Unemployment: The Next Generation

You can call them the children of the Great Recession:

At the height of the economic crisis, in 2010, more than 8 million children and teenagers in the United States lived with an unemployed parent, according to the Brookings Institution. That’s one of every nine kids, living in the shadow of the most severe wave of job losses since the Great Depression.

Their experiences and worldviews, although still coming into focus, are part of the trickle-down effect of the jobless recovery. The Obama administration says that the economy is slowly improving, and unemployment has fallen below 8 percent; but for many children and teens of jobless parents, the experience of the Great Recession lives on and will probably stay with them for years.

“We need to think of this recession as a two-generation phenomenon. We focus on tracking job losses with the parent generation, but you rarely think about what will happen to the kids,” says Ariel Kalil, a psychology professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.

Maybe many of them will look back someday and realize just how naive they were about Obama and his policies...