Moving Into Poverty Damages Children’s Mental Health, Study Shows

February 21, 2017

New University of Liverpool research – published in The Lancet Public Health — shows that children who move into poverty are more likely to suffer from social, emotional and behavioral problems than children who remain out of poverty.

Researchers from the University’s Department of Public Health and Policy explored the impact that moving into poverty had on the mental health of children and their mothers, using a nationally representative sample of children born in 2000 and followed up until 2012 (UK Millennium Cohort Study).

The researchers identified 6063 families who were not in poverty and had no mental health problems when their child was 3 years old. They tracked these families and compared the mental health of those that moved into poverty to those that remained out of poverty by the time their child was 11 years old.

Fourteen percent (844) of these 6063 families moved into poverty over this period. The children that moved into poverty were 40% more likely to develop social, emotional or behavioural problems, compared to those that remained out of poverty. The mothers who moved into poverty were also 44% more likely to develop mental health problems and this partially explained the negative effect that poverty had on children’s mental health.

Read more on News-Medical.net.