Which policies are needed to decrease child deprivation in Belgian regions?

The research project will build on previous analyses done by Guio and Vandenbroecke (2019) and will deepen three research questions, largely not addressed so far and which are described below. The share of single parents and reconstituted families has substantially increased during the last century. These households tend to face higher risk of poverty. Within these households, the particular 'status' of children in shared custody requires methodological development. In most surveys, these children are fully recorded in the surveyed household, independently of the amount of time they spend in this household. This has a number of consequences. First, this introduces a bias in the national picture of the distribution of household types, i.e. on the relative share of reconstituted families, singles parents and singles in the population and it biases the breakdown of key social indicators by household type. Secondly, this leads to a biased view of the equivalised income on which the poverty and inequality analyses are based, to a largely unknown degree. in traditional monetary poverty and inequality analyses. Indeed, the computation of equivalence scales used to compare income of households of different size and composition does not take into account the fact that these children share their time between two different households. To disentangle this issue, additional data on the time spent by children with their respective parents were collected for the first time at the EU level in the 2021 EU-SILC ad-hoc module and could be used to refine the existing analyses. The first strand of the project therefore aims at developing a new household typology which will take into account of the custody arrangements of children. This new typology will then be used in a broader analysis of risks factors of child deprivation in Belgium, which will also include parents' joblessness, education, country of origin, (re-)equivalised income, housing tenure status and regions. The literature shows that chronic health problems during childhood increase the probability of poor health and poverty in adulthood and that chronic health problems are influenced by parents' socio-economic status. The second strand of the project aims at measuring whether child deprivation constitute a risk factor of health problems during childhood in Belgium. Finally, in view of the importance of early intervention and of childcare access to fight against mid-term and long-term consequences of child deprivation, the third strand of the project aims at mapping the degree of childcare use/non-use among the deprived children, for different household configuration and work attachment. In particular childcare use intensity amongst single parent household (in our refined definition) will be of particular interest. As far as most of the available child deprivation items may not be valid measures of deprivation of the youngest children attending childcare (< 3 years), we may opt to rather use household's and parents' deprivation to proxy the socio-economic conditions of children. A final strand of the research project will focus on concrete policy recommendations and will identify, on the basis on the three above analyses, the necessary policy reforms in order to decrease child deprivation in all three Belgian regions, as well as to fight against the consequence of child deprivation on children's well-being.. This will include, inter alia, income, housing, health and childcare policies, but also refer to child support and alimony policies, targeted at single parent households. If possible, depending on data availability and sample sizes, a comparison of how child benefit reforms in Belgium are associated with child deprivation (2014 versus 2021) can be conducted as well.