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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Voiceless'

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

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

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

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

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

And the monthly maximum welfare payment for a Philadelphia family of three today is $403 - the same as in 1990.

The most searing consequences of hunger among children are poor health and poor school performance, said Chad Dion Lassiter, president of the Black Men at Penn School of Social Work Inc., part of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Social Policy and Practice.

Without education, he said, the future is lost.

Indeed, the study found that the children most likely to be receiving food stamps and living in poverty were those living in an unmarried household (91.2 percent) and those in a household in which the head did not finish high school (62 percent).

Complicating life for such families is the fact that food prices are so high that food stamps generally run out by the third week of the month.

Invariably, parents wind up not eating during those hungry last days of the month, said Shearine McGhee of Logan, a 30-year-old single mother of two who recently was laid off from a clerical job.

"I give my kids bigger portions from the food-stamp food," she said. "You don't worry about yourself."

In fiscal years 2005 through 2008, the federal government spent between $2.4 billion and $3.3 billion per month on food stamps, Department of Agriculture figures show.

When President Obama took office, he used stimulus money to pump up food stamps; in August, the government spent $4.8 billion for the program.

'Not much'

While that sounds impressive, Hirschl said, the average monthly benefit per person rose only from $92 in 2006 to $133 in August. "It's not much," he said, adding that while food stamps help children, the already better-off elderly can get them as well, adding to the disparity between young and old.

The research on which the study is based was conducted for 29 years by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. For more than a generation, researchers there followed individuals from about 4,800 families and asked each year whether the family was using food stamps. Response rates ultimately reached 98.5 percent.

The last year of sampling was 1997 because afterward, the Michigan researchers began asking their food-stamp question every two years. Hirschl said he and Rank thought that made post-1997 data less reliable.

Because there was so much data, the authors were able to use a very long window of observation, which helped them extrapolate into the future about food-stamp usage, said John Iceland, a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University. Iceland, who is familiar with the methodology used in the Hirschl-Rank paper, described it as "very solid work."

"It's like determining the likelihood of developing heart disease from health data," Rank said.

The Michigan study is well-known and widely used by social scientists, and it has proven to be accurate over the years, Iceland said.

The finding that 50 percent of children will be on food stamps in their lifetime is conservative, Hirschl said.

That's because only about 60 percent of households eligible for food stamps actually get them, a finding backed up by the newly released Department of Agriculture study. Stigma and ignorance of the program hold people back, he said.