See what author Gracie Staples has to say aobut CCF expert Christia Spears Brown’s new brief report, “Media messages to young girlsL does “sexy girl” TRUMP “Girl Power”?”
CCF News
Media Messages to Young Girls: Does “Sexy Girl” Trump “Girl Power”?
Media Messages to Young Girls: Does “Sexy Girl” Trump “Girl Power”?
A briefing paper prepared by Christia Spears Brown, University of Kentucky for the Council on Contemporary Families.
September 3, 2020
Children face continued social isolation this fall, with 21 of the 25 largest school districts in the country choosing remote learning instead of in-person classes. This means children will consume more social media than usual. Media images will outnumber — and may well outweigh — real-life interactions with kids their own age. Although boys and girls consume the same amount of media, that extra dose of media exposure may have very different consequences for boys and girls, slowing down ongoing progress toward gender equality.
Do Girls Really “Rule”?
Girls and women have made many strides toward gender equality in the past 30 years. In 1977, two-thirds of Americans said it was better for men to do the breadwinning while women stayed home to take care of the family. By 2016, the figures were reversed: Two-thirds of Americans — and a full three-quarters of millennials – now say men and women should be equal both at work and at home. Thirty years ago, little girls were still routinely cautioned to “act like a lady” and not to compete with boys at school or in sports. Today, girls are encouraged to think they can excel in all sorts of activities formerly confined to men.
Many girls seem to have gotten the “girl power” message. Among Americans under age 35 today, equal numbers of men and women are practicing law, while 60% of physicians are women. Since Title IX was passed in 1972, there has been a nearly ten-fold increase in girls who play high school sports.
Or Is the Real Rule for Girls “Just Be Sexy”?
But at the same time, the mass media deluges girls and women with a very different message, one that encourages them to seek approval by the way they dress and look rather than by their abilities and talents. Beginning in early childhood, girls and women are bombarded with the message that the best way to have value and achieve high status is to be sexy. This message, which sometimes masquerades as a form of empowerment, perpetuates stereotypes that may prove just as difficult to overturn as those of “the feminine mystique.” The diffidence and modesty teens and young women were expected to portray in the past has been replaced with an equally restrictive expectation to wear revealing clothes that accentuate breasts and buttocks (surgically enhancing them if necessary), sport just the right amount of make-up to be alluring but not “cheap,” and carry themselves, preferably in high heels, as if constantly trying to attract sexual attention from (adult) men. Both ideals of women, past and present, center around their self-presentation, previously as passively submissive, now as active architects of their sexual objectification.
This message starts early. When researchers analyzed 10 of the most popular television programs among White and Latina elementary school girls in the U.S., they found that only 38% of the characters were girls, but 75 percent of the time, these girls were presented in sexually objectifying ways. So girls are less likely than boys to be major characters or initiators of action on shows, and when they do make an appearance on the screen, they are typically wearing skimpy clothing, making comments about their bodies, and flirting with the boys’ characters. This delivers a two-pronged message: girls are less important overall than boys, and the only way to be important – to be noticed – is to be sexy, attractive, and flirty with boys.
Sexualized Messages Are Everywhere
On average, children in elementary school watch four and a half hours of television a day: At this rate of exposure, children see approximately 78,069 examples of “sexy girl” role models just in children’s programming alone every year. And with schools, playgrounds, and after-school activities grounded, children are likely to consume much more media this year.
Sexualized depictions of girls and women are prevalent in nearly all forms of mainstream media, including magazines, video games, music videos, television shows, and movies. A 2017 study published in Pediatrics reported that sexually objectifying portrayals of women appear in 52% of all magazine advertisements and 59% of music videos.
Music videos seem to be especially influential in propagating sexualized stereotypes. In a forthcoming paper based on our latest research, we asked seventh-grade boys and girls if they agreed with several statements expressing sexualized gender stereotypes, such as “there is nothing wrong with boys being primarily interested in a girl’s body,” “pretty girls should expect to be flirted with and should learn how to handle it,” and “using her body and looks is the best way for a girl to attract a boy.” All the students endorsed some of these statements, but of the seventh-graders who never watched music videos, only 17 percent agreed with more than half. Among youth who watched between 4 to 6 hours per week, a third agreed with more than half these statements. And among seventh-graders who watched 7 to 9 hours of music videos per week, a full 50% agreed with more than half such statements.
This does not even count the impact of the sexualized toys marketed to young girls. MGA Entertainment, aiming at the 6-to-10 year-old market, recently released “L.O.L. Surprise! Dolls,” outfitted in mini-skirts, high heels or thigh-high boots, and fishnet stockings. As a recent viral video indicated, some of the dolls reveal clingy lingerie when dunked in cold water.
Girls Who Dress Sexy Are Assumed to be Popular, But Not Smart
Even before the end of elementary school, girls come to equate looking sexualized as a marker of popularity and status. Girls, especially prior to puberty, aspire to look sexualized before they have any understanding of sexuality or sexual behavior, and before they see it as a way to attract the attention of boys. Instead they are reflecting what the media has told them their most successful peers are like and who they are most likely to hang out with. When six- to nine-year old girls were asked what outfit would be popular with other girls, they selected an extremely short black mini-skirt and an off-the-shoulder top, an outfit significantly more sexualized than what they said they wore every day, and more sexualized than what they thought boys would like. So looking sexy is seen as a route to be popular among one’s peer group.
On the other hand, looking sexy is not seen as admirable in other ways. Experimental studies with children, teens and adults of both sexes reveal that women and girls who “look sexy” are consistently rated as less nice, less smart, and less competent than similar females who are not portrayed as sexualized. Indeed, they are often denigrated for these traits by the very same girls who aspire to look like them! In our research with elementary school children, children as young as 5 tell us that, compared to non-sexualized girls wearing jeans and a blouse, girls in skimpy clothing with heavy make-up and jewelry are not as nice, not as athletic, and not as smart as the other girls, but that they are more popular. When asked to describe a sexualized girl in a picture, elementary school-aged girls say things like, “Girls that dress like that aren’t very smart” or that they just “act dumb.” Yet a large proportion of girls aspire to look like the sexualized girl, even while saying she has very few redeeming qualities.
The Downside of Succeeding at Sexy
Unfortunately, the association of successful sexual display with shortcomings in other areas can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our research with girls aged 11 to 14 shows that when girls prioritize sexualized attractiveness, even temporarily, they appear to deprioritize, within themselves, traits they presume to be incompatible with sexiness, such as intelligence. This tendency shows up even earlier: When researchers gave some elementary-aged girls a sexualized doll (“Fashion” Barbie) to play with for just five minutes, the career aspirations they reported afterwards were more limited than those of girls who played with the non-sexualized Mr. Potato Head. Researchers in both Europe and the US find that, among girls, valuing being sexualized, or even just being exposed to sexualized images of girls, leads to lower levels of working memory (the memory necessary to solve math problems and remember the beginning of the sentence while reading the end of the sentence), plus worse performance in girls’ math, language arts, science, and social studies (in both their grades and standardized test scores).
In our research with middle school girls, we find that seventh-grade girls who believe that girls should be valued for their sexual appeal have lower academic motivation and less confidence in their academic ability by the eighth grade, regardless of how well they are currently doing in school. Even girls who do well in school report downplaying what they know when they value being sexualized, saying they don’t raise their hands even when they know the answer and they pretend to do worse on a test than they actually did. So instead of striving for academic excellence, we see middle school girls concluding that the most direct path to social status is to be sexy, and that requires “playing dumb.”
Once girls adopt a sexualized look, this penalizes them in their interactions with adults, who tend to assume that such girls are not just “playing dumb,” but actually are dumb. For example, when adults were shown pictures of a fifth-grade girl dressed in either a tee-shirt, jeans, and Mary Jane shoes or a short dress with a leopard print cardigan and a purse, the girl dressed in the sexy outfit was described as less intelligent, capable, competent, and determined than the girl in jeans. This held true even when the sexualized girl was described as being an honors student and the president of the student council! Given that adults also rate sexualized girls as less smart than non-sexualized girls, regardless of their academic accomplishments, girls who manage to live up to cultural ideals of sexiness face lowered expectations for their academic success from their teachers, their peers, and themselves.
Constantly seeing sexualized females affects boys and girls in even more disturbing ways. Elementary school girls who aspire to wear sexy clothing and think that sexy equates with popular are more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies, rating their ideal body as thinner than their actual body; by adolescence, that is associated with disordered eating, an early sign of the eating disorders that disproportionately affect girls in their teens.
Children in elementary school who were exposed to pictures of sexualized women in experimental studies rated those women as less than fully human and less worthy of being helped when in danger than non-sexualized women. In a recent meta-analysis of 59 different studies, researchers documented that the more sexualized media teens are exposed to, the more likely they are to endorse “rape myths,” such as the belief that it is okay for a woman to be raped if she is wearing suggestive clothing. The link between seeing sexualized women in the media and condoning sexual violence towards women was the strongest among White boys between the ages of 11 and 17.
Despite this long-range danger to women, the drive to be sexualized — to assume one’s value comes exclusively from sexual attractiveness — is largely coming from girls (or more precisely, girls’ reactions to the barrage of sexualized media messages) rather than from boys their own age. In our studies with elementary school children, when we ask children to tell us about the sexualized girls, it is girls who recount elaborate stories about why sexualized girls are more popular and attractive. Boys in elementary school are still pretty clueless about the different implications of a girl wearing a belly shirt or a hoodie. This fits our understanding of how stereotypes develop in children: we all pay more attention to the cultural messages that are relevant to us. Girls are closely paying attention to what is valued in women and girls – and despite all the feel-good slogans about “girl power,” the message girls get from the media is that sexiness is valued above everything else. As long as this is the standard girls learn from the mass media, full equality will be unattainable.
[divider style=”shadow”]
For Further Information
Christia Spears Brown, Ph.D.
Lester and Helen Milich Professor of Children at Risk, Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky
Director, Center for Equality and Social Justice
Author, Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: Raising Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes
christia.brown@uky.udu
859-556-9568
Links
Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/girls-media-messaging-brief-report/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/girls-media-messaging-release/
About CCF
The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions For more information, contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, coontzs@msn.com.
September 3, 2020
“The Tool We Have”: Why Child Protective Services Investigates So Many Families and How Even Good Intentions Backfire
“The Tool We Have”: Why Child Protective Services Investigates So Many Families and How Even Good Intentions Backfire
A briefing paper prepared by Kelley Fong (Georgia Institute of Technology) for the Council on Contemporary Families.
August 11, 2020
In recent months, conversations around the role of the police have drawn mainstream attention to what contemporary policing actually encompasses. Responding to violent crime constitutes only a small share of police work; instead, we often call on armed officers to address homelessness, mental illness, addiction, and other social adversities. Even when these encounters do not lead to arrest or physical violence, ubiquitous policing in marginalized communities, especially Black communities, heightens experiences of exclusion, injustice, and precarity.
In a new study, I trace how another, parallel institution comes to loom large in marginalized communities: Child Protective Services (CPS). Each year, U.S. child protection authorities, tasked with responding to child abuse and neglect, investigate the families of over three million children, disproportionately poor children, Black children, and Native American children. A staggering one in three children can expect a CPS investigation at some point during childhood.
To understand why CPS encounters are so commonplace, especially for marginalized families, I observed CPS investigations in Connecticut and interviewed approximately 100 key participants on these cases: professionals reporting suspected child maltreatment, frontline investigators, and investigated mothers. My research shows how, with the fraying of the social safety net in recent decades, efforts to help families take the form of summoning an agency that can forcibly separate them. As with the police, this expansive reliance on authorities with coercive power fosters fear and mistrust even when CPS does not find sufficient evidence to confirm maltreatment.
Contrary to media coverage focused on a few exceptional cases of horrific maltreatment, CPS’s broad reach does not imply millions of malevolent parents are willfully or seriously abusing their children. The situations drawing CPS’s attention typically involve adversities such as domestic violence, substance misuse, homelessness, and mental health needs, often among families experiencing material hardship and systemic racism. As I learned, the educational, medical, law enforcement, and other professionals who initiate two-thirds of CPS reports usually do not think the children they report are in grave danger. And CPS investigators agree. Nationwide, the vast majority of reports (over 80 percent) are deemed unfounded by CPS.
But nor does widespread CPS reporting represent a deluge of false reports from bureaucrats concerned about liability given legal mandates, or, conversely, eager to see children taken from “bad” parents. Overwhelmingly, teachers, nurses, police officers, and other service professionals say they would have reported their most recent case even if not legally required to do so. But usually, they do not want or expect CPS to remove children from the home. Instead, they call CPS in the hope of resolving a key dilemma they face: They want to help families but have limited time, resources, and roles to do so as they believe necessary. Thus, they turn families over to an agency they hope can intervene with families in ways they cannot. At a women’s services center, a staff member explained that “this is the tool that we have” to ensure children’s needs are met. These purportedly benevolent intentions expand the reach of CPS, as reporting professionals call on CPS not primarily to identify children in need of foster care, but to rehabilitate families broadly.
- Reporting professionals almost always want CPS to provide supportive services, reasoning that CPS has more information about available and appropriate services. For example, in one case, a police officer responded to an incident of domestic violence. “I don’t think that it’s a situation where the kids need to be removed from the house,” he said. Instead, he hoped CPS could assess the family’s needs and perhaps refer them to counseling, interventions he saw as beyond his role and knowledge.
- Yet reporting professionals also call on CPS’s coercive authority, framing the agency’s power as useful in pressuring parents to accept voluntary services or adjust their behavior in ways reporters believe will improve conditions for children. Another case involved a school struggling to manage a child’s behavioral outbursts. The parents had resisted the school’s desired intervention and the child also mentioned his father hitting him on the head. The school social worker hoped the parents would be more receptive to advice and service referrals coming from CPS. As she reasoned, when CPS refers, “parents either hear it differently or out of nervousness and fear of what if I don’t accept this service. Not that that’s the greatest way to get people involved, but if you get them involved, then hopefully the outcome is beneficial.”
- Embracing CPS reporting as a means of rehabilitating families disproportionately channels marginalized families to CPS. Race and class biases shape which families reporting professionals believe need supervision and correction. A daycare director, for example, described “red flags” that might make her more likely to turn to CPS: “Your quick, first red flag would be a lower-income family. Where they live has a lot to do with it too.” Moreover, given underinvestment in communities of color and poor communities, systems serving these families face resource constraints that may increase reliance on CPS. In one case, a major provider of mental health services for low-income Black and Latinx families reported a Latina mother who did not follow through with treatment recommendations after her daughter’s suicide attempt. The therapist said she “didn’t want to throw CPS at” the mother, but with her high caseload, she felt she could not keep following up to ensure the daughter received recommended services. “Because I’m seeing so many families,” she said, “things get lost and they fall through the cracks… [so it’s] gotta go to the big guys.”
But professionals’ wide-ranging concerns about families are often ill-suited to the intervention CPS offers.
- Frontline investigators point out that responding effectively to many of the families coming to their attention does not require the coercive authority that CPS can exert. CPS is uniquely empowered to identify candidates for legal intervention and child removal. But with children’s basic safety typically not at issue, investigators question the need for a child protection-specific response, recognizing that any assistance they might be able to offer could be provided by others instead. As one investigator noted, reporting professionals could make referrals or educate families themselves, but “they just pick up the phone and call us,” straining his caseload and subjecting families to unnecessary surveillance: “Once you call us, it’s a whole different ballgame… We come in and we delve into everything.”
- CPS investigators, like reporting professionals, are often unable to address families’ persistent needs. “I know I’m supposed to be a miracle worker, but sometimes there’s nothing we can do,” lamented another investigator. For example, the agency can refer to therapeutic services, but cannot address the chronic material needs at the root of many reports. On one case, involving a family’s housing conditions, the investigator wondered aloud, “What am I supposed to really do? I don’t see the kids being neglected.” She wanted to help the family, but CPS could not provide ongoing rental assistance. “The sad part is there’s nothing we can do in the sense that we don’t have housing,” she reflected.
Upon receiving reports, CPS investigators conduct multiple home visits and question families on numerous aspects of their personal lives. Investigators try to connect families with social services, but, like police, these efforts are often undermined by the agency’s coercive authority. Faced with the possibility of family separation, parents react with fear, mistrust, or resentment, straining their relationships with critical service providers.
- CPS investigations foster substantial anxiety among investigated families. Although reporting professionals and investigators rarely expect children will be removed, the threat of removal is ever-present even if unstated. “I couldn’t speak. The only thing that crossed my mind was that they were going to take them away,” recalled one mother. “I always thought that their job is to come in and take a child from their family,” another reflected. “Oh my God. You don’t understand. I was so scared.”
- CPS reports can also lead parents to distance themselves from reporting systems, even when parents ultimately view CPS investigators positively. For example, one mother, reported to CPS for using marijuana during pregnancy, hesitated to speak openly with healthcare providers afterwards, potentially precluding her from accessing needed support. After giving birth, she worried she was experiencing postpartum depression. But, she explained, “I don’t tell them any of that because I don’t need them to say, oh, she’s going through postpartum. She’s gonna hurt the baby.”
Thus, in asking CPS—like the police, armed with tools of surveillance and coercion—to take on all manner of social problems, we further traumatize and marginalize families. To work towards a more effective and just response, we can, first, revise mandated reporter trainings and CPS hotline screening to discourage and remove routes for professionals to wield CPS as a tool of disciplinary control. Second, akin to models that replace police with unarmed, support-oriented crisis response teams, we might devise an alternative entity for reporting professionals to obtain assistance for families, perhaps one that can refer families to a range of services based on the needs they identify.
Any alternative must provide truly voluntary assistance and advocacy, offered without threats of punishment. Recent reforms seeking to orient CPS more around service delivery, such as “differential response” systems and child maltreatment prevention services, remain tethered to the agency’s inherent coercive authority. But effectively supporting child and family welfare requires investments outside coercive systems—investments that shift power and resources to affected communities. Research is clear that broad-scale anti-poverty policies, such as minimum wage increases, the Earned Income Tax Credit, childcare subsidies, and child support pass-throughs, reduce child maltreatment risk and CPS intervention. Families navigating the U.S.’s weak labor market supports, stingy welfare state, and persistent and pervasive racism do not need intrusive and apprehension-inducing inquiries into their parenting; they need equitably distributed material resources as well as the political power to ensure public policy responsive to their needs.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Kelley Fong, Assistant Professor, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology; ktfong@gatech.edu.
LINKS AND ABOUT:
Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/cps-brief-report/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/cps-release/
The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.
The Council helps keep journalists informed of notable work on family-related issues via the CCF Network. To join the CCF Network, or for further media assistance, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.
August 11, 2020
New From CCF! Before and during COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State Sociology
vrutter@gmail.com
Telecommuting Gets Mixed Results for Gender Equity at Home, and Women Are More Depressed
Even before the pandemic, telecommuting had mixed results on gender equity. And mothers telecommuting during the pandemic report more stress and depression than mothers working outside the home.
August 4, 2020, Austin TX–As of April/May 2020, 55 percent of currently employed parents were working from home, and many experts predict that telecommuting will become more widespread even if schools do reopen next month. Is telecommuting the new normal? And if so, what does that mean for women’s well-being at home and at work?
A unique new study, Before and During COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality, released today by the Council on Contemporary Families, compares parents who were telecommuting before the pandemic and after. The good news? Telecommuting fathers do a lot more childcare than other fathers – enough more to actually even out their time with moms. The bad news? They don’t increase their daily housework at all, while telecommuting women increase theirs by almost 50 minutes. The really bad news? Telecommuting during the pandemic increases mothers’ depression and anxiety significantly more than working from a separate location. One conclusion the authors draw is that women benefit from the boundaries created by work away from home.
Investigators Thomas Lyttelton (Yale Sociology, Emma Zang (Yale Sociology), and Kelly Musick (Cornell Policy Analysis and Management) examined time use data from parents who were telecommuting from before COVID-10 and after. Using data from the 2003-2018 American Time Use Survey (ATUS, N = 19,179) and the April and May 2020 COVID Impact Survey (N = 784), they found two distinct patterns of adjustment telecommuting, pre COVID-19:
Telecommuting dads closed the gender gap on childcare. Pre COVID-19, dads spent 67 more minutes caring for children on the days they worked exclusively from home. This was 47 minutes larger than the moms’ increases on work-from-home days.
For housework, the gender gap got worse. Pre COVID-19, when mothers worked from home, they increased their housework by 49 minutes, while fathers did no more housework on work-from-home days than on days they worked away from home.
Work-family spillover hits telecommuting moms hard. Aside from actual child care, telecommuting fathers, pre-COVID-19, reported that children were present while they were working for 21 minutes per day, on average, on days they worked from home. But mothers reported children present when they were working for 54 minutes per day, a gender gap of 27 minutes.
And in the pandemic, telecommuting moms report especially elevated stress. Telecommuting moms are more depressed and stressed than moms who work outside the home — and more depressed and stressed than dads working in either location. Telecommuting dads are actually less anxious when working from home than when at a separate workplace; the opposite is true for moms.
The authors note: “The closure of schools and childcare facilities greatly increases childcare burdens on parents, with telecommuters now expected to educate their children alongside doing their day jobs, a job that has so far fallen most heavily on women…. Mothers telecommuting in April – May 2020 reported feeling anxious, depressed, and lonely at higher rates than telecommuting fathers. The same was not true for mothers in the workplace, where we found no gender differences in stress and depression.”
What are those rates of stress now? In the pandemic, 20 percent of mothers working from home report feeling depressed, while 11 percent of fathers working from home do. For anxiety, six percent of fathers working from home report it, while three times as many mothers — 18 percent — working from home report it. (See Figure 2 in the brief for additional details.)
Where does this leave us?
“Telecommuting seems to work better for gender equity when men do it rather than when women do it. As a historian, my take is that men need to be reintegrated into the household just as women have been reintegrated into the work world. Telecommuting seems to help dads pay attention to childcare requirements they can ignore when at work,” notes Stephanie Coontz, CCF Director of Research.
“By contrast, most telecommuting women find it hard to ignore the internalized pressure to take care of every pile of dirty laundry, sweep up every pile of dirt, and jump to attention every time a child wanders into the room. This is a form of work-family conflict people often ignore when they tout the advantages of working from home, and as this report shows, it’s a source of gender inequality at home and at work,” Coontz concludes.
-more-
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Thomas Lyttelton / PhD candidate / Yale Sociology / thomas.lyttelton@yale.edu / (203) 606-8047.
Emma Zang / Assistant Professor / Yale Sociology / emma.zang@yale.edu / (919) 536-9621.
Kelly Musick / Professor and Chair / Cornell Policy Analysis and Management / musick@cornell.edu.
LINKS AND ABOUT:
Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality-advisory/
The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions
August 4, 2020
-end-
Long-term Risks to Children from Economic Toll of COVID-19
July 20, 2020
A fact sheet prepared by Kristi Williams, Ohio State University for the Council on Contemporary Families
Although children appear to be less vulnerable than adults to serious COVID-19 medical complications, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that they are disproportionately endangered by the pandemic’s economic toll. Households with children have seen significant increases in housing insecurity and food insufficiency. When experienced in childhood, these forms of economic adversity have cumulative negative consequences that endure throughout the life course. With experts predicting another “two long years” until recovery, this is a serious social problem.
Key provisions of the CARES Act, including expanded unemployment benefits and protections against eviction and foreclosure, are set to expire on July 31, 2020, increasing Americans’ vulnerability to poverty, hunger, and homelessness. Without additional economic relief, millions of children face risks to health and well-being that may persist long after COVID-19 is under control.
Food insufficiency in households with children during COVID-19
In the first week of July, almost 15% of American households with children reported not having enough to eat over the past 7 days, compared to just 9% of households without children. This represents a substantial increase since the pandemic: 35% of these households reported they did have sufficient food prior to March 13, 2020.
A vast body of research documents the association of food insufficiency (not having sufficient food) and food insecurity (limited or uncertain access to adequate food) with a range of negative outcomes for children. Children raised in food insecure households are at higher risk of depression, suicide ideation, behavioral problems, deficits in educational and social skills, and poor health as much as 10 years later. Schools play an important role in protecting children from the effects of household food insufficiency by providing free or reduced-price meals to those in need. But it is not clear that all schools will be back in session fulltime this fall. Furthermore, pre-school aged children, who do not normally get school meals, may be particularly vulnerable to the long-range impact of food insecurity, given the rapid cognitive development that occurs between age 0-5.
Housing insecurity in households with children during COVID-19
Housing insecurity—which includes lack of access to affordable housing, homelessness, crowding, and poor housing quality—has also increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, further threatening the health and well-being of American children. As of early July, 15% of mortgaged households with children had a late or deferred mortgage payment the previous month, compared to 6% of mortgaged households without children. The numbers are even more striking for renters. Approximately 26% of households living with children in rental units reported a late or deferred payment in the past month. Housing affordability was already a serious problem before COVID-19, with 25% of all renters and 71% of low-income renters spending more than half of their incomes on housing. As the pandemic continues, these families face a growing risk of foreclosure or eviction.
The residential instability faced by those who can’t afford adequate housing undermines children’s school performance, limits access to preventive services including immunizations, and increases risk of a wide range of developmental and health problems, including drug use and teen pregnancy. One study found that children who experienced multiple residential moves prior to age 7 were almost three times more likely to be diagnosed with depression by age 14. In addition, children in households that lack affordable housing or who experience housing instability (evictions, frequent moves, homelessness) are at higher risk of parental maltreatment, neglect, and abuse.
Housing and food insecurity undermine child and adolescent well-being in part by increasing maternal depression, parenting stress, and harsh parenting. And even parents who have not yet experienced food or housing insufficiency but anticipate doing so as the crisis continues are now feeling the kind of stress that can erode smooth family functioning. In a May study by the American Psychological Association, 70% of parents reported that being able to provide basic needs such as access to food and housing during the pandemic was a significant source of stress.
Increased isolation during the pandemic exacerbates the vulnerability of families with children to the negative effects of housing and food insecurity
Many low-income families rely on support from family and friends in order to make ends meet, but social isolation, uncertainty, and widespread economic strain have made these resources more difficult to access during COVID-19. At the same time, school closures and restrictions on contact have isolated many children from professionals who work with children and serve as mandated reporters for suspected abuse or neglect.
But duration of exposure matters, suggesting that it is not too late to head off many of the negative long-term consequences of the economic toll of the pandemic for American children if we strengthen and expand existing relief measures. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, which replaced the Food Stamp Program) provides funds directly to families to help pay for food but current benefits may be insufficient to meet growing needs. Provisions of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act of 2020 that allowed states to provide free or reduced-price meals to eligible students affected by pandemic-related school closures may need to be extended beyond the 2019-2020 school year. And temporary expansions of employment benefits and eviction protections provided by the CAREs Act are set to expire at the end of July. Investing in America’s children by expanding and extending these important government programs can help to mitigate the long-term social, economic, and health toll of the pandemic on the next generation.
-more-
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Kristi Williams, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Sociology, Ohio State University, williams.2339@osu.edu
Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, Council on Contemporary Families, coontzs@msn.com
LINKS AND ABOUT:
Fact sheet: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/children-economic-toll-covid-19-fact-sheet/
—
The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.
The Council helps keep journalists informed of notable work on family-related issues via the CCF Network. To join the CCF Network, or for further media assistance, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.
Follow us! @CCF_Families and https://www.facebook.com/contemporaryfamilies
Read our blog CCF @ The Society Pages – https://thesocietypages.org/ccf/
July 20, 2020
CCF’s Joshua Coleman on Helping Your Family Take COVID-19 Seriously
Are you having trouble convincing your family to take COVID-19 seriously? CCF senior fellow Joshua Coleman has some advice! Read his thoughts in The Atlantic’s “What Do You Tell Someone Who Still Won’t Stay Home?”
Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/03/convince-family-take-coronavirus-seriously/608356/
