child poverty thesis

Mental health effects of poverty, hunger, and homelessness on children and teens

Rising inflation and an uncertain economy are deeply affecting the lives of millions of Americans, particularly those living in low-income communities. It may seem impossible for a family of four to survive on just over $27,000 per year or a single person on just over $15,000, but that’s what millions of people do everyday in the United States. Approximately 37.9 million Americans, or just under 12%, now live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau .

Additional data from the Bureau show that children are more likely to experience poverty than people over the age of 18. Approximately one in six kids, 16% of all children, live in families with incomes below the official poverty line.

Those who are poor face challenges beyond a lack of resources. They also experience mental and physical issues at a much higher rate than those living above the poverty line. Read on for a summary of the myriad effects of poverty, homelessness, and hunger on children and youth. And for more information on APA’s work on issues surrounding socioeconomic status, please see the Office of Socioeconomic Status .

Who is most affected?

Poverty rates are disproportionately higher among most non-White populations. Compared to 8.2% of White Americans living in poverty, 26.8% of American Indian and Alaska Natives, 19.5% of Blacks, 17% of Hispanics and 8.1% of Asians are currently living in poverty.

Similarly, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous children are overrepresented among children living below the poverty line. More specifically, 35.5% of Black people living in poverty in the U.S. are below the age of 18. In addition, 40.7% of Hispanic people living below the poverty line in the U.S. are younger than age 18, and 29.1% of American Indian and Native American children lived in poverty in 2018. In contrast, approximately 21% of White people living in poverty in the U.S. are less than 18 years old.

Furthermore, families with a female head of household are more than twice as likely to live in poverty compared to families with a male head of household. Twenty-three percent of female-headed households live in poverty compared to 11.4% of male-headed households, according to the U.S. Census Bureau .

What are the effects of poverty on children and teens?

The impact of poverty on young children is significant and long lasting. Poverty is associated with substandard housing, hunger, homelessness, inadequate childcare, unsafe neighborhoods, and under-resourced schools. In addition, low-income children are at greater risk than higher-income children for a range of cognitive, emotional, and health-related problems, including detrimental effects on executive functioning, below average academic achievement, poor social emotional functioning, developmental delays, behavioral problems, asthma, inadequate nutrition, low birth weight, and higher rates of pneumonia.

Psychological research also shows that living in poverty is associated with differences in structural and functional brain development in children and adolescents in areas related to cognitive processes that are critical for learning, communication, and academic achievement, including social emotional processing, memory, language, and executive functioning.

Children and families living in poverty often attend under-resourced, overcrowded schools that lack educational opportunities, books, supplies, and appropriate technology due to local funding policies. In addition, families living below the poverty line often live in school districts without adequate equal learning experiences for both gifted and special needs students with learning differences and where high school dropout rates are high .

What are the effects of hunger on children and teens?

One in eight U.S. households with children, approximately 12.5%, could not buy enough food for their families in 2021 , considerably higher than the rate for households without children (9.4%). Black (19.8%) and Latinx (16.25%) households are disproportionately impacted by food insecurity, with food insecurity rates in 2021 triple and double the rate of White households (7%), respectively.

Research has found that hunger and undernutrition can have a host of negative effects on child development. For example, maternal undernutrition during pregnancy increases the risk of negative birth outcomes, including premature birth, low birth weight, smaller head size, and lower brain weight. In addition, children experiencing hunger are at least twice as likely to report being in fair or poor health and at least 1.4 times more likely to have asthma, compared to food-secure children.

The first three years of a child’s life are a period of rapid brain development. Too little energy, protein and nutrients during this sensitive period can lead to lasting deficits in cognitive, social and emotional development . School-age children who experience severe hunger are at increased risk for poor mental health and lower academic performance , and often lag behind their peers in social and emotional skills .

What are the effects of homelessness on children and teens?

Approximately 1.2 million public school students experienced homelessness during the 2019-2020 school year, according to the National Center for Homeless Education (PDF, 1.4MB) . The report also found that students of color experienced homelessness at higher proportions than expected based on the overall number of students. Hispanic and Latino students accounted for 28% of the overall student body but 38% of students experiencing homelessness, while Black students accounted for 15% of the overall student body but 27% of students experiencing homelessness. While White students accounted for 46% of all students enrolled in public schools, they represented 26% of students experiencing homelessness.

Homelessness can have a tremendous impact on children, from their education, physical and mental health, sense of safety, and overall development. Children experiencing homelessness frequently need to worry about where they will live, their pets, their belongings, and other family members. In addition, homeless children are less likely to have adequate access to medical and dental care, and may be affected by a variety of health challenges due to inadequate nutrition and access to food, education interruptions, trauma, and disruption in family dynamics.

In terms of academic achievement, students experiencing homelessness are more than twice as likely to be chronically absent than non-homeless students , with greater rates among Black and Native American or Alaska Native students. They are also more likely to change schools multiple times and to be suspended—especially students of color.

Further, research shows that students reporting homelessness have higher rates of victimization, including increased odds of being sexually and physically victimized, and bullied. Student homelessness correlates with other problems, even when controlling for other risks. They experienced significantly greater odds of suicidality, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, risky sexual behavior, and poor grades in school.

What can you do to help children and families experiencing poverty, hunger, and homelessness?

There are many ways that you can help fight poverty in America. You can:

• Volunteer your time with charities and organizations that provide assistance to low-income and homeless children and families.
• Donate money, food, and clothing to homeless shelters and other charities in your community.
• Donate school supplies and books to underresourced schools in your area.
• Improve access to physical, mental, and behavioral health care for low-income Americans by eliminating barriers such as limitations in health care coverage.
• Create a “safety net” for children and families that provides real protection against the harmful effects of economic insecurity.
• Increase the minimum wage, affordable housing and job skills training for low-income and homeless Americans.
• Intervene in early childhood to support the health and educational development of low-income children.
• Provide support for low-income and food insecure children such as Head Start , the National School Lunch Program , and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) .
• Increase resources for public education and access to higher education.
• Support research on poverty and its relationship to health, education, and well-being.
• Resolution on Poverty and SES
• Pathways for addressing deep poverty
• APA Deep Poverty Initiative

• A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Public Health

Volume 18, 1997, review article, the effects of poverty on child health and development.

• J. Lawrence Aber 1 , Neil G. Bennett 1 , Dalton C. Conley 2 , and Jiali Li 3
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: National Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University School of Public Health, 154 Haven Avenue, New York 10032; email, [email protected] Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program, School of Public Health, 140 Warren Hall, Berkeley, California 94720-7360 National Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University School of Public Health, 154 Haven Avenue, New York 10032
• Vol. 18:463-483 (Volume publication date May 1997) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.18.1.463
• © Annual Reviews

Poverty has been shown to negatively influence child health and development along a number of dimensions. For example, poverty–net of a variety of potentially confounding factors—is associated with increased neonatal and post-neonatal mortality rates, greater risk of injuries resulting from accidents or physical abuse/neglect, higher risk for asthma, and lower developmental scores in a range of tests at multiple ages.

Despite the extensive literature available that addresses the relationship between poverty and child health and development, as yet there is no consensus on how poverty should be operationalized to reflect its dynamic nature. Perhaps more important is the lack of agreement on the set of controls that should be included in the modeling of this relationship in order to determine the “true” or net effect of poverty, independent of its cofactors. In this paper, we suggest a general model that should be adhered to when investigating the effects of poverty on children. We propose a standard set of controls and various measures of poverty that should be incorporated in any study, when possible.

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International Journal of Social Economics

ISSN : 0306-8293

Article publication date: 1 November 2004

This paper is a study on child poverty from two perspectives: child income poverty (derived from family income) and child deprivation (evaluated by non‐monetary indicators). On the one hand, empirical evidence supports the thesis that income‐based poverty measures and deprivation measures do not overlap. On the other hand, the relationship between poverty and the child's living conditions is not linear. Uses micro‐econometric techniques to analyse child income poverty and present deprivation indicators, and thereby an index of child deprivation, to study child poverty. The measurements used are centred on the child. The results obtained support the thesis that the study of child poverty differs whether the focus is on the child or on the family.

• Children (age groups)
• Child welfare
• Measurement

Bastos, A. , Leão Fernandes, G. and Passos, J. (2004), "Child income poverty and child deprivation: an essay on measurement", International Journal of Social Economics , Vol. 31 No. 11/12, pp. 1050-1060. https://doi.org/10.1108/03068290410561168

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Child Rights and Child Poverty: Can the International Framework of Children's Rights Be Used to Improve Child Survival Rates?

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]

• David Gordon,
• Shailen Nandy,
• Christina Pantazis,
• Peter Townsend
• Simon Pemberton, 
• David Gordon, 
• Shailen Nandy, 
• Christina Pantazis, 

Published: October 23, 2007

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0040307
• Reader Comments

Citation: Pemberton S, Gordon D, Nandy S, Pantazis C, Townsend P (2007) Child Rights and Child Poverty: Can the International Framework of Children's Rights Be Used to Improve Child Survival Rates? PLoS Med 4(10): e307. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0040307

Copyright: © 2007 Pemberton et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The authors wish to express their thanks to UNICEF for providing a grant which funded two stages of research developed from 2000, involving collaborative work between the University of Bristol and the London School of Economics and Political Science. The authors would also like to thank the United Kingdom Department for International Development for their funding of the research team, which has also contributed to the writing of this article. SP would like to acknowledge the Economic and Social Research Council Post Doctoral Fellowship Award PTA-026-27-0250, which allowed him the time to contribute to the writing of this article. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of UNICEF, the Economic and Social Research Council, or the Department for International Development.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Abbreviations: UNCRC, United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

The purpose of this short paper is to explain how the international framework of human rights can be better used to help reduce child poverty and improve child survival rates.

The Consequences of Child Poverty

It is estimated that over 10 million children in developing countries die each year, mainly from preventable causes. In approximately half of these deaths, malnutrition is a contributory cause [ 1 , 2 ]. However, the World Health Organization has argued that seven out of ten childhood deaths in such countries can be attributed to just five main causes, or their combination. In addition to malnutrition [ 3 ], these causes are pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles, and malaria. Around the world, three of every four children seen by health services are suffering from at least one of these conditions. Many of these deaths could be prevented using readily available medical technologies at comparatively little cost. In 1997, the United Nations Development Programme estimated that the cost of providing basic health and nutrition for every person on the planet was $13 billion per year for ten years [ 4 ]. To place this sum in perspective, in 2002, the United States population spent $30 billion on pizza and Europeans spent $12 billion on dog and cat food.

While medical interventions can, in principle, prevent most young children from dying early, they cannot remove the underlying causes of poor health, which are linked directly to the severely deprived or absolutely poor living conditions suffered by 30% of the world's children [ 5 , 6 ]. For example, almost a third of the world's children live in squalid housing conditions, with more than five people per room or with mud flooring. Over half a billion children (27%) have no toilet facilities whatsoever and over 400 million children (19%) are drinking from unsafe open water sources (e.g., rivers, lakes, ponds) or have to walk so far to fetch water that they cannot carry enough to meet minimum health requirements [ 6 ]. The World Health Organization has argued that: “The world's biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill health and suffering across the globe is listed almost at the end of the International Classification of Diseases. It is given code Z59.5—extreme poverty” [ 7 ]. Eliminating extreme poverty is the key to improving global child survival rates, particularly over the long term.

Child Survival and Child Rights

In recent years, the importance of the link between child rights and child survival has been contested. In 2004, an editorial in The Lancet [ 8 ] argued that UNICEF's focus on child rights had been detrimental to international campaigns to improve child survival. In particular, the article claimed that the outgoing UNICEF Director (Carol Bellamy) had focused on “girl's education, early childhood development, immunisation, HIV/AIDS, and protecting children from violence, abuse, exploitation, and discrimination”, and that in doing this she had “failed to address the essential health needs of children”. The current Director of UNICEF (Ann Veneman) has so far given much less prominence to child rights, making “child mortality public enemy number one for the agency” [ 9 ].

We argue that a rights-based strategy will increase child survival, in part by reducing child poverty, but only if some rights are prioritised over others. UNICEF, under Bellamy, adopted a position in which all the rights in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) were regarded as of equal importance, and both developed and developing countries were urged to realise these rights progressively (i.e., one after the other) [ 5 , 10 ]. This position has become hard to defend, since some rights are clearly more important than others and/or contingent on others. For example, whilst UNICEF recognises that children living in poverty are more likely to experience non-fulfilment of other rights [ 5 ], the right to vote is little use to a child who has died in infancy as a result of a lack of medical care due to poverty.

There is a clear need to prioritise the realisation of rights in policy so that action can be divided into successive stages according to degree of severity of transgression and available resources. Ensuring child survival provides a good basis for this prioritisation, but to be effective, actions need to tackle both the symptoms and the underlying causes. The UNCRC (see Box 1 ) established a strong ideological, moral, and political tool for challenging these structural causes and its utility should not be undervalued.

Box 1. The Five Core Principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

• The right to life, survival, and development
• Non-discrimination
• Devotion to the best interests of the child
• Respect for the views of the child
• The right to an adequate standard of living and social security

Article 24 (1) of the UNCRC states that:

“States Parties recognize the right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health and to facilities for the treatment of illness and rehabilitation of health. States Parties shall strive to ensure that no child is deprived of his or her right of access to such health care services”.

Similarly, Article 24 (2) of the UNCRC continues:

“States Parties shall pursue full implementation of this right and, in particular, shall take appropriate measures:

(a) To diminish infant and child mortality;

(b) To ensure the provision of necessary medical assistance and health care to all children with emphasis on the development of primary health care;

(c) To combat disease and malnutrition, including within the framework of primary health care, through, inter alia, the application of readily available technology and through the provision of adequate nutritious foods and clean drinking-water, taking into consideration the dangers and risks of environmental pollution;

(d) To ensure appropriate pre-natal and post-natal health care for mothers;

(e) To ensure that all segments of society, in particular parents and children, are informed, have access to education and are supported in the use of basic knowledge of child health and nutrition, the advantages of breastfeeding, hygiene and environmental sanitation and the prevention of accidents;

(f) To develop preventive health care, guidance for parents and family planning education and services.”

If these rights were to be fulfilled, child survival rates would rapidly improve.

The Potential of a Human Rights Approach

A human rights approach offers the possibility for progressive interventions into child poverty and child survival in three ways. First, conventions like the UNCRC have been signed by most countries in the world and thus can be considered to embody universal values and aspirations. Second, human rights conventions place a legal obligation upon states, a view endorsed by Mary Robinson (former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) in her speech to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa: “…a human rights approach adds value because it provides a normative framework of obligations that has the legal power to render governments accountable” [ 11 ].

Any comprehensive understanding of the root causes of poverty and the 10 million annual premature child deaths cannot ignore the legal and institutional structures that create and perpetuate income and wealth imbalances within society. Thus, human rights provide a challenge to these structures [ 12 ].

Third, rights-based language can help to direct policy. It shifts the focus of debate from the personal failures of the “poor” to the failure of macro-economic structures and policies implemented by nation states and international bodies (World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, etc.) to eradicate poverty. Hence, child poverty in this context is no longer described as a “social problem” but a “violation of rights” [ 13 ].

Human Rights as a Tool for Poverty Reduction: Some Practical Issues

There are objections to the human rights approach. One question is whether human rights, as formally expressed in human rights conventions, are genuinely universal [ 14 ]. Critiques based on cultural relativism and Asian values have suggested that human rights are “western” in orientation and content and, consequently, promote liberal/individualist social preferences over more “collective” forms of organisation [ 15 , 16 ]. However, it is a fact that every country in the world (the 193 UN Member States) has signed the UNCRC—implying that negotiated moves towards the realisation of the agreed goals are feasible. There is a near-unanimous consensus on objectives and values. Only two countries have to date failed to ratify the UNCRC—Somalia and the US.

A second question is whether economic, social, and cultural rights (including child health and survival) have been subjugated to civil and political rights, despite the insistence of human rights advocates on the “indivisibility” of these rights (see Box 2 for definitions of different categories of rights) [ 17 ]. Following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, civil and political rights have tended to be promoted over economic, social, and cultural rights [ 18 ]. Two specific international covenants were agreed upon: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and signatories are committed to the realisation of all these rights [ 18 , 19 ]. Ironically, the act of creating two covenants has served to provide contradictory messages about the “indivisibility” of rights. This distinction has become entrenched in the legal systems of nation states, which sometimes place civil and political rights in the “justiciable” section of their constitution, while relegating economic, social, and cultural rights to the realm of directive principles [ 20 ]. Civil and political rights have entered into law ahead of economic, social, and cultural rights, which are crucial for poverty eradication and health improvements.

Box 2. Definitions of Categories of Rights

Social and economic rights relate to guaranteeing individuals a minimum standard of living, such as a minimum income, housing, health care, and education.

Cultural rights relate to the recognition and safeguarding of ethnic/religious groups' practices and beliefs.

Civil rights relate to personal freedoms, such as the right to privacy, freedom of movement, and right to a fair trial.

Political rights relate to political participation, such as the right to vote and the right to peaceful assembly.

A third question about human rights is whether the “non-justiciability” and non-enforcement of certain economic, social, and cultural rights makes the development of anti-poverty policies difficult. It is often argued that “rights”, as they have been defined in human rights conventions, are imprecise or are moral claims that are not legally enforceable [ 20 ]. Many “rights” have so far been largely ignored by national courts, and the realisation of economic, social, and cultural rights is particularly difficult. Domestic courts have been adept at arriving at complex decisions in cases relating to civil and political rights, but they have tended to dodge issues of poverty, access to health care, and non-fulfilment of other economic and social rights. They cite the non-justiciability of such rights and have not been aided by international jurisprudence, which is currently lacking in this area.

However, both domestic and international judiciaries could follow the inventive and progressive approach of treaty committees and special rapporteurs who scrutinise and regularly report on nation states' adherence to the conventions [ 20 ]. For instance, the Committee on the Rights of the Child has, on a number of occasions, refused to accept the “non-affordability” claims made in the progress reports of states. For instance, in the light of the funding of their defence budgets, Indonesia and Egypt were invited to justify their failure to make significant progress in implementing the UNCRC [ 20 ].

There are notable examples where economic and social rights have been written into nation states' constitutions. Rights thus removed from the political sphere into the legal sphere are less contested. The advantage of this shift is that the courts can help to set minimum welfare standards—through reviewing government budgets, vetoing legislation that is likely to increase rather than reduce poverty, and so on. Examples of such an approach can be found in India, the Republic of South Africa, and Finland [ 21 ].

The Relationship between the Rights of the Child and Child Poverty

The UNCRC does not contain an explicit human right to freedom from poverty. Hence, to measure poverty in terms of rights, a selection process is required to match these rights to the severe deprivations of basic human need that characterise poverty and cause ill health. Giving greater priority to selected groups of rights does not imply that rights are divisible in any ultimate or “perfect” sense. It allows planned actions to be taken, progressively by stages, to achieve agreed ends. Human rights are interrelated, so the fulfilment of some rights is reliant on the prior realisation of others [ 15 ].

Many of the rights, as expressed in the relevant charters and conventions, are ambiguous or imprecise. This is often the case with social and economic rights where access to some rights is easier to define and measure than others. The right to survival—preventing early deaths—is less difficult to measure than access to adequate health or educational services. Many phenomena (such as “health”) can be considered to be on a continuum ranging from “good health” to “poor health/death” [ 22 ]. Similarly, fulfilment of rights can be considered to be on a continuum ranging from complete fulfilment to extreme violation. Courts can make judgments on individual cases on the correct threshold level at which rights are found to have been violated or fulfilled (see Figure 1 ).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0040307.g001

Regrettably, there is little international case law at present that identifies the location of this “judicial” threshold with respect to many social, economic, and cultural rights, such as the right to health care. Social scientists therefore have a responsibility to help identify such “judicial” thresholds—a methodological issue we have sought to address in previous research [ 23 ].

The international framework of child rights is a useful theoretical and political tool in taking action to reduce child poverty and improve child health [ 24–29 ]. A rights-based strategy is necessary to the development not only of international and national jurisprudence but to a global civil society that challenges the structures of global poverty, so that child rights may move from the realms of rhetoric to those of tangible reality. However, in order to provide clear guidance for policy, we need to move away from an approach that gives all rights equal weight, to a strategy of choosing clear implementation priorities. We suggest that the rights contained in the UNCRC relating to child survival and non-discrimination be prioritised, i.e., these rights should be implemented first in situations where child rights cannot be implemented all at once. An emphasis on both survival and non-discrimination is vital to prevent unequal health provision from developing—for example, privileging the survival of boys over girls or one ethnic group over another. If such priorities are not set, then governments may decide to implement those rights first that are least expensive and easiest to fulfil and only implement more expensive rights, which would improve child survival, at a later date.

Child rights fulfilment by states can only be properly assessed within the global context of poverty and an equal appraisal of developed and developing countries. Thus, the guidance given by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (General Comment No. 5) [ 30 ], which specifies that the realisation of child rights is the responsibility of all nation states, be it within their jurisdiction or through international cooperation and action, requires widespread reinforcement and support. This places special obligations upon those who operate in the interests of the powerful nation states at the supranational level to ensure that child survival rates are improved by the fulfilment of children's human rights, particularly their economic and social rights. Solely concentrating on medical interventions that increase child survival, while ignoring other violations of children's human rights, is unlikely to ensure the health and well being of children in the long term.

Acknowledgments

The authors would particularly like to thank the following UNICEF representatives: Enrique Delamonica, Elizabeth Gibbons, and Alberto Minujin for their insights upon a number of issues during the two stages of research.

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Dynamics of child poverty and its determinants: the case of Tigray Regional National State

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A comprehensive approach to the study of poverty in the region

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• Volume 4 , pages 143–151, ( 2014 )

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The necessity for a comprehensive approach to the study of poverty in the region, including analysis of the socio-economic situation in the region, the effectiveness of existing institutions, and the status of the environment, is shown. The official approach to the definition of poverty is analyzed and its main problems are shown based on the case study of Tyumen oblast. In order to identify a comprehensive picture of poverty in the region, the indicators that characterize this phenomenon from various viewpoints, viz., monetary, unmet basic needs, lack of human development opportunities, social exclusion, and subjective assessment of poverty, are compared. The conclusion that it is necessary to solve the complex task of simultaneously reducing the levels of social and economic poverty in Tyumen oblast is made.

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Original Russian Text © D.Yu. Rudenko, 2013, published in Region: Ekonomika i Sotsiologiya, 2013, No. 3(79), pp. 121–141.

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Rudenko, D.Y. A comprehensive approach to the study of poverty in the region. Reg. Res. Russ. 4 , 143–151 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1134/S2079970514030083

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A Comprehensive Approach to the Analysis of Regional Poverty

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Measurement of regional poverty should be comprehensive, considering socio-economic, environmental, and institutional factors, and address both social and economic issues simultaneously..

The paper proves that measuring regional poverty should be comprehensive and include an analysis of the socio-economic and environment situation as well as effectiveness of the existing institutes. We analyze an official approach to and major problems of measuring regional poverty through our case-study for Tyumen Oblast. To describe a full picture of poverty in the oblast, we apply a multidimensional approach and compare indicators of people’s experience of deprivation such as lack of income, lack of capacities for human development, inadequate living standard, social exclusion, and peoples’ poverty assessments. We can also conclude that there is a need to solve problems of the increased social poverty and those of economic poverty observed in the Tyumen Oblast simultaneously.

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• What Is Cinema?

Garrison Keillor on Tim Walz and the Lake Wobegon Problem

The upper Midwest had a moment in the sun at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Michigan and Wisconsin have a good chance of being the states that decide the election. And with Minnesota governor Tim Walz as Vice President Kamala Harris ’s running mate, Democrats have, with some glee, seized on the chance to argue that the party can speak to a kind of down-home Americana that many would say they’ve lost touch with in recent years.

“We are starting the MAMMA movement,” Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar told the crowd at a breakfast held by the Michigan delegation. “Make America Michigan and Minnesota again!”

She then riffed on the line Garrison Keillor once used every week to close a segment called News From Lake Wobegon—the fictional Minnesota town Keillor described in humorous and novelistic running stories on his radio show A Prairie Home Companion. “All the women are strong,” Klobuchar said, “all the men are good-looking, and all the vice presidents are above average!”

A Prairie Home Companion went off the air in 2016. In 2017, Minnesota Public Radio severed ties with Keillor for “ inappropriate behavior ” in the workplace, which he said at the time was a “more complicated” story. Minnesota Public Radio CEO Jon McTaggart said after an investigation that Keillor’s public comments were not “ fully accurate .” In 2022, when asked whether he’d crossed a line, Keillor told CBS, “ Evidently, I did .” For a while, the archives of A Prairie Home Companion were taken offline, though they were made available again after Keillor and MPR reached an agreement .

For people who grew up, as I did, listening to the show, it was a turn of events that was hard to process. A Prairie Home Companion, through musical acts and its variety shows, introduced generations of NPR-listening liberals to ballads and anecdotes arising from a deep well of American folklore. In this deeply divided country, one supposed to be built on constitutional ideals rather than ethnic heritage or deep history, there is no official repository for these songs and stories, and no government agency charged with maintaining our cultural memory. These things get passed on organically, or not at all.

The selection of Walz lit up the DNC and hasd, to a degree that would have seemed unimaginable only a few weeks ago. The pick offered a direct counter to the selection of JD Vance as Donald Trump ’s own running mate: Democrats have tried to color Vance’s story of rising from poverty to Yale Law, which he tells in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, as less “authentic,” the phrasing often goes, than Walz’s own story of teaching high school and coaching football in a small Midwestern town. The accessory of the moment, worn by officials on the convention floor and by squads of young women at the “Hotties for Harris” party, is a Walz-inspired camo cap. The cap, inspired by the fact that Walz himself likes to hunt, is a careful piece of messaging, playing on the way that Walz famously described Republicans of today as “weird,” and suggesting that suddenly Democrats are the party speaking to the values of regular Americana. It is a messaging theme, but it suggests that the Democrats are beginning to realize they need to face down questions about globalization, the hollowing-out of America’s small towns, and deindustrialization of areas like the upper Midwest that left many people in America’s camo-cap-wearing regions disillusioned with the entire project of liberalism, and contemptuous of the Democratic Party.

So from a stairwell in the United Center, as the roll call nominating Harris and Walz was unfolding, I called Keillor, who now continues to tour and give performances at age 82, to ask about Walz.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Vanity Fair: So I have a private theory that something broke in America when A Prairie Home Companion went off the air. To me, growing up, it was a show that represented a liberalism that was still rooted in a kind of localist tradition, and was in touch with the song and story of small-town Americana. But it still fit into a liberal, inclusive vision.

Garrison Keillor: You know, I go around doing shows still, solo shows, and I go hither and yon and play theaters. And people are very moved when I remember when I was in school and we all sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Which I don’t think is sung often in schools anymore, but that’s not my problem.

And so this whole crowd of people, they love the notes and they sing. And some audiences sing it better than others, but it’s very moving. They might sing “God Bless America.” We could go on. But it’s all of these people, strangers standing shoulder to shoulder in the dark, and they feel this emotional bond. This is my generation, and we may be the last generation that knows all the words.

That seems to be something the Walz pick speaks to.

The thing that impressed me about Tim Walz when he was running for governor—his people asked if I would hold a fundraiser at my house. I used to live in a big, big house on Summit Avenue in St. Paul. I said, Sure, of course.

And he came and he gave a speech off the cuff, standing outside in a back garden that looked out onto the Mississippi. And it was such a decent speech, such a down-to-earth speech. Nothing about historic injustices, no grand scheme of economics, but really about decency and civility. And he said that a child has a right to a good education—every child. And this is fundamental. But a child cannot get a good education if he or she goes to school hungry. There is in our midst—always has been in our midst—people who are living on the very edge, and their children should be taken care of.

This points to something at work in politics around the world right now. I have a friend who works in the new British Labour government, who told me that they’ve realized suddenly that to win an election, they had to get out there and sing “God Save the King,” and to make it clear they believed in an intangible sense of history, and that sort of thing. And I guess the question liberals around the world have been wrestling with is, sometimes that ends up looking like a project that only includes a certain kind of person. Can you talk about the difficulty of reconciling that here in America?

The thing that brought Governor Walz to attention was his use of the word weird. And this is a word that leaps out when uttered by an elected official. This is a word one would expect to come from a teenager, but it was absolutely appropriate. Millions of people felt the same thing when they heard it. That this truly described an aspect of the opposition, the denial of the 2020 election results. The statement that President Biden was the worst president in the history of the country, that Kamala Harris was the worst vice president in the history of the country. Donald Trump saying that he’s better-looking than Kamala Harris. It’s weird .

And it’s clear that Tim Walz learned something from teaching high school. He picked up some language and it rang the bell of authenticity, which in this day and age of social media has become very precious and very rare. The same when he told the story of during the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis, [and] when President Trump [previously] put out a message [on Twitter], “ Liberate Minnesota .” Governor Walz called the White House, and he got hold of President Trump and he said, “What do you want me to do that I’m not doing?” He did not get out and give a speech, because there were armed men demonstrating in front of the governor’s mansion. And the governor’s daughter, his little girl, was terrified. And he asked President Trump to talk to his daughter. And President Trump, to his credit, talked to this little girl. This is the sort of humane view of public service that is so missing with all of the anger on both sides and all of the incredible, almost violent rhetoric. Half the country thinking the other half is crazy. This is a tone of authenticity that I think rings so true. [Editor’s note: The Trump and Walz teams have offered differing accounts of their communications during the 2020 unrest.]

I know JD Vance well enough to suspect that he’d be personally stung to hear you, of all people, call him weird. Because he’d probably say that what they are trying to do is restore an America that has been sort of lost in this globalized economy and these decisions taken at a high level that kind of reshaped our whole thing into a highly financialized, highly technologized system with no rootedness or meaning at its core—all this sort of thing. Their whole project is essentially now saying that it’s liberalism and liberals who are weird, and trying to rebuild an America that it believes in itself. Why has that not actually worked, and why has it translated into something that’s so divisive?

Younger people, people under 40, particularly people who have done as their parents urged them to do and gotten a good education—this country, this culture, is not terrifying to them. It is not a threat to them. They believe in it; they’re moving ahead with it. And so this is a difference between uneducated, less educated old people and ambitious young people who are taking control of this culture and this economy.

I am 82 years old and I’m glad to see this happen. To me this is the most natural thing in the world. I don’t know JD Vance; I didn’t read his book. I know very little about him. He’s the vice presidential candidate, and so his job is to be on the attack. I understand that. I’m talking about the head of the ticket and the increasing unreality that he is trying to sell to people. American isolationism is not a noble idea in a world at such great conflict. The idea that we can pull back and that we can live within our boundaries. The reasons why people from Guatemala and Nicaragua are anxious to come to this country, take a look at what’s happening in their country. And they’re coming for the same reason that people always have, because this country is not a third-world country. It’s one of the greatest countries in history and they believe in it.

We have some basic differences with the other side. And I think that weird is a word that strikes a bell. The other side is not interested in policy. If they are, they have not made this clear.

That hits at the thing that gave me the idea to call. Here at the DNC, I keep seeing young people in the famous Harris-Walz camo ball caps. And those caps seem to me to speak to a conversation a bit beyond words. Since I’m talking to you, let’s call it a longing for a Lake Wobegon that most people of my generation have never known. And now with Walz, there seems to be a hope that maybe actually Democrats can speak to that longing. But the thesis on the right is that they can’t.

I think that they want to. I think that the center left, the liberalism, and the party have been weighted far too far on the academic side, and they find it hard to talk face-to-face. I think that having a Democrat who is a hunter and who coached football and who taught in a public school in a small town is an enormous symbolic step. And that is one of the things that has created such enthusiasm for this ticket. And the fact that the party pulled itself out of a losing position in just a few weeks I think is astonishing. And it was all done back behind the scenes and I don't know how it was done, but eventually, I assume, we’ll find out.

I guess that’s where reporters should be coming in.

The center left, the liberal wing of the party, has tended to be the party of doom and gloom, focusing on historic injustices. Which certainly have a basis in fact, but this woman is the child of people of great ambition who came to this country for a better life, and she shows it every time she appears in public. She is very happy with where she is, and she’s not about to get down in the mud. She’s trying to make this a moment of national unity.

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James Pogue

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