENDIX 1.
Children and Families in New Zealand: Detailed Data
New Zealand Children and Families: A Snapshot
APPENDIX 2.
Measuring Poverty in New Zealand
Measuring Poverty: An Introduction
Relative Income Poverty – How is it Calculated?
Index
Endnotes
Author Profiles
“Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.”
Rudyard Kipling
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Arundhati Roy
Introduction
According to a survey conducted in 2011, New Zealanders overwhelmingly identified “getting a fair go” as a core New Zealand value.(1)
Looking after each other was as important to us as looking after the glorious natural environment in which we live, and far more important than having power or prestige or even being wealthy.
We thought of ourselves (when we’re at our best) as broadminded, tolerant and protective of others.
It’s five years on from that survey, but there’s no reason to believe that we will have resiled from those principles.
Nor is the notion of giving everyone a fair go new. While we are less clear on what drove the great migrations from the Pacific by Māori, we do know that many of those Europeans who colonised New Zealand were fleeing countries where they had felt stifled and starved of opportunity.
Many of these European settlers came here believing that there would be no financial or social obstacle to the opportunity to get ahead beyond natural ability and willingness to work to improve yourself and situation. Regardless of the lived reality of such beliefs, especially for Māori or women, the view prevailed. The beliefs infiltrated the New Zealand psyche, giving rise to the egalitarianism value that persists amongst Kiwis today – the notion that no one, not a Supreme Court judge, a captain of industry, a politician nor the Prime Minister him or herself, maybe not even an All Black – is better than anyone else. We believe that all New Zealanders are of equal value, and all deserve the opportunity to better ourselves as far as we are willing and able.
It’s that key Kiwi value – the notion of a fair go – that made it uncontroversial for our Government to sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1993, which basically obliged it and all future New Zealand Governments to consider the best interests of children in all that they do. That core value was also the motivation for this book, because anyone who reads or tunes into the news will see there is reason to believe that a significant number of New Zealanders are not receiving their birthright. A large number of children, according to the headlines, are living in families with such low incomes and limited opportunities, that they’re being denied the chance to thrive.
All children are not born equal. There is amongst any given group of children a wide range of abilities and aptitudes – or at least, the potential to acquire them. And this last point is fundamental to this book’s project. All children, no matter how gifted by nature, require nurturing to realise their potential. The job of nurturing falls, as it has always fallen, to the child’s parent or parents. No surprises there. But there is a piece of ancient wisdom that states “it takes a village to raise a child”.
This is literally true in many indigenous societies, where members of the extended family and whānau, neighbours, broader kin groups or a whole tribe are closely, interpersonally related and provide support to parents as they feed, care for and educate their children. And it is no less true in Western cultures and societies, where we have replaced intimate, interpersonal relationships amongst broad groups of people with “systems” designed to deliver the same services – a health system, an education system and so on – to the nuclear family. If the village/ hapū/iwi – real or virtual – does its job, each child receives enough food, adequate attention to their health and physical well-being and the kind of inputs that grow a child’s potential. In other words, it enables the child to thrive.
In many parts of the world, where resources are scarce and lives are most often precariously dependent upon subsistence means of producing a living, the obstacles to creating the kind of environment under which children have the opportunity to thrive are severe. You only have to look at the advertisements run by aid agencies in the wake of natural disasters to see that it is all too often beyond the powers of human agency to keep children in some countries alive, let alone thriving. But in wealthy countries such as New Zealand, things are different. There are pretty much always enough resources to go around. If a child is missing out on any of the things they need to thrive, it is within someone’s power to change it. In other words, if children are missing out, it is a political problem.
The Butterfly Effect: How the “Poor Problem” in New Zealand Harms Us All
Why should we care that some children are missing out on the opportunity to thrive? Quite apart from the moral and even legal grounds (we are signatories to binding international instruments that oblige us to consider children’s best interests in all of our legislation), there is the argument from pure self-interest. We all have a stake in society: When children miss out, society foots the bill and so do all its members.
Insufficient resources in childhood and the impact on children and families creates what Statistics New Zealand terms a “butterfly effect”(2) by “affecting not only the children and families living in poor situations but also the society having to bear a dividend of the costs”. (p. 6)
As we will see, insufficient resources have a direct impact upon child well-being. Quantifying this impact is a slightly tricky business, but it’s worth having a crack at it. The report on solutions to child poverty put the economic costs of child poverty in the range of $6 billion to $8 billion per year.(3)
These figures are based on work carried out by John Pearce in 2011 on the costs of child poverty. Pearce estimated the main costs to be $2.2 billion per year on poor education and lost productivity costs, $3 billion to $4.5 billion on health costs, $2.2 billion on costs of crime and $1.4 billion a year on social welfare costs. Pearce notes that the costs are difficult to pin down and are likely to be around $8 billion to $10 billion if the different sector costs are factored in.(4)
“Our analysis estimates that the annual cost of child poverty is between $6 billion and $16 billion annually, with the best estimate in the region of $8 billion. This is 3.5% to 9% of GDP, with the best estimate being about 4.5%.” (p. 1)(4)
This book addresses three main questions. First, what does it mean when we say that every New Zealand child deserves a “fair go”? What does a thriving New Zealand child look like, and what do they need from their parents (or parent) and “the village” – the systems designed to support and supplement parental care – in order to thrive? This question is not as straightforward as it might seem at first glance. Advances in science have yielded some startling insights into the ways in which our early childhood conditions determine our later life. Our brains are quite plastic and malleable – that is, they are capable of being re-wired by experience – throughout our lives, but so much of what and who we are is irrevocably determined by what we experience in those critical first, few years. Poor outcomes for children today become the burden their children have to shoulder tomorrow. The intergenerational impact of insufficient resources is best understood, we find, through what happens (or does not happen) during the fundamental development stages of the first years of life.
Second, we seek to quantify the problem. How many children are missing out? That is, how many Kiwi children are not receiving a fair go, or are being denied the opportunity to thrive? Again, the answer is far from clear-cut. Do you measure the numbers of children who are, in fact, failing to thrive, or do you try to quantify the group of children who are at risk of failing to thrive? Neither is an easy enterprise. Children fail to thrive for different reasons and in different ways. Just because you fail to thrive doesn’t mean you lacked the opportunity to do so. And conversely, some children thrive against all odds. But what is of interest to us (and as we shall soon see) is that some of the problems that afflict New Zealand children seem to be associated with the lack of resources available to their families. If, as this suggests, the lack of resources causes poor outcomes for children, then it is vital to know how many children live in families that lack the resources necessary to give them their best shot at realising their potential.
Third, supposing we agree that, as a nation, we have a problem, how do we address it? What policy option or options have been shown to be effective, here or overseas, in redressing the imbalance? How much would they cost? And will they be politically acceptable?
As the last point suggests, we will confront a great deal of mythology and fallacy along the way to finding the answers we seek, reflecting the range of philosophical positions it is possible to take with regard to society’s responsibilities to its individual members. There is plenty of beguiling political rhetoric that insists that those who find themselves at the bottom of the social heap are there because “they made bad choices” – they squandered the opportunity to thrive and get ahead that we provide to all our children. Why should society (by which is meant the hardworking taxpayer) pick up the pieces for people like that? Equally beguiling for others is the idea that the poor are helpless victims with no individual autonomy or choice, the flotsam and jetsam of luck and the structure of society. Both positions are hugely problematic for the individuals and families involved: Polemic thinking in a complex world is of little use to real people. Perhaps a little truth lies everywhere we look? Perhaps such “truths” do not elucidate the issue or get us closer to a solution unless we are all prepared to think more deeply about such issues?
In the end, the best and hardest question this book will ask of you, the reader, is this. Do we really believe in giving everyone a fair go? Because if it is true that a significant number of New Zealand children are being denied the opportunity to thrive, then we are not only in breach of our duty, under the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child, to do our best by the nation’s children, but we are falling short of the standards we set ourselves. When all is said and done, children by definition have little or no control over their lives. It is those around them – the village, not just the parents – who can give them the opportunity to thrive. In a properly functioning society, families don’t have to go it alone when they’re raising children. It is almost universally true that parents want the best for their children. Society’s job is to make it possible for all the different types of families we have to give their children a fair and equitable opportunity to thrive. Some will need more and others need less support to do so, if we find the scales are not fairly balanced in New Zealand. Because that is what giving everyone a fair go is all about. It is not about giving everyone the same; rather, it is giving what is needed to thrive.
Ka pū te ruha, ka hao te rangatahi
As an old net withers, another is remade
There is a long history of mahi dedicated to our tamariki and families in New Zealand and all over the world. Many giants of thought and action have worked tirelessly to improve the lives of our children. It is from this long history that our work has been formed.
List of figures
Figure 1. Rates of “Poor” Children in New Zealand
Figure 2. Material Deprivation Across the World: Adults Aged 65 and Over
Figure 3. Material Deprivation Across the World: Children
Figure 4. Rates of Children at Risk of Poor Outcomes in New Zealand
Figure 5. Costs of Superannuation and Other Social Benefits 2000 to 2019
Figure 6. Child Income Poverty Trends in New Zealand After Housing Costs
Figure 7. Income Inequality in New Zealand 1982 to 2015
Figure 8. Income Inequality in New Zealand and the OECD 1980 to 2015
Figure 9. Trend in Rates of Children With Insufficient Material Resources: 2007 to 2015
Figure 10. Trends in Rate of Children with Insufficient Material Resources by Severity: 2004 to 2008
Figure 11. The Income-Poor and Materially-Deprived: 2007 to 2015
Figure 12. Material Hardship for All New Zealanders: 2007 to 2016
Figure 13. Wealth Inequality in 2004 By Family Type in New Zealand
Figure 14. Trends in Sole – and Two-Parent Families’ Poverty: 1988 to 2015
Figure 15. Families and Children in Poverty: Family Type
Figure 16. Families and Children in Poverty: Family Size
Figure 17. Trends in Child Poverty by Number of Children: 1984 to 2015
Figure 18. Families and Children in Poverty: Educational Qualitifcations
Figure 19. Child Poverty Over Time by Parental Employment
Figure 20. Families and Children in Material Poverty: Employment Conditions
Figure 21. Families and Children in Material Poverty: Ethnicity (percentages rounded up)
Figure 22. Income Over Time in the UK Ages 25 to 40
Figure 23. Life Expectancy in New Zealand since 1951
Figure 24. Child Homicide 1978 to 2000
Figure 25. Hospital Admissions for Children with Conditions Associated with Poverty: 2000 to 2013
Figure 26. Housing Costs by Disposable Income: 1988 to 2013
Figure 27. Housing Costs to Wage and Price Growth: 1988 to 2013
Figure 28. Children in Households with High House Price-to-Income Ratios: 1988 to 2015
Figure 29. State Housing in New Zealand: 1938 to 2015
Figure 30. Families and Children in Severe Hardship by Type of Housing
Figure 31. Homeless Children in New Zealand
Figure 32. Children’s Worry About Money For Food
Figure 33. The Investment Model (Adapted from Cooper and Stewart)(79)
Figure 34. Family Expenditure on Children in the US: 1970s and 2000s
Figure 35. Family Expenditure on Children in the US: 1970s and 2000s
Figure 36. What Works to Ensure All Children Have the Opportunity to Thrive?
Figure 37. Housing Costs for Children Receiving Accommodation Supplement
Figure 38. Welfare Support Spending by Ministry for Social Development (WfF is paid by IRD)
Figure 39a. Numbers of Women Aged 15-49 in Each Income Band 2012
Figure 39b. Paid Parental Leave Recipients by Income(207)
Figure 40. Existing Policies for Families & Children in New Zealand
Figure 41. 1 Year UBI & Basic Income
Figure 42. 3 Year UBI & Basic Income
Figure 1 Appendix. Explaining Income Poverty as 60% of Median Household Incomes, Based on a Median Disposable Household Income of $1,000 per Week (adapted from Boston and Chapple)(221)
Figure 2 Appendix. Explaining Income Poverty Reduction through Median Incomes (Adapted From Boston and Chapple)(221)
CHAPTER 1.
The Weetbix Kids: Are All Kiwi Children Thriving?
If you were to ask the average New Zealander – supposing you could find one – how they could tell whether a child was thriving, they would likely answer that “you can just tell when a kid is thriving, can’t you?”
Thinking about it more, they may say that thriving children are happy, healthy and engaged with the world, doing normal “kid” things and experiencing all the ups and downs, excitements and disappointments that childhood brings. They might go all misty-eyed and paint you a picture of a child who spends summers messing around in the water swimming and fishing, eating ice creams on the beach in the setting sun, who wakes up of a winter’s morning to a breakfast of warm Weetbix, which sets them up for a morning of throwing themselves around a muddy sports field in front of at least one adoring parent, to be whisked home to a hot chocolate and lots of cuddles. A thriving child will be alert and attentive at school and their performance will reflect it, and their childhood will be firmly rooted in the rough and tumble of the school playground, full of their friends and rivals, similarly healthy kids who have feet as tough as leather and the same love for climbing trees. This thriving child has many adults in their life that they can trust and at least one or two upon whom they can rely completely. They will be proud of who they are and where they come from, whether it be their family or their people.
Māori might add one or two items to the list, or place greater emphasis on others. No Māori child could be considered to be thriving, they might say, if they lack waiora (a healthy connection to the land and environment), mauriora (a strong and positive cultural identity), te oranga (a sense of inclusion in their society), toiora (a healthy lifestyle) or mana whakahaere (a sense of autonomy or self-determination).
These lists align quite nicely with a list of the things that signify thriviness (to coin a term) drawn up by economist and Nobel laureate Amaryta Sen and others(5) (Martha Nussbaum, Sudhir Anand and James Foster). Sen and his team observed many communities and cultures and decided that their members were thriving when they had the capability (i.e. the practical choice) “to achieve outcomes that they value and have reason to value” p 291.(6) According to Sen’s “Capability Approach”, that is, to thrive is to have both the opportunity to choose what matters in life (rather than having it determined for you) and the practical ability to achieve this (the barriers removed and the right supports in place). So meaningful measures of whether children are thriving need to include outcomes that matter to individuals and communities, not just to policymakers and pointy-headed academics.
It will not be news to anyone that the picture of a thriving New Zealand child that we sketched above is not a representation of reality, or at least, not universal reality. It could be that it is derived from some golden age. It could be that it is purely aspirational, a depiction of some ideal future, the kind of place we would like our children to grow up. But there is no doubting that for many children, it is a pipe dream, and so far removed in so many particulars from their own present experience that it appears unattainable.
Measuring gross national thriviness is a practical impossibility, because it is not a fixed, single quantity. It can only be determined by examining certain indicators of well-being. Some of these are obvious and can be easily measured and represented with statistics:
•Health: For example, hospitalisations and deaths for various illness and injuries
•Educational achievement: For example, NCEA, or PISA scores for different ages
•Behavioural issues: For example, mental health issues such as anxiety, and depression.
Some have to do with the outcomes that children go on to experience:
•Economic engagement: Earnings and employment as young and older adults
•Crime: Arrests, court attendance, restorative justice attendance
•Unintentional pregnancies: Abortion and teen parent rates.
Still others, while having a significant impact on the quality of a child’s life, are harder to measure and less easy to represent with simple numbers and quantities:
•Children’s well-being and social inclusion: Whether, for example, a child feels “happy” or alone and unsupported; whether they have a strong peer group, live in a safe and attractive neighbourhood with quality facilities for children
•Parenting behaviours, including those that can be measured and described with “hard” data such as rates of abuse and maltreatment, and those including softer data, such as how connected children feel to their parents
•Parental mental health.
None of these, taken in itself, will tell us whether a child is thriving (or, in the case of the outcomes metrics, did thrive as children). But together, they give us an indication of the kinds of conditions we are creating for our children as a society, and the outcomes that our children are experiencing. They are, that is, proxy measurements for the well-being of our children.
So how are we doing? Let’s start by looking at one set of measurements of child well-being, namely health. We are one of the better countries in the OECD in terms of rates of low birth weight, and are middling in infant mortality (in 2014, 10 babies in every 1000 died in New Zealand).(7)
However, we have the seventh-highest rate of deaths in childhood, with around seven children per 100,000 dying before they reach the age of 18 (the OECD average is around five per 100,000).(8)
This high death rate is due in part to the number of children in New Zealand who are injured by accidents in their homes and surrounds and the number of children whom we intentionally kill by assault.
After cancer and abnormalities, injury (both intentional and accidental) is the leading cause of child death (those aged one to 14 years old) in New Zealand; in a four-year period, 218 children died because of transport-related injuries, drowning and assault – about 28% of all child deaths.(7)
We also have one of the highest rates of youth suicide in the OECD.
Some of these numbers are alarming, some might simply shrug and accept them on the basis of “bad luck”, but if it were the case then there would be a roughly equal chance of bad luck happening to all New Zealanders regardless of their age, stage or social situation. The trouble is, even where we are doing pretty well compared with many (if not most) other countries, there is little reason to get all self-congratulatory, because when the numbers are examined in detail, a consistent “social gradient” appears in our performance. That is, certain groups in society are doing worse than others, and the common denominator among these groups is that they are poor.
In statistical terms, around 60 of every 100,000 children from the poorest communities in New Zealand die each year, compared to 20 of every 100,000 from the least poor communities.(9) The rate of death from injuries due to such things as traffic accidents, poisonings and drownings is eight times higher in our poorest communities than it is in our communities with few poor households (8.65 per 100,000 children, compared to 1.76).
Similar “social gradients” can be distinguished in other mortality statistics. Once they are out of their first year of life, we see that kids who live in our poorer communities are three times more likely to be burdened by a very specific group of grievous health issues and are more likely to die in their childhood from these issues than those children living in wealthier communities.(10) These conditions include skin infections, asthma, rheumatic fever and meningitis. If we look at specific conditions, the rate of death in children from medical conditions such as pneumonia, meningitis and asthma in our poorest communities is 6.48 per 100,000 (compared to 1.08 per 100,000 in our wealthiest communities).
Sudden Unexplained Death in Infancy (SUDI) is the single largest contributor (43%) to children’s deaths that is associated with being poor. Every year, the parents of 50 babies experience the unimaginable horror of finding their children dead where they are sleeping. Parents living in poor communities are six times more likely to experience this trauma than parents living in the least poor (the rates of death per 1000 babies are 1.8 and 0.3 respectively).
Of course, not all children die from illnesses, but the rates of hospitalisation tell us much the same story about the dangers of being poor. Each year in New Zealand there are 205,661 hospitalisations of children aged 0–14 years for illnesses associated with being poor – conditions such as chest infections, skin infections and diseases passed from child to child. Many of these children will be in and out of hospital on a constant basis as their lives and living conditions do not change and they are re-exposed to the same risks that took them there in the first place.
In those communities with the greatest concentrations of poor households, 75 children in every 1000 are hospitalised each year for health conditions associated with being poor, a figure that is three times higher than the 26 children in every 1000 from wealthy communities who are hospitalised for such conditions.
Pretty bleak. It gets worse if you look at other measures of child well-being.
Educational Achievement
Internationally, we look quite good in the educational stakes. Overall, only 16.2% of children who leave New Zealand schools do so with no qualification, which compares quite favourably with many other countries. But once again, if we look at who is doing badly in New Zealand, we find that children from poorer areas are less likely to be involved in formal education at all ages, less likely to attend high quality education centres and – perhaps unsurprisingly – do worse at school than their better-off peers.
The problem starts at the start. Children living in in poor areas are less likely to attend early childhood education,(11,12) and when they do, it is likely to be of a lower quality with fewer teachers per child and lower levels of training on average.(13,14) New early childhood educational centres (ECEs) are being built at the greatest rate in the wealthiest communities, even though these communities have, on average, a lower birth rate (15–17). Home-based care (where only 3% of carers have a recognised teaching qualification) is on the rise throughout New Zealand.(18)
It’s quite likely that the net result of these differences in access to early childhood education is being reflected in subsequent scholastic performance, with poor children of the same innate ability starting school behind their peers at age five. This gap remains (and widens) by age 10,(19) and the disadvantage discernible at the start of school and in primary school is carried through into secondary and tertiary education. Overall, 45.4% of Kiwi children achieve university entrance, but significantly fewer children from poorer communities stay at school, let alone achieve university entrance. In schools that draw their students from the poorest communities, 62.5% of students achieve National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) at Level 2 or above (the desired minimum qualification). This is compared to 91.5% of students in those schools drawing their students from the wealthiest communities.(10)
It is likely that some of these differences are exacerbated by a lack of access to those things critical to achievement. While most New Zealand children live in households with access to the internet, children living in sole-parent families (which are more likely to be poor) tend not to.*
Behavioural Issues and Mental Health
Poor mental health (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, conduct/disruptive behaviour disorders, parent-child relational problems, self-harm and suicide) is on the rise in children generally. Self-harm and suicide rates are all higher for children living in poorer communities. From 2004 to 2009, there was a steady increase in the rates at which children accessed mental health services (1.15% to 1.49%) although whether this is due to the better identification of disorders or their higher occurrence is unclear. However, the prevalence of mental health and behavioural issues in children is likely to be underestimated. In 2009, 26.0% of young women aged 15–19 years and 15.5% of young men reported deliberately harming themselves in the preceding 12 months.(20)
The term “behavioural issues” can also apply to risk-taking behaviours. Young people are, by their nature, more apt to take risks. There is good scientific evidence to show that the developing brain is markedly less adept at assessing risk and long-term consequences than that of adults, simply because the parts of the brain responsible for making these assessments are still a work in progress. Some young people do, however, take more risks than others, in terms of alcohol and drug abuse, contraceptive use (or the lack of it) and risk-taking in cars and on motorbikes.
The Youth 2000 survey has been going in New Zealand since the early 2000s. The survey asks 14- to 18-year-olds at regular intervals about different aspects of their well-being – how connected they feel to their society, families and school, their behaviours and their health – and gives us something of a window into the world as experienced by our young people.(21)
Seatbelt wearing (or rather, not wearing a seatbelt) is a risky behaviour; 74% of young people always wore one in a car, but fewer young people from poorer communities (68%) typically wore one.
Most (75%) young people in the target age group are not sexually active. Of those who are, around a fifth (17%) reported not using contraception or only using it occasionally and this rate was higher in students coming from poorer communities (to what degree the authors did not report).
Teenage Fertility
New Zealand has a high rate of teen pregnancy internationally (although it has been dropping over time), and our pregnancy rates are disproportionally high in poor communities. There are around 4000 live births to teenagers each year in New Zealand (about 10% of all births), and there are an equal number of abortions.(22) Teenage parenthood per se is not necessarily a negative outcome; some young parents prove to be highly competent and manage to achieve on a par with their peers, but this is not the typical experience. Becoming a parent before you are 20 is more often than not difficult for the young parent or parents and their babies, who are statistically at a greater risk of poor health and death.(23)
Teenagers who have babies are much more likely to live in poorer communities – poor teens are about seven times more likely to have a baby than their wealthier peers,(11) which is little surprise given the risky attitudes to contraceptive use reported by young people from poorer communities.
Parenting Behaviours: Abuse and Maltreatment
On average, 12.5 children die as the result of assault each year in New Zealand and it is children from the poorest households who are most likely to end up in hospital (or dead) as the result of abuse. Our rates of child homicide are extraordinarily high on the international stage. Between 2000 and 2012, 100 children were assaulted and died. The rate has remained stable at around 0.9 deaths per 100,000 children, with lower rates in 2002–03 and in 2012. The OECD median is 0.6 deaths per 100,000 children.
Hospitalisation for abuse is eight times more common for children living in poor communities compared to those in the least poor (a rate of 31.66 per 100,000, compared to 3.76 per 100,000).(10)
By age five, 5.4% of all children from all social groups in New Zealand have been maltreated – and those are just the cases that we know about. Sadly, the number is likely to be even higher.(24)
When children are believed to be at considerable risk of harm in the keeping of their primary caregivers, they are removed either temporarily or permanently and placed in the care of the chief executive of the Child, Youth and Family Service (CYF). Each year 90,000 children are subject to a formal notification to CYF (9% of the child population). In 2014, 19,652 cases were substantiated. There are approximately 5000 children in CYF’ care at any one time (0.5% of the child population).(25)
When asked, 14% of young people reported they had witnessed adults hitting or physically hurting another child in their home in the last 12 months, while 7% had seen one adult hit or injure another Reporting witnessing violence in the home was more common if young people lived in a poorer community.(21)
Special Topic: Conflating Being Poor with Family Dysfunction
It is not uncommon to see in media and popular discussion the conflation of insufficient family resources with family violence or more generally “family dysfunction”. What we mean by this is that when discussing low-income families and the challenges they face, it is implied (whether intentionally or not) that “low-income family” is simply shorthand for a so-called dysfunctional family.
It is important to be clear that interpersonal violence (similar drug and alcohol disorders) is, as we see from these data, one of the symptoms of what is an economic problem. While violence and dysfunction is a serious and concerning issue, only some families on low incomes experience the symptoms. Overall about 0.3% of children from low-income families are hospitalised for abuse. This compares with 0.03% of children from middle and high-income families. Both absolute rates are low. Violence or family dysfunction is not the cause of the economic issues families face, though it can, as with many symptoms of poverty, become something that maintains a low income and has long-term impacts on children and their opportunities (we discuss how the symptoms of poverty can become barriers to getting out in our special topic “Intergenerational Poverty”).
Dysfunction is not the defining feature of families who are poor, rather it is the economic circumstances they experience – and the lack of ability to fully participate in society that comes with it – that is. To suggest otherwise is a misrepresentation of the many loving and functional families who live with and struggle on insufficient resources. Violence and substance disorders present across all social and income groups and, as we discuss in Chapter 5, can occur in any family if the conditions lend themselves to it. It is therefore vital to consider the symptoms of a problem (relationship issues or dysfunction in families) in the context of what is the cause of those symptoms – one of the first queries of this book.
Parenting Behaviours: The Parenting Relationship
The parent-child relationship doesn’t have to be badly broken to be of concern. How parents behave towards their children – the warmth, love and affection they express – is critical to child development and well-being (we’ll have a look at why in Chapter 5: Paying it Forward: How Deprivation Causes Poor Outcomes).
The good news is that most young people in New Zealand feel loved and cared about. For example, 78% of young people said they felt close to their parenting figure most of the time and 93% felt that their mother or father (or the person who acted as the parent) cared a lot about them. Only about half of young people felt they got enough time with their parents, however, and 11% said they hardly ever got enough time with them. Asked what prevented their caregiver spending time with them, children named work, housework and the demands from other family members.
Increasingly, grandparents and other relatives act as parents for children, more so in poorer communities. For example, 26% of young people had another relative caring for them in poor communities, compared to 11% in wealthy communities.
No matter who cared for them, 99% of young people said that their carer thought it was important that they go to school every day, while around half said their family attended school events. This rate was higher in poor communities (49%).(21)
Parental Mental Health and Well-Being
The attachment and bond a child has with their primary caregiver is an essential factor in their development. It’s therefore vital that the primary caregiver is well and happy. To determine the rates at which children are disadvantaged by the poor mental health of their parents, we can consult the so-called “harder” measures of parental mental health, such as diagnoses of depression and anxiety. It is estimated that post-natal depression occurs at a rate of between 10% and 20% of mothers,(26) although it is a notoriously under-reported and misunderstood mental health issue.
Suicide is the leading cause of death in women who are pregnant or who have recently had a baby, and the rate is much higher in New Zealand than in the UK. Between 2006 and 2013, 21 women committed suicide in pregnancy or in the 12 months following birth. Women in poverty and Māori and Pacific women in New Zealand are much more likely to die of all causes, including suicide, during or just after birth.(23)
Mental health problems do not need to reach the point where a parent attempts (or commits) suicide or even where a diagnosis is made for it to adversely affect their children. Stressed, anxious or unhappy parents don’t bond well with their children, and there is evidence that parental stress and anxiety have a negative impact on children’s development. When asked about their levels of life satisfaction and sense of purpose, parents from two-parent families reported high levels of well-being; sole-parent families, by contrast, reported much lower rates well-being.(27)
At least in part, this will be due to financial stress and anxiety. When asked, 12% of young people reported that their family often or always worried about not having enough money for food. Among the poorest communities, this number was 18%, compared to 6% in the wealthiest.(21)
Children’s Well-Being and Social Inclusion
It has traditionally been thought much easier to base assessments of children’s well-being on harder data such as health, education and abuse statistics than on softer measures, such as self-reported social inclusion, satisfaction and happiness. But this is beginning to change, and children’s voices on these issues are beginning to be sought.
The Youth 2000 survey asked a number of questions designed to gauge children’s sense of self and inclusion, the most obvious being those about a sense of well-being and mental wellness. Most (76%) young people in the survey described their emotional well-being as good; however, when asked specifically about symptoms that indicate depression, 16% of females and 9% of males reported symptoms of depression that were likely to have an impact on their daily life, while nearly 38% of female and 23% of male young people said they had felt down or depressed most of the day for at least two weeks in a row during the previous 12 months.(21)
The Youth 2000 study also sought to determine how included children felt in their communities and families. This is sometimes referred to as “social connectedness”. To this end, children were asked how they felt about their neighbourhoods, friends, schools and whether they participated in a community activity. Overall, 68% of young people in the study took part in community-run activities or groups including sports and church groups, while a small group (12%) felt there was nothing to do in their community. Only 54% felt safe all of the time in their community. Most (97%) young people said they had a friend they could talk to about anything and who would help them out. Other studies in New Zealand have shown that young people’s sense of community connectedness is predicted by community wealth, with children from wealthier communities reporting feeling more connected.(28)
Outside the family, school is the most important social group to which children belong. According to the Youth 2000 survey, school is a mixed bag for many children. Many (61%) like school a bit or think it is “okay”. About 5% said they had attended three or more schools and 10% did not like school. How teachers and the school expect children to do is likely to have a big impact on their own sense of their abilities, and it is positive to see that more than 90% of students (90% of males and 92% of females) felt that people at their school expected them to do well. What they expected of themselves was different, however, especially for those from poor communities. Young people from these communities were less likely to think that they would go on to higher education and more likely to leave school to go straight into employment compared to those young people from wealthier communities.
It is important to also consider how children who are made vulnerable by disability – about 11% of children – experience their childhoods in New Zealand. Such children are more likely to be income-poor (that is, to live in a family that does not earn enough to meet the needs of its members; more on this later) and to live in a family that relies on a benefit than children without disabilities.† Having a disabled child puts additional financial strain on families through loss of income for caregiving parents and through the expenses incurred related to the disability. Families with children with a disability also have higher rates of divorce.(3) The 2013 New Zealand Disability Survey tells us that disabled children are less likely to participate in leisure activities, including physical activity and seeing friends, than non-disabled children.(29) But we know nothing from these children about their own sense of well-being or life satisfaction, as Statistics New Zealand has never sought to collect this sort of information. This is a gap in our picture of the overall well-being of New Zealand children with disabilities that has been highlighted frequently.
If you are seeking to compare the quality of the childhood of a poor New Zealander with that of a better-off peer, one place to look is at their respective life prospects. Most of what we know about these come from so-called longitudinal studies, which follow a number of individuals from birth into adulthood. Such studies show that kids who have grown up in poverty don’t do as well in the workforce (with all other factors, such as ability, being equal) as those who grew up in wealthier families‡.(11)
The Christchurch Longitudinal Study has followed a group of 1,277 individuals born in Christchurch since their birth in 1977, collecting a huge amount of data on a regular basis from these children. In one analysis, researchers related childhood family income (that is, the income a child’s family was earning when they were between the ages of one and ten years) to two adult outcomes, namely rates of completed schooling and adult income. When they adjusted for family factors (such as parental education, maternal age, family structure and abusive parenting) and individual factors (such as childhood IQ and socio-emotional functioning), childhood family income had a statistically significant relationship with two adult outcomes: The level of schooling achievement and labour market success. If their parents received low incomes during their childhood (all other factors equal), they were less likely to do well at school and in the workforce.(30)
(31)
