When little kids don’t have stable housing, it can affect their health later
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When kids lack a safe and stable place to live, especially in early childhood, it can affect their health years down the line. That's the conclusion of a new study in the journal Pediatrics. NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee has this report.
RHITU CHATTERJEE, BYLINE: Researchers used data from a study that's been following a group of children across the country since their birth over 20 years ago. Kristyn Pierce is a researcher at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. For the new study, she and her colleagues looked at the data on kids' experiences with housing from birth to age 15.
KRISTYN PIERCE: We took measures of housing insecurity...
CHATTERJEE: Which included a range of indicators.
PIERCE: ...Homelessness, eviction, doubling up - meaning, like, overcrowding in the house - spending a night in a place that wasn't meant for residents and also difficulty paying for rent or mortgage.
CHATTERJEE: Pierce says a big group of kids had stable housing throughout the study.
PIERCE: Children who just never experience housing insecurity at all.
CHATTERJEE: Another group had low levels of housing insecurity at certain times while a third group experienced a lot of housing instability, mostly in early childhood, but had stable housing later on. Pierce says kids with any level of housing insecurity, low or high, were more likely to report they had worse health at age 15 and...
PIERCE: Children in both insecure groups reported higher levels of depression, and then only those in the highly insecure group reported higher levels of anxiety.
CHATTERJEE: Most past studies have looked at the health impacts of housing problems in adults, says Rahil Briggs, who wasn't involved in this research.
RAHIL BRIGGS: This study is really important in terms of focusing our attention on teens.
CHATTERJEE: Briggs is the national director of HealthySteps, a program that supports low-income families with kids between the ages of 0 and 3. She says early childhood is a critical period of development, so it makes sense that experiencing housing instability in those early years would affect health in adolescence.
BRIGGS: That it's really that longitudinal trajectory from infancy all the way up to adolescence.
CHATTERJEE: The findings highlight the importance of intervening early, says Briggs. An easy way to do that is for pediatricians to screen families for secure housing.
BRIGGS: Ninety percent of young children regularly attend well child visits. It is the single and only setting that we have in this country to regularly reach young children and their families.
CHATTERJEE: One place already doing this screening is Montefiore Health System in New York City, says doctor Hemen Muleta.
HEMEN MULETA: Here at Montefiore, we screen all of our clinic pediatric patients for social needs.
CHATTERJEE: Including housing. Muleta, a pediatrician at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore, says community health workers then connect families that need help to resources. But, she adds...
MULETA: Housing insecurity is probably one of the most difficult and the longest to be able to resolve.
CHATTERJEE: A reality tied to the lack of affordable housing in the city. Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR News.
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