“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” — Frederick Douglass
Pediatricians aren’t usually day-to-day policy-makers but policy decisions affect the work they do every day as front-line caregivers for our nation’s children. That’s why I was extremely pleased the official journal of the Academic Pediatric Association (APA) recently devoted an entire supplement to a pressing policy crisis affecting pediatricians, public health workers, teachers and all of us and the nation’s future: child poverty in America. As Academic Pediatrics put it: “Childhood poverty creates long-lasting, often permanent, physiologic changes through constant exposure to threats such as malnutrition, acute and chronic disease, toxic stress, social deprivation and lack of opportunity.”
The editors add: “Children remain the poorest members of our society even in good times, with rates that are unacceptably high for a developed nation. This situation is not an inevitable fact of life. The United States is a nation that knows how to use policies and programs to raise its citizens out of poverty.” I agree! The Children’s Defense Fund 2015 report, “Ending Child Poverty Now,” shows policy solutions to ending child poverty in our nation already exist and can be implemented without delay if politics and greed can be overcome by a commitment to help children. By expanding investments in nine existing policies and programs that work, we could shrink overall child poverty 60 percent, Black child poverty 72 percent and improve the economic circumstances for 97 percent of poor children.
Academic Pediatrics’ editors offered this single-issue volume to help empower pediatricians, community and national leaders, policy-makers and advocates to courageously address child poverty now. “Underlying this agenda are: 1) a belief that social justice demands both a robust safety net and universal opportunity for social mobility; 2) an acceptance of a broad definition of health that goes beyond well-being and focuses on the accumulation of human capital; 3) a recognition that social determinants of health impact and outweigh traditional health care for most children, and that health care must radically transform in response; and 4) a desire to eliminate, now and for the generations that follow, the health inequities that divide us. Pediatricians are in a unique position to help poor children both directly in their practices and as trusted advocates for children in the public arena. They must work with leaders in education, social service programs, government and business — virtually every sector of society that collectively has a strong stake in addressing the problem of child poverty. For who are these children but not our children? And for whom is the time to engage but not now?
To read the full article by in the Philadelphia Tribune, please click here.