Many of the 1.2 million recession-induced job losses have hit workers under age 25, threatening to push the nation's child poverty rate higher, according to a study by a children's advocacy group.
Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 accounted for more than 1 million of the overall jobs lost since the recession began in July 1990, said a study released Sunday by the Children's Defense Fund.The findings "confirm a new era . . . in which disproportionate economic pain falls on the youngest and most vulnerable Americans," said the study, which reviewed Bureau of Labor Statistics data with the help of Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies.
Hundreds of thousands of workers over 25 lost jobs as well, the study noted, but it said those losses were offset by jobs gains among other older workers, so net declines weren't as great. There were no such offsetting employment gains for young workers, the study said.
Poor employment prospects for young workers threaten children, the group said, because most American children are born into families where one or both parents are under 30.
Even though the recession started in the middle half of 1990, an extra 841,000 American children were pushed into poverty last year compared with 1989, the group said. Some 13 million American youngsters live in poverty, the group said.
While recessions of the 1970s and '80s pushed between a half-million and 884,000 children into poverty each year, "economic recoveries have lost much of their effectiveness in rescuing children from poverty," the group said.
So if the pattern of the 1980s continues, the Children's Defense Fund said, a recovery wouldn't be robust enough to pull children out of poverty fast enough to make up for the ones who had been plunged into poverty by the recession.
"Continuing cycles of recession and recovery that mirror the recent past will be devastating for children," the group said. "If the pattern of the 1980s holds true . . . by the end of the decade 14.8 million children will live in poverty."
Labor market problems are a major cause of child poverty because they accelerate "a devastating cycle of declining earnings, declining family incomes and rising child poverty among families headed by young adults," the group said.
Recent recessions have hit young Americans harder than they used to, the group said. For instance, in the 1974-75 recession, only 40 percent of the net job loss was borne by young workers, the study said.
Improvements in government programs such as unemployment insurance and food stamps, along with children's tax credits, would help young working families, the group said.