When Christopher’s father passed away, he was left without a home and without a family. His previous home, a social security housing unit under his father’s name, was rescinded by the government and Christopher was faced with homelessness at a young age. Without a stable place to sleep each night, Christopher found himself moving from abandoned car to train to bus for shelter. He struggled to maintain proper hygiene and find clean, warm clothing, while also finding himself affected by the loss of a stable home and community.
Child homelessness finds itself widespread across the United States. In the 2014 to 2015 school year, 1.2 million homeless children were enrolled in the public-school system, a 3.5 percent increase over three years (Homeless Children and Youth Act of 2017). Through our government and state programs, education systems have made efforts to provide stable environments for homeless children to develop and learn in, endorsing new programs such as the Homeless Children and Youth Act of 2017. The effects of homelessness impact children both in their immediate circumstances as well as their long-term lives. Despite compelling research proving detrimental effects of homelessness on child development, the number of homeless children continues rising. Homeless children are known as our country’s “invisible population,” and if they are left without the support, stability and opportunity for proper development that they need, they may become the “chronically homeless adults of tomorrow” (Ziv, 2014). The effects of poverty, lack of a stable family and loss of a physical home hinder the socio-emotional and cognitive development of children. The impact of homelessness on children lasts much longer than the number of years they live without a physical home; their education, development, and future are compromised by the setbacks they experience in their youth.
The culture of homelessness is often misunderstood and misrepresented, especially in regard to children. It is often believed that the only people affected by homelessness are adults. In reality, children are the fastest growing demographic of the homeless. In 2013, there were 2,483,539 homeless children in the U.S., an average of 1 in every 30 children facing the trauma and difficulties of homelessness (Bassuk, DeCandia, Beach, Berman, 2014). One year later, a study came out from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development stating once again that 37% of the homeless population are families with children. Many believe that those who are homeless have brought it upon themselves. Be that fact or fiction, this blame cannot be place on the children. Without a voice, homeless children become the victims of insecure housing, job markets, domestic violence, and other causes of homelessness. The brokenness of a home life directly impacts not just the parents, but also the children. They are the unheard and unseen of this homeless epidemic, leaving them vulnerable during crucial years of development and the most likely to be affected long term.
In looking at the correlations between homelessness and child development, questions regarding the significance of “home” come to the surface. What impact does a physical home have on a child and their development? A psychologist in the late 1960s, James J. Gibson, crafted the concept of “affordances,” referring to the opportunities an object or place provide a child to discover, learn, and develop. Within the realm of environmental psychology, affordances can be seen as the opportunities that physical space afford for a child’s development. The purpose of different environments in a child’s life is to offer a myriad of developmental opportunities for growth. It has been shown that a child benefits developmentally from having a place for social interaction and having a separate place for retreat. While school satisfies the social need for most homeless children, they lack a place of retreat where security is assured. For many, even when they had a home, this security was not guaranteed. Domestic violence is one of the leading causes of homelessness. A report from the American Civil Liberties Union in 2002 reported, “In New York City, almost half of all homeless parents had been abused and one quarter of all homeless parents were homeless as a direct result of domestic violence.” For a parent fleeing a toxic home environment, removing their children from that environment with them seems to be the best option, yet the absence of supportive programs and services to help women in this transition often results in homelessness for the whole family. In this case, a place of retreat for development is not easily accessible to children, both when they had a home and without.
In some cases, schools are able to provide both the social and secure environment for homeless children. In Oklahoma, a state where one in thirteen children under the age of six experienced homelessness in 2015 (Administration for Children and Families, 2017), an elementary school aims to remove the barriers from homeless children’s access to education. In the NPR segment on Positive Tomorrows, they address the effects that homelessness has on children in the classroom: “Without consistent access to adequate food, shelter and safety, students are often too hungry, tired and stressed to keep up in the classroom” (Hayes Luke, 2017). In an effort to remove these distractions from a child’s life so that they are capable of learning in the classroom, Positive Tomorrows offers transportation, meals, clothing, and other basic needs to their students. In addition, they have programs to teach parents life skills and help them find a job. The results at Positive Tomorrows have been outstanding: their student’s math grades improve, reading levels shot up, and attendance levels were at 90 percent over the 2015-2016 school year. Families were provided with counseling services, health check-ups and dental screenings. For young students experiencing homelessness, a healthy, stable and supportive school environment like Positive Tomorrows can make a huge difference in their educational and developmental trajectory.
Even before children reach school age, homelessness has begun to take its toll on a child’s development, beginning with the mother’s pregnancy. The likelihood of conflict in prenatal development rise for homeless mothers. These women are less likely to receive prenatal care, more likely to experience stress and more likely to have poor nutrition. All of these factors have the potential to lead to complications during pregnancy and therefore in the continued development of the child as they grow. Chloe Learey (2014), a director of the Winston Prouty Center for Child Development states that “These infants [of homeless women] are more likely to have a low birth rate, to not receive regular check-ups and immunizations, and to live in a stressful environment.” All of these factors lead to difficulties in both cognitive and physical development throughout a homeless child’s life.
There can be severe consequences for a child born with a low birth weight. When a child whose mother did not receive prenatal care is born with a low birth weight, the child is nine times more likely to die within its first year of life. A homeless child born with a low birth weight has less accessibility to medical services and health care, making it far more difficult to cope with the implications of a low birth weight than for a non-homeless child. Low birth weight is directly related to job related setbacks in later years. A study at the University of Michigan reported that “Low birth weight is linked to a 10 percent reduction in hourly wages from ages 18-26, compared to the wages of normal birth-weight siblings, but a 22 percent reduction in wages from ages 37-52.” The influence of poor development when in utero is greater than many would ever imagine, and for homeless children born into poverty, they are handed the burden of homelessness and difficulty from the very beginning.
The physical toll that homelessness takes on pregnant women is not just evident in low birth weight births, but also in a mother’s nutrition during pregnancy. During prenatal development, a mother’s nutritional health directly correlates to the child’s nutritional health. An article in the Journal of Nutrition notes that “alterations in fetal nutrition and endocrine status may result in developmental adaptations that permanently change the structure, physiology, and metabolism of the offspring, thereby predisposing individuals to metabolic, endocrine, and cardiovascular diseases in adult life” (Wu, Bazer, Cudd, Meininger, Spencer, 2004). The impact of a pregnant mother’s environment and lifestyle reach far beyond her own health, but influence her child’s future physical and cognitive outcome as well. Finally, the stress that a homeless mother endures during pregnancy is shown to influence their child’s long-term motor development, cognitive development, and behavior. Homeless women face many obstacles and challenges when pregnant, and the effect of their stressful environment and accessibility to prenatal care and healthy nutritional foods lead to long-term consequences for their newborn children.
Following pregnancy, the living conditions of homeless mothers and infants can lead to increased risk of disease or illness during the formative months of infant development. Infants may have fewer opportunities to develop their perceptual and motor skills, depending on their environment and affordances, or lack thereof. At 18 months old, infants begin showing signs of developmental delays. In Ronald E. Hallett and Linda Skrla’s book, Serving Students Who Are Homeless (2017), they reflect on the impact traumatic experiences on children: “early traumatic experiences can have profound effects on the brain architecture of young children that lead to altered brain size and structure leading to impaired cognitive skills, memory, emotional self-regulation, behavioral problems, coping and social relationships.” Traumatic experiences at a young age have the capability to modify the literal size and structure of the brain, changing with it the functional capabilities. This becomes a huge burden for a young child to carry: the stress and trauma of an unpredictable homeless life alongside physical and mental sickness, both of which affect one’s ability to concentrate and learn effectively. By preschool age, 75 percent of homeless children “have at least one major developmental delay or deviation” (Hart-Shegos, 1999). These signs of developmental difficulty often take the shape of speech and verbal delays, and emotional and behavioral problems. The developmental delays that a majority of homeless children face set them back from infancy, altering their educational development from the start. When a child’s education is disrupted so early on, their likelihood of continuing to face academic and developmental delays increases, resulting in long-term consequences throughout their lives.
Once these preschoolers reach elementary age, their unstable living conditions greatly impact their school experience. As a result of their insecure housing situations, 41 percent of homeless children are forced to transfer schools in one year, while 28 percent attend three or more (Hart-Shagos, 1999). The University of Pittsburg Office of Child Development (2010) compared children living in stable homes to children in unstable homes, stating, “children who live in unstable situations have four times the rate of developmental delays, three times the rate of emotional or behavioral problems, and twice the rate of learning disabilities.” As a result of housing issues that children are incapable of changing, homeless children face the consequences of such a lifestyle. As a result of developmental delays, homeless children are at a higher risk of being held back a grade, which leaves them at greater risk for having to repeat a grade in the future. Often, Hart-Shagos (1999) notes, the cause of these educational interruptions are due to their homelessness, two factors being “excessive absenteeism (21 percent of homeless children compared to five percent of other children) and because they moved (14 percent of homeless children compared to five percent of other children).” Without the ability to attend classes on a daily basis compounded with cognitive delays and insecure time and space to study outside of school, homeless students face stumbling block all along their academic path. Such circumstances set homeless children up to struggle in an academic setting.
Beginning at the elementary level, this change of academic settings impacts children’s social, emotional and cognitive development to a further degree. This occurrence within the elementary school years can lead to higher dropout rates in high school. A report for the Family Housing Fund of Minnesota states that “Homeless children are four times more likely than other children to score at or below the tenth percentile in receptive vocabulary and reading. Nationally, 75 percent of homeless children perform below grade level in reading, 72 percent perform below grade level in spelling, and 54 percent perform below grade level in math.” The years of elementary education act as a foundation for students to continue their learning, using tools such as reading, writing and math, to further develop skills and understanding. When homeless children are unable to adequately grasp such fundamental academic foundations, their future education is built on faulty ground. These low academic scores are a result of the environmental instability that homeless children face. Instead of having a home to retreat to, a quiet place to study, easy access to materials, and the money for extracurricular opportunities, homeless children lack such accessibility and resources, alongside the not knowing where they will sleep that night. The stressors of this lifestyle interfere with academic development in addition to environmental influences. At a young elementary age, homeless children are faced with adversity in their very first classroom settings. The struggle of forming a basic foundation of learning leads to later academic problems, all due to factors of homelessness they were not able to control over the course of developmentally crucial years.
As homeless children enter middle and high school, they continue facing both academic and environmental stressors. In 2016, the National Conference of State Legislatures released a statement addressing youth homelessness, noting that youth ages 12 to 17 are more likely than adults to be homeless. They continued on to say, “Homeless youth are at a higher risk for physical abuse, sexual exploitation, mental health disabilities, substance abuse, and death. It is estimated that 5,000 unaccompanied youth die each year as a result of assault, illness, or suicide.” For homeless youth who have already been affected by the stressors and traumas of day-to-day homelessness, the likelihood of continued trauma and injustices to be dealt to them only increases as they age. In addition, their education will very likely be interrupted once again, as homeless youth are 87 percent more likely to drop out of high school (America’s Promise Alliance, 2014). Finally, the likelihood of teen pregnancy greatly increases for homeless youth. Approximately 20 percent of homeless youth will become pregnant (NAECY, 2016), leading to new problems for both mother and child. In reaching adulthood, homeless children have faced incredible adversity: developmentally, educationally, socially, and mentally. In every way, homelessness permeates a child’s life, limiting their opportunities and lifestyles from conception.
The effects of homelessness on a child are severe, leading to long term consequences. Throughout their lives, homeless children are easily passed over and unnoticed, whether in academic settings, social, or at home. Without effective systems in place to act as preventative and corrective measures for homeless children’s developmental trajectory, this increasing population will continue to deteriorate, becoming the “chronically homeless adults of tomorrow” (Ziv, 2014). The absence of change in our societies response towards child homelessness is indicative of the lack of awareness and understanding our culture has of the gravity and impact of their experiences. If we continue to neglect the injustice that homeless children are facing, we perpetuate the cycle of poverty and inequality, inadvertently consenting to the degradation of innocent, young lives, leading them on towards a hopeless future.