Psychological research has demonstrated that living in poverty has wide ranging negative effects on children’s physical and mental health and wellbeing. Poverty is linked with negative conditions such as substandard housing, homelessness, inadequate nutrition and food insecurity, subpar child care,and lack of access to health care which adversely impact children. Poorer children and teens are at greater risk for negative outcomes such as poor academic achievement, school dropout, abuse and neglect, behavioral and socio-emotional problems, physical health problems, and developmental delays. These effects are compounded by the barriers children and their families encounter when trying to access physical and mental health care.

• Homeless children are sick four times as often as middle class children and have high rates of acute and chronic illnesses. In addition, they suffer from emotional or behavioral problems that interfere with learning at almost three times the rate of other children.
• Availability of adequate healthy food is critical to a child’s physical and emotional development as well as their ability to achieve academic success.
• Children are sometimes placed Out of Home (OOH) to ensure the stability of a child or youth, however it comes at high economic costs and can contribute to further breakdown within the family. The focus statewide and nationally is a more community-based and family-centered approach to helping children, with family preservation and reunification as an important goal.