Addressing intergenerational poverty is tricky business. If we are trying to break the cycle of poverty, innovative and nontraditional measures must be employed. We just cannot keep using the same failed approaches. To stop intergenerational poverty, we must focus on rising generations — the children of these families trapped in poverty. With situational poverty, parents need and receive direct help with their temporary circumstances. With intergenerational poverty, the adults in the room are either very often the problem or live with circumstances that don’t allow them to be the solution. The only way to effectively break these cycles of dependency is to focus on the children and, frankly, until now, many conservative policymakers have been reluctant in principle to bypass parents.
