State Overview and Findings

Children in their neighborhoods

Children are impacted by their surroundings ... the families, neighborhoods and communities in which they live. Large numbers of Oklahoma children are growing up in neighborhoods where high poverty is the norm, where it is common for families to be headed by only the mother, where teens regularly drop out of school and where men do not work. Ambitions, possibilities and limitations are often established for young people through their life experiences in such neighborhoods. Children look up to and follow the people they know, neighbors providing role models for their future. Regardless of the specific circumstances of each individual or family, all who live in a typical disadvantaged neighborhood are disadvantaged. All neighbors have limited access to services and transportation. All neighbors deal with high prices and little opportunity.

(A pdf file with this narrative, plus graphic maps and charts, is available for download.)

The four maps (see pdf file) display areas in which large portions of county children live in distressed neighborhoods. Each map looks at a different troublesome factor – child poverty, female-headed households with children, high school dropouts and non-working men – to measure the proportion of county children who live in neighborhoods where the rate for that factor is one and one-half times higher than it is for the state. Taken together, these four factors provide a comprehensive picture for each county of the neighborhoods in which children live.

The individual county’s rank on each of the four factors is combined into a Disadvantaged Neighborhood Index in which the higher the number, the more disadvantaged the neighborhoods in which larger proportions of their children live. Fifteen Oklahoma counties (Beaver, Cimarron, Cotton, Dewey, Ellis, Grant, Harper, Kingfisher, Lincoln, Love, Murray, Noble, Nowata, Roger Mills, and Washita) have a Disadvantaged Neighborhood Index of “0,” demonstrating that none of their children live in neighborhoods where large proportions of the children suffer high rates of poverty, where more families than usual are headed by a single mother with no husband present, where disproportionately high rates of children drop out of high school, or where a larger than usual proportion of the men are not in the labor force at all. In the ten worst counties, generating a Disadvantaged Neighborhood Index of 222 to 296, a large proportion of children live in very disadvantaged neighborhoods. Among these ten counties are those where as high as eighty percent (80.5%, Choctaw County) of the children live in a high poverty neighborhood, up to half (46.3%, McCurtain County) of the children live where it is more common than usual for neighborhood families to be headed by a single mother, up to half (49.8%, McCurtain County) of the children live with neighbors who are more likely than normal to be high school dropouts, and up to thirty-nine percent (39.0%, Choctaw County) of the children live where high rates of men don’t work. More limitations than possibilities may be established for young people through their experiences living in those neighborhoods.

Conclusion