Homelessness Devastates Children, Families Boise State Professor Says Conditions Of Poverty Passed On From One Generation To The Next

Pity the homeless child.

Besides no stable environment, the future holds health problems, poor performance in school and a lifetime of poverty.

Destitution and homelessness can devastate children. They have few friends and are even shunned by other kids. Their social, physical and mental development is retarded.

“We continue to treat it as an emergency crisis situation,” says Boise State University psychology professor Linda Anooshian. But “homelessness clearly has emerged as a long-term social problem. Homelessness and poverty, particularly long-term poverty, have very severe consequences.”

In her search to understand, Anooshian is talking with up to 90 homeless families, paying $30 for an hour interview with the mother and 30 more minutes with a child between 6 and 12.

“Some of these families are really strong,” she says, based on dozens of interviews she already has conducted, mostly at homeless shelters since it has been difficult to contact people living in cars or tents or doubling up with other families.

“To get through the stresses and the kind of things they’re reporting … my gosh, how did they do it?” she says. “We want to look at the good families and see how they do it, to try to figure out what it is that differentiates those from the others.”

Conditions that foster homelessness often are passed from one generation to the next for lack of marketable job skills that could break the cycle.

“We are planting the seeds of intergenerational homelessness,” Anooshian says. “The cost will be high.”

The children end up disconnected. All too often, they don’t even see the television programs other children talk about at school.

“It is as if they become lost in the middle of their own city,” Anooshian says. “They have big problems in school. That’s really discouraging if you think about it. School is the one potential safe haven for these kids, kind of the hope for them. … Instead they get negative labeling and social rejection.”

Candy Simpson knows about it first hand. The 30-year-old mother of three is living at the Salvation Army’s Booth Center in Boise.

Her 7-year-old son, who enters first grade in the fall, already has had problems in kindergarten.

“It seems like he’s more aggressive. He’s lashing out at people, hitting people,” Simpson said. Before they became homeless months ago, “he was much more mellow. Being homeless is really bad.”

Another mother of three who declined to give her name has been homeless since her husband lost his job and they lost their house in Ogden, Utah, earlier this year. Before coming to the Booth Center, the family was living in a tent at Caldwell. The trials of homelessness require children to put much more effort into their family, she said, but like Simpson she knows the toll moving from school to school takes on them.

“Our goal is to get into a home - and stay there the whole school year,” she said.

A pilot program has begun at Boise’s Madison Elementary School. Fifteen children, most from a nearby homeless shelter, were assigned “school buddies” who met with them at least once a week to talk about problems and provide encouragement.

“We’ve had no formal assessment yet, but the informal feedback has been very positive,” Anooshian said. If that continues, the program will be expanded at the end of the three-year trial.

The state still is trying to determine the extent of homelessness, but it is on the rise. Last year alone, nearly 1,300 school children received direct federal aid from the McKinney Fund, which pays for school supplies, course fees and even clothing as part of the effort to get homeless children into the classroom.

Anooshian concedes part of her research is aimed at proving to Idaho’s leaders that welfare reform will devastate the state’s poorest people.

“Welfare reform will increase homelessness, particularly in Idaho,” she said. “It will substantially increase hunger. Families will disperse rather than stay together.”

“Overall, welfare reform and strong families? No, they don’t go together,” she said. “Poverty stresses families, poverty doesn’t strengthen families.”