Childhood poverty and deprivation at the starting gate in France. Examples using Elfe survey

Abstract

Income has been increasingly criticized as an indicator of childhood living conditions, especially at young ages. In this paper, we present a picture of poverty and multi-dimensional deprivation of children in France, around the time of their birth and during the first year of life. To do so, we use both an income poverty measure as well as a multiple deprivation approach, applied to a nationally representative survey of over 18,000 children born in France in 2011 (the Elfe cohort). We examine four dimensions of children's daily lives : material conditions ; parenting ; housing conditions ; and extreme housing conditions. Our results show that income poverty does not always overlap with deprivation : some children live in income-poor households without being deprived in the dimensions we study, and vice versa. Notably, we find only a small overlap between extreme housing deprivation or parental involvement and income poverty. Furthermore, we show that the population groups most at risk of deprivation in early life vary according to the dimension considered, and are distinct from the determinants of income poverty. For example, while single motherhood is the main driver of income poverty, it is not associated with an increased risk of housing deprivation nor with low parental involvement, when other socio-demographic characteristics are controlled for. This approach therefore adds more precision and nuance to our understanding of child poverty at very young ages in France.