 Poverty Begins at Home? Questioning some (Mis)conceptions about Children, Poverty and Privation in Female-Headed HouseholdsSylvia Chant () Working Papers from eSocialSciences Abstract: Grounded in a popular stereotype that female-headed households are the ‘poorest of the poor’, it is often assumed that women and children suffer greater poverty than in households which conform with a more common (and idealised) male-headed arrangement. In addition, a conjectured ‘intergenerational transmission of disadvantage’ in female-headed households is imagined not only to compromise the material well-being of children, but to compound other privations – emotional, psychological, social and otherwise. Beyond affecting young people in the short-term, these are also deemed to sow the seeds of future hardship. However, a mounting body of evidence suggests that household headship is not necessarily a good predictor of the start that children have in life, nor of their trajectories into adolescence and adulthood. On the basis of such evidence, the present paper seeks to interrogate -- and challenge -- some (mis)conceptions about female household headship and poverty among children. Background Paper for UNICEF's State of the World's Children 2007] Keywords: poverty; children; female-headed households; adolescence; psycological well-being; hunger; intergenrational transmission of disadvantage; Poverty Studies; Sociology; Gender Studies; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:817 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences |
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