Stella Blaylock has not been sleeping well since before Christmas, when the partial government shutdown furloughed her father and unexpectedly extended his holiday vacation. Days later, her mother was laid off from her job as a federal contractor.

A fifth grader at Williamsburg Middle School in Arlington, Va. — a Washington, D.C., suburb home to thousands of government workers — Stella now worries whether her parents will be able to scrape together enough money for her braces, or whether a planned overnight camp in June will have to be deleted from the family’s calendar.

“The shutdown makes me nervous,” said Stella, 11, whose father, a foreign service officer, was furloughed for a week but is now working without pay.

Now in its fourth week, the government impasse that has upended the daily lives of thousands of federal employees has also caught in its cross hairs young people across America, from children who are agonizing alongside their parents over lost jobs and wages to college students unable to pay tuition or file financial aid forms.

With the Internal Revenue Service closed, Cartonise Lawson-Wilson, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, has been unable to submit required paperwork for a grant that will pay her housing and tuition. Desperate for help while she awaits a resolution to the deadlock, she started a GoFundMe campaign, but has received only $15 of her $7,512 goal.

“I don’t have a backup plan,” she said.

[Read: President Trump Rejects Proposal to Temporarily Reopen the Government]

As President Trump and Congress remain at odds over the president’s demand for $5 billion to address what he calls a humanitarian crisis on the southern border, the protracted standoff has exacted an escalating financial and emotional toll on the 800,000 federal workers and the thousands of government contractors who have not been paid. And the effects of the stalemate, the longest in United States history, are cascading across generations, with little that breadwinners can do to hide the consequences from their children.

“The shutdown is like an acute recession,” particularly for those living paycheck-to-paycheck, said Gustavo Carlo, an expert on child and adolescent development at the University of Missouri who has studied the effects of financial strain on families.

The economic instability can lead to depression that hurts parent-child relationships, he said, adding, “It’s not good for these kids, it’s not good for these families.”

Children have tapped their entrepreneurial spirits to assist their parents. In Virginia, Stella’s 9-year-old brother Tiger has picked up on the family’s financial tension and has offered to sell his comic book drawings to help pay their mounting bills. And when Bella Berrellez found out that her mother had been furloughed from her job at the Food and Drug Administration, the fifth grader from North Potomac, Md., started making soap scrubs to bring in extra cash.

See How the Effects of the Government Shutdown Are Piling Up

The longer the federal government remains closed for business, more services are affected.

“My mom’s not getting paid so I thought about ways I could help,” said Bella, 11, who has sold more than 300 jars of the $7 scrub to neighbors and online customers through the handicrafts website Etsy. Her father has not lost his job, so the family decided to donate the proceeds to a food bank to help others affected by the shutdown.

[Read about how the shutdown has underscored how deeply the federal government is connected to everyday life.]

Elsewhere in the Washington region, public schools have offered free or reduced-price lunches to students whose parents have been furloughed. The Alexandria, Va., school district received nearly 20 requests the day after the subsidized meal plan was offered last week, a spokeswoman said.

The shutdown has become a teaching moment, too. In several high schools across the country, it has been used as a real-time lesson in governance and economics. Scott Zwierzchowski, a teacher at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago, last week split his Advanced Placement microeconomics classes into groups and asked students to study the shutdown’s short- and long-term impacts on consumer spending, tourism and trade.

Shortly after class ended, Shadi Naji, 17, shared his analysis. “The costs definitely outweigh the benefits,” he said.

With the costs, financial and otherwise, climbing, Mr. Trump has warned that the shutdown could last for months or even years. Federal workers missed their first paychecks last week.

“The stress is just too much,” said Lucy Ugochukwu, who said she got chest pains watching Mr. Trump deliver his televised address last week about the impasse. Furloughed from her job at the Treasury Department, she was unable to pay her son’s spring tuition at Penn State University’s Schuylkill campus. The university eventually granted David Ugoshukwu, 19, a scholarship that will cover part of his balance, but she has struggled not knowing when her paychecks might resume.

“How can I set up a payment plan when I don’t have income?” she said, adding that a GoFundMe campaign she created to pay the outstanding debt is far shy of its goal.

The sudden halt in income forced Keisha McKoy, a furloughed F.D.A. employee, to visit a local food pantry last week for the first time. She stood in line with other furloughed workers and their children. She said she was afraid she would not be able to afford next month’s $1,785 rent or pay her internet and credit card bills. One of her sons, James Williams, 19, who attends Prince George’s Community College, has applied for part-time jobs because, he said, “any little bit helps.”

“Trump’s talking about a crisis on the border, but we have a crisis right here,” said Ms. McKoy, whose home in Upper Marlboro, Md., was plunged into darkness earlier this month after she was unable to pay her electric bill. A single mother of five, Ms. McKoy told her two smaller children there was a power failure, but could not hide the truth from her older sons.

“They have to watch me cry,” she said, “and figure out how to feed them all.”

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