PU685 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection Example

Poor Is Not One Number: A Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on How Child Poverty Fell to a Record Low and More Than Doubled the Next Year Without Most Families' Wages Changing

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PU685: Issues and Concepts in Maternal and Child Health

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The seminar and the classmates are composite; the poverty measures, the published rates and the research cited are real.

What I Believed

My notes before the session read: "Child poverty = kids below the federal poverty line. The number is the number." I had used the official poverty rate for years in grant applications at the family resource center where I work, and nobody had ever questioned it. I thought of measurement as a technical detail that did not change what we knew about which children were poor.

What the Seminar Showed

The group opened the Census Bureau's report on poverty in 2022 and compared the two measures it publishes. Under the Supplemental Poverty Measure, child poverty was 5.2 percent in 2021, the lowest on record, and 12.4 percent in 2022, more than doubling in one year (Shrider, 2023). I asked what had happened to families' wages between those years, and the answer was that the main change was not in wages at all. The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit, paid in monthly installments from July to December and fully refundable for the lowest-income families, had expired. A classmate who works in a WIC office described what she saw when the monthly payments stopped: families returning for formula they had been buying themselves. That matched a study the instructor brought, which found a 3.7 percentage point drop in household food insufficiency among families with children after the first advance payment, a reduction of about a quarter (Shafer et al., 2022). Under one measure, millions of children moved out of poverty and back in two years without their parents earning a different wage.

The Fact That Changed My Mind

The instructor then put the two definitions side by side. The official measure compares a family's cash income before taxes with thresholds built in the 1960s from the cost of a basic food budget multiplied by three. It ignores tax credits, SNAP and housing assistance, and it does not subtract taxes, work expenses or out-of-pocket medical costs. The supplemental measure counts those resources and expenses and adjusts thresholds for current spending on basic needs and for local housing costs. So the official measure, by design, cannot see the policies that were doing most of the work in 2021. A classmate from public policy put it bluntly: if your measure does not count the tax credit, it cannot tell you whether the tax credit worked.

Where I Ended

I now think "poor or not" is a property of a measure, not only of a family, and that the choice of measure decides which policies can be evaluated at all. That does not make the official measure useless. It has a long consistent series and still determines eligibility for many programs, which is why my grant applications use it. But for asking whether a policy reduced child poverty, the supplemental measure is the right instrument, and the National Academies committee that reviewed the evidence used it for exactly that reason when estimating which policy packages could cut child poverty in half within ten years (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019).

What I Will Change

At the family resource center, our annual report will show both measures for the county where they are available and say what each counts. When we describe the families we serve, we will note which benefits they receive, since those benefits are invisible in the official rate. I also want to go back to two grant applications from last year in which I described county child poverty as unchanged since 2019 using the official rate. Under the supplemental measure, the story for those years would have been a sharp fall and a sharp rise, and the funders deserved to know that the families we serve had lived through both. More practically, when a family tells our staff that money got tighter in early 2022, I now know a likely reason and can connect them with the state earned income credit and SNAP outreach rather than treating it as a household budgeting problem.

What I Still Cannot Settle

The seminar split on whether the 2021 drop should be read as proof that cash support works or as a one-year anomaly during a pandemic with many other supports in place. The food insufficiency study separates the tax credit's timing from other changes better than the annual poverty figures can, but it measures food, not poverty. I left believing the expanded credit reduced child poverty substantially, and not knowing how much of the record low would have survived a normal economy.

References

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2019). A roadmap to reducing child poverty. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25246

Shafer, P. R., Gutiérrez, K. M., Ettinger de Cuba, S., Bovell-Ammon, A., & Raifman, J. (2022). Association of the implementation of Child Tax Credit advance payments with food insufficiency in US households. JAMA Network Open, 5(1), Article e2143296. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.43296

Shrider, E. A. (2023). Poverty in the United States: 2022 (Current Population Reports P60-280). U.S. Census Bureau.