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Toronto child poverty rate at "epidemic levels"

King of Kensington

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Is this epidemic happening mainly because mostly poor immigrants are having children? If it's mostly poor people having children, then the child poverty rate will be high.

White Canadians haven't had enough children to even sustain the population since the 1970s. Immigration has been the lifeblood of the nation. White people are more likely to be middle class and to have good resources to raise children. White people should have more children, or we will decline in the world as we die off.
 
What about the supposed yuppie/hipster "baby boom"? (Of course, we've been hearing about it for for a decade, but is there any evidence that it actually exists?)
 
What about the supposed yuppie/hipster "baby boom"? (Of course, we've been hearing about it for for a decade, but is there any evidence that it actually exists?)

The downtown child population (under 5 years old, iirc) was at 2500 at end of 2008. Since then it has at least doubled (this was via a city planning doc, can't find it at the moment).
 
The downtown child population (under 5 years old, iirc) was at 2500 at end of 2008. Since then it has at least doubled (this was via a city planning doc, can't find it at the moment).

Take a look at www1.toronto.ca Your City/Demographics/Neigbourhood List and look at the profiles of 70,72,73,75,76,77,78,81,82
The profiles use the 2011 census...
 
Found it. My numbers were half of what actually is happening. See p32: http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2014/te/bgrd/backgroundfile-69192.pdf

"Downtown’s population has also been growing through ‘natural increase’. From January 2011 to September 2013 there have been about 5,200 babies born to mothers resident in the Downtown. This is only slightly less than the number of children under the age of 5 counted by the Census in 2011. Notable is the fact that 22% of these infants find their home in the Harbourfront and Railway Lands."
 
I think this problem is real so I'm not trying to discredit the report; however, In a large city child poverty rates will always be significant. These poverty measures are based on relative, not absolute measures of income.

I also don't think these income figures pain the full picture of what is going on. A family of four is considered to be living in poverty if it has an income of $38,920. $38,920 is very low but then I would have to admit that my own family never had a family income any larger when I was a child and yet I actually consider myself to have grown up in privilege. The reason our income was so low is that my parents owned their own property and ran a small business. As such they largely had control over their own income. They only took enough money out of their business for us to live on and we kept a tight ship expense wise.

Again, I'm not saying that the poverty problem isn't real but I can't help but wonder about all those restaurant, real estate, corner shop, contracting etc. companies owned by visible minorities whose families would be living in borderline poverty according to this study and yet actually sitting on significant asset wealth. According to this study my family (and I'm a visible minority to boot) would be poverty statistics.
 
I have no idea why some folks believe downtown is where the wealthy yuppies live. Most wealthy families live north of Bloor between Bathurst and Bayview. Downtown is a mixture of poor and rich (but hardly as rich as a lot of midtown/uptown folks).
 
Government programs implicitly encourage poor people to have families by reducing the marginal cost of having a child - subsidized housing, cash payments, tax credits, subsidized day care. In contrast, middle class families pay through the nose for a "family sized" 3 bedroom house and have to pay full freight for day care and everything else.

This is one of the reasons that universal social programs are so good - everyone contributes according to their means through taxes, but everyone benefits from the program equally
 
Toronto single mother Veronica Snooks, 51, struggled to raise five children in poverty.

The city’s lack of affordable housing meant she stayed in abusive relationships longer than she should have, causing her to lose her children to child welfare and spiral into addiction and depression.

“You stay longer because of poverty. It just seems easier to take the abuse,” she said. “We suffer for our children.”
Snooks, who moved into a Toronto Community Housing townhouse in Flemingdon Park eight years ago, credits the affordable rent and social programs aimed at assisting single moms for helping her beat her addictions and turn her life around.

Wow, just wow. Not to make light of her struggles with addiction and depression, but she would not have struggled so much if she had not had any children while in an abusive relationship and unable to care for them. The problem here is not a lack of support for children, it's that our society enables people like this to do whatever they feel like while the rest of us pick up the pieces.
 
Wow, just wow. Not to make light of her struggles with addiction and depression, but she would not have struggled so much if she had not had any children while in an abusive relationship and unable to care for them. The problem here is not a lack of support for children, it's that our society enables people like this to do whatever they feel like while the rest of us pick up the pieces.

+1.
I don't think people should just have any number of children they want without being able to afford it, just because "they like kids". The society should offer some help, but most of the financial resources need to come from the parents themselves. You can't barely make minimum wages and have 8 kids. It is not fair to the kids, nor to the taxpayers who are forced to support them.
 
Wow, just wow. Not to make light of her struggles with addiction and depression, but she would not have struggled so much if she had not had any children while in an abusive relationship and unable to care for them. The problem here is not a lack of support for children, it's that our society enables people like this to do whatever they feel like while the rest of us pick up the pieces.

Certainly having 5 kids in her circumstances probably wasn't the best idea.

I think the idea though is that people in poverty are, because of poverty, more prone to make poor long-term decisions. The causality is reversed, in a way.

If you've got no education, no promising career or no wealth, having kids can seem like a way to mark yourself as an 'adult.' It seems crazy to people with college degrees, for whom having kids can at times seem like a huge career impediment, but things are different when you don't have those opportunities.

It's not exactly fair to blame this on 'society' as a whole or any-kind of 'welfare mom' stereotype. Low education and life opportunity correlates with higher fertility nearly everywhere. For instance, here's Olga Khazan reporting on similar things in Brazil:

The rich have other ways of displaying their maturity, but among poor teenagers, having children can be a social-climbing strategy. When you share a cramped, leaky hut with an army of siblings and a frazzled adult, there can seem no better way to prove your worth than to become a mother.

“I have 13- and 14-year-old girls crying to me because their pregnancy test was negative, and they wanted to be pregnant,†said Janos Gyuricza, a primary care physician in Sao Paulo. “Getting pregnant is a way of becoming a woman. You finally have something of your own.â€

Of the 262 women Gestos targeted with their female-condom promotion, about half continued to use them consistently, according to an internal report the organization later conducted.

This is completely nonsensical to anyone with a college degree, obviously. I think the point is that we should focus on programs which assist at risk groups to have more opportunities, not judge them by our own standards of maturity and rationality.
 
This is completely nonsensical to anyone with a college degree, obviously. I think the point is that we should focus on programs which assist at risk groups to have more opportunities, not judge them by our own standards of maturity and rationality.

The problem is that people like the woman in the article are acting rationally in a sense, because our social safety net actually encourages women with few job skills to have multiple kids instead of staying in the workforce. They can often make more (and qualify for more subsidy) as a "welfare mom" than by working a minimum wage job. What we need to do is fix our social safety net so that it actually helps people to get out of poverty, rather than keeps them in it!
 
I have no idea why some folks believe downtown is where the wealthy yuppies live. Most wealthy families live north of Bloor between Bathurst and Bayview. Downtown is a mixture of poor and rich (but hardly as rich as a lot of midtown/uptown folks).

Yes, "midtown and North Toronto elite" is more apt than "downtown elite."
 

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