蜜桃影视

Join our zero2eight Substack community for more discussion about the latest news in early care and education.

In early February, Tateona Williams suffered the unthinkable. on a freezing cold Monday, she parked her van in a Detroit parking garage and kept her vehicle running so that she and her four children, plus her mother and her mother鈥檚 child, could stay warm. At some point in the night, the engine turned off. Her 9-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter stopped breathing and later died, apparently freezing to death. 

Williams and her children with relatives, but in late November were told they had to find somewhere else to live. She called the city鈥檚 homeless response team at least three times seeking help, but her situation wasn鈥檛 deemed an emergency, and she never received assistance in finding somewhere to stay; in November she said she was no family rooms were available. So they began living out of a van, frequently parking in the casino garage where her two children died. It was only after that tragedy that she was finally given a spot in a shelter.

Homelessness has seen a sharp uptick across the country in recent years, but the increase has been the most dramatic for families with children age 5 and younger, multiple data sources suggest. 鈥淭he most common age that someone is in shelter nationally is under the age of 5,鈥� said Henry Love, vice president for public policy & strategy at Win, the largest provider of family shelters in New York City. This trend means more and more families with young children are scrambling to find somewhere to live.

This housing instability can have a lasting impact on children, affecting their cognitive and social-emotional development and leading to learning delays and academic challenges. Those challenges are likely to follow them throughout their education and even later into their lives.

In its of homelessness in America, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reported that the number of homeless people increased by 18% last year, reaching the highest level ever recorded. The problem is even more acute for families with children: They experienced the largest single-year increase, with a rate that climbed by 39% between 2023 and 2024. That came after a increase in homelessness for families with children in 2023.

Those numbers are alarming, said Donald H. Whitehead, Jr., executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, even as he noted that the department鈥檚 data is an undercount due to challenges with identifying homeless people and how they鈥檙e classified.

HUD doesn鈥檛 break the data down further by children鈥檚 age. But other sources indicate that the youngest children are increasingly at risk of living in homelessness. 鈥淲hat we know to be true is more young kids are experiencing homelessness,鈥� said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit focused on homelessness and education.

According to an estimate generated by SchoolHouse Connection and the Poverty Solutions initiative at the University of Michigan, there were 681,180 children nationally under age 6 experiencing homelessness in the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent data. That represents an approximately 23% increase over the 2021-2022 school year, 鈥渢wice the increase for school-aged children,鈥� Duffield said in an interview. The nonprofit expects to publish the data in April.

In January, SchoolHouse Connection for the 2022-2023 school year, showing that 451,369 children ages 3 and younger were experiencing homelessness that year. That represents about a 24% increase over the 2021-2022 school year. 

The same trend appears in more recent for children attending Head Start, which provides free early childhood education to low-income children below the age of 4. Homelessness among those children rose nearly 13% between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years, the largest increase since the start of the pandemic. Overall, the figure for children attending Head Start is up 28% since the 2021-2022 school year. 

The increases are 鈥渦nfortunately consistent across data sources,鈥� said Erin Patterson, director of education initiatives at SchoolHouse Connection.

The higher numbers could reflect better efforts to locate children experiencing homelessness. The American Rescue Plan provided $800 million in pandemic-relief funding that to identify more children in unstable housing. Head Start鈥檚 former director, Khari Garvin, was particularly on increasing enrollment among homeless children. 鈥淚f it鈥檚 about finding and enrolling and identifying, that鈥檚 a good thing,鈥� Duffield said. 

But the increases are also driven by troubling forces. Pandemic-era protections and funding that helped keep people housed have come to an end. Until it was by the Supreme Court in August 2021, a federal eviction moratorium barred eligible tenants from being kicked out of their homes; state and local eviction moratoria lasted longer, with Oakland, California鈥檚 in July 2023. Some converted empty hotels to housing for homeless people. States from Congress鈥檚 CARES Act to offer rental assistance, and then Congress passed two rounds of rental assistance totaling $46.5 billion. All of those measures have now expired.

In the meantime, the cost of housing has climbed dramatically nationwide. Rents 29% between 2019 and 2023, far outpacing income growth, and last year a record number of American households spent more than 30% of their incomes on housing. Such increases often trigger evictions, and the people of eviction are families with babies and toddlers. 

Homelessness among young children may also have risen with the arrival of migrant families, many of whom had nowhere to stay except shelters. Domestic violence often forces victims and their children to flee their housing situations and enter shelter systems, and there was an in such incidents during the pandemic. Many families have also recently been pushed out of their housing by natural disasters, from the flooding in North Carolina to the fires in Los Angeles. 鈥淭hose have lingering effects,鈥� Duffield said. 鈥淧eople don鈥檛 get their feet right away and the more vulnerable you are the longer it takes.鈥�

Having children is also expensive and can tip families into poverty. Research has that a quarter of all poverty spells start with the birth of a child. 鈥淧eople who are on the cusp can quickly slide into homelessness,鈥� Patterson said. 

Even as homelessness among young children and their families is on the rise, they often get left out of homeless counts and homeless services. The vast majority of these families don鈥檛 live on streets or in shelters, but instead double up inside friends鈥� and families鈥� homes, which HUD doesn鈥檛 count as technically homeless and may be harder to identify. Others live in motels and hotels, which again doesn鈥檛 count for HUD鈥檚 purposes. 

鈥淭he homelessness system itself doesn鈥檛 see families with young children and it doesn鈥檛 prioritize them,鈥� Duffield said. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e often an afterthought.鈥� As Williams鈥檚 story showed, they can get turned away if they technically have somewhere to sleep, like a car or a couch.

By contrast, the federal McKinney-Vento Act, which provides school districts with money to support students experiencing homelessness, includes in its count those who are living with other families, in hotels and motels, or in substandard conditions. 

The difference shows up in the data. The U.S. Department of Education鈥檚 estimate of the number of homeless students has since 2004, with a spike during Hurricane Katrina and a dip during the pandemic. And yet the number of homeless families reported by HUD has remained relatively flat in comparison over all of those years. 

One thing is clear, though: Homelessness has huge ramifications for young children. 鈥淚t is a traumatic experience,鈥� Whitehead said.

Research has found that children who experience homelessness are to have developmental delays. It can even interrupt such basics as potty training. Housing instability means many families move frequently between schools, disrupting a child鈥檚 education. 鈥淎s a former teacher, if a child can鈥檛 feel safe and is not stabilized, they can鈥檛 learn,鈥� Love said. 

Children who experience homelessness are more likely to and suffer from . Once they reach school age, homelessness is tied directly to higher absenteeism rates and lower test scores.

鈥淎ny experience of homelessness, even short-lived, can impact a child鈥檚 development even after the family has been stably housed,鈥� Patterson said. But, she added, 鈥淭he younger and longer a child experiences homelessness, the greater the cumulative toll of negative outcomes.鈥�

Enrolling children in safe, high-quality early education programs can mitigate those issues and 鈥渉elp create a sense of normalcy and calm in otherwise tumultuous and toxic circumstances,鈥� Patterson said. But just 7.4% of Head Start eligible children who were homeless in 2023-2024 were actually enrolled in Head Start or Early Head Start. Young children in public pre-K classrooms or Head Start programs run by school districts can receive help through the McKinney-Vento Act with transportation, food and other priorities.

Other solutions range from the specific to the systematic. Prioritizing homeless families for services, including early childhood education, could help. More accurate counts would also give a clearer picture of who is homeless. Another solution would be to offer more housing vouchers targeted for this population, similar to those offered to veterans or unaccompanied youth, or simply to provide cash without strings attached.

鈥淕ive people money,鈥� Love said. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 really the crux of it. People are under-resourced.鈥�

Did you use this article in your work?

We鈥檇 love to hear how 蜜桃影视鈥檚 reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.