No Way out of the Poverty Trap

A study presented by the national industrial welfare organization Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO) this week in Berlin paints a bleak picture of the poverty that an estimated one million children in Germany grow up in and very often remain plagued by.

The phenomenon is a vicious cycle difficult to break out of, according to the study. Children who come from such impoverished backgrounds often can’t keep up with their counterparts in kindergarten and are isolated by the time they enter primary school, it says.

Poverty deeply-lodged in German society

The Organization for Economic cooperation and Development (OECD) defines as "poor" those who have access to less than 50 percent of the average income of their country. By those standards, a poor family of two adults and two children lives off of €1500 ($1620) a month in Germany.

The head of the AWO, Manfred Ragati, said this week that the widespread belief that most of these children and their parents must be living from social welfare is often wrong. "More than 70 percent of these parents cannot provide properly for their children despite them holding jobs."

A representative study done by the AWO in 2000 indicated that poverty was widespread in Germany. It concluded that every seventh of the 14 million children in the country were poor and that young children weren’t provided financial security despite their parents being employed.

Health and adjustment problems

In the current poverty study, social scientists observed 185 deprived families up to the time their children reached primary school age. The findings have revealed a host of problems that arise from being poor.

"Poverty has taken strong root; the health of the affected children has often worsened. Such children, who are usually loners in kindergarten, turn into misfits by the time they reach school. For instance, they often can’t go to the movies or to the swimming pool with their peers and are often visited less frequently at home, because they can’t invite other children over," Ragati said.

The study, which estimates that almost 90 percent of poor children suffer from chronic illnesses such as headaches and stomach ailments, shows that familial destitution not only leads to undernourishment and social isolation of children but also drastically limits their future.

Children from deprived families don’t just face problems at school but often are sent to school at a later age than six, the average age for children to begin primary school in Germany.

Gerda Holz, one of the authors of the study, explained that parents are often unable to cope with bringing up their children because they are too busy trying to earn money to secure their existence. As a result, the parents have no time to take care of and pay attention to their children's needs.

Holz said this often influences children’s behavior. "We see a visible relation between poverty and behavior that conspicuously stands out," she said. Holz added that children simply cannot cope with too little parental support and attention, the lack of concentration due to chronic illnesses and rejection by fellow students. The situation, she said, was particularly dramatic with single mothers.

More special care and sensitive laws needed

The problem of increasing poverty isn’t helped by the fact that children are often considered a financial risk by couples in Germany because they lower a family's living standards.

As a result, the AWO is demanding that tax law and state aid programs accommodate the various family models that exist in Germany today. It is also calling for child support and family aid to be dependant on income and for jobs to allow more flexible working hours for single parents.

"We need sufficient child-care options to enable one to harmonize family and job, where child-care doesn’t just translate into safe-keeping of children. In particular, special centers to take care of deprived children need to be increased. To break out of the vicious cycle of poverty, poor children need particularly intensive care that is based on their individual situations," Ragati said.