Child tax credits arriving next month, but study finds pandemic likely erased post-recession gains for Illinois families
As the White House spreads the word this week about the new child tax credit slated to begin next month, a study released Monday finds that post-recession gains for struggling Illinois families could be reversed by financial hardships wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual KIDS COUNT Data Book, which was released Monday to coincide with Child Tax Credit Awareness Day, shows that “an insufficient response to the crisis could erase nearly a decade of progress in child well-being following the Great Recession,” officials at the nonprofit said in a Monday statement.
The report ranks the states from 1 to 50 in terms of child well-being on the eve of the pandemic and “shows how the COVID-19 crisis exacerbated inequality, with Black and Latino kids and families struggling the most,” foundation officials said.
Illinois ranked 21 overall, according to the 2021 KIDS COUNT Data Book, a 50-state report released annually to track child well-being in the United States, officials said.
Childhood poverty had been declining before the pandemic, even as other indicators remained relatively consistent, officials said.
In 2019, 16% of Illinois children lived in households with an income below the poverty line, and 4% of Illinois children did not have health insurance, according to the report.
“The expansion of the child tax credit is the main recommendation included among policy solutions,” officials said, adding that experts estimate “it will lift more than 4 million children above the poverty line in 2021.”
As Congress has authorized the child tax credit for only one year, officials are urging, “lawmakers across the aisle to find common cause and ensure the largest one-year drop ever in child poverty is not followed by the largest-ever one-year surge.”
In addition to overall decreases in poverty, Illinois children in 2019 saw improvements in reading and math proficiency; fewer children lived in areas of high poverty; and their parents were less frequently unemployed and overburdened by housing costs, officials said.
Still, despite some gains in the decade following the recession, officials are concerned about the “full impact that COVID-19 will have on Illinois children, particularly poor children of color,” Bill Byrnes, a KIDS COUNT project manager at Voices for Illinois Children, part of the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago said Monday.
“For Illinois, our children fared better in the years following the recession, but we’re concerned about the racial/ethnic disparities,” Byrnes said.
Indeed, the report showed that Black children lived below the federal poverty level at a rate of 34%, — more than two times that of the state rate of 16%, Byrnes said.
Latino children were below poverty level at a rate of 20% and white children at 9%, Byrnes said.
Also troubling is the report’s finding that from 2017 to 2019, 45% of children in Illinois ages 3 and 4 were not in school, with young Latino children not in school at a rate of 53% — the only group to exceed the state rate, Byrnes said.
In 2010, 162,000 children did not have health insurance, but by 2019, that number had decreased by 20% to 120,000, Byrnes said.
Among the disparities were findings that Latino and Black children lacked health insurance at higher rates than other racial/ethnic groups Byrnes said.
Data from the Household Pulse Survey — which was collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and multiple federal agencies to gauge the impact of the pandemic — shows that 9% of adults in Illinois with children in the household lacked health insurance.
The report also found that 23% of the state’s households with children said they had little or no confidence in their ability to pay their next rent or mortgage payment on time — a number that decreased to 19% in March 2021, according to the report.
Byrnes said the arrival of the new child tax credit for working parents “will keep a whole lot of people from falling behind on their bills and other payments.”
“Getting an extra $250 to $300 a month might not sound like a lot of money, but it can make all the difference in the world to struggling families,” Byrnes said. “The main problem is, it only lasts a year, and these are problems families were having before the pandemic ... trying to figure out how to pay for child care, and barely making ends meet.”
On Monday, federal officials said nearly all U.S. families with kids will qualify for the new child tax credit, with couples making less than $150,000, and single parents making less than $112,500 qualifying for the full benefit.
The automatic payments, which were enacted as part of the American Rescue Plan, are slated to begin next month, with monthly payments of up to $300 per child, officials said.
President Joe Biden’s American Families Plan proposes extending the credit beyond 2021, White House officials said in a Monday statement.
Twitter @kcullotta
