Family Income Impacts Children's Health

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Children's health improves along with increasing levels of family education and income, Braveman noted. "Children in poor and less-educated families generally have the worst health, but even children in middle-class families fare worse than those at the top," she said.

Sue Egerter, co-director of the University of California, San Francisco, Center on Social Disparities in Health, and another of the report's authors, noted that in the United States a full third of children in the poorest households are in less than very good health, compared with 7 percent of children in more affluent households.

"These children are not simply suffering from earaches, these are kids with much higher rates of chronic medical conditions including asthma, respiratory allergies and learning disabilities," Egerter said during the teleconference. "These are kids who, quite simply, have more health problems than most other kids."

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The same health disparities exist among middle-class children, Egerter said. "Middle-class kids are nearly one and a half times as likely as children in higher income families to be in less than very good health," she said.

Two stark examples of the disparity in children's health are found in the states of Texas and New Hampshire.

Texas has the highest rate of children in "less than optimal health." Among poor Texan families, 44 percent of these children fall into that category, compared with only 6.7 percent of children in higher-income families. This is the largest income gap in children's health of all the states.

In contrast, only 13 percent of low-income children in New Hampshire have less than optimal health, compared with 6.4 percent of children in higher-income families. This is the smallest income gap of all states, Egerter said.

Even children in middle-income families can experience shortfalls in health compared with children in higher-income families, according to the report. These differences in health are also seen across racial and ethnic groups.

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