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I have found some really interesting fast facts that I feel should be shared. These are all from an organization called Children International who deal with kids in poverty all around the world and not just in the United States.
- 1 in 5 kids grows up in a poor environment
- About 15.5 million kids live below the poverty line
- 40%, almost half, of kids live in poverty before they hit 18 years of age
- Between just 2012 and 2014 federal funding for children education fell and now it amounts to just 10% of the federal budget.
- Students aged from 17 to 24 who live in impoverished families are 7 times more likely to drop out of school.
- 86% of kids whose parents don’t have their GED like under the poverty line.
- Missippi is the state that has the most children living in poverty closely followed by New Mexico and then Arkansas
- The United States almost has the highest rate of child poverty out of developed nations, it's only below Greece, Mexico, Israel, and Turkey.
Recently I read an article that was talking about child poverty and it some really interesting stats and facts that I thought I could share. They wanted to get the reader really thinking about wealth inequality by stating that 17 billionaires (which is crazy) and over 100,000 houses that have over 1 million dollars in assets yet there are still over 92,000 “poor” kids that live in the state. They then went on to talk about the poverty line which is a household making less than 52,000 dollars a year, now this sounds like a lot but in today's economic environment that is not enough to support a family of 4. Then I found another interesting topic then a lot of people can sadly say they relate to. They brought up the fact that a lot of people just tell poor families to get jobs and magically they will be out of poverty. But the reality is that a lot of employers will not pay these families as full time employs so then they are not getting the same benefits as others, thus making less money. Lastly, I just wanted to include a really good quote that was in the article and it was talking about the American dream. “Americans have always loved a rags-to-riches story... we’ve forgotten that they are the exception, not the rule. Ours is a system that is designed to provide wealthy kids with a great shot at staying wealthy”.
I read the article, I read “Childhood poverty dynamics and adulthood overweight/obesity: Unpacking the black box of childhood”. This was written by Maio Li, Sarah Mustillo, and James Anderson. It was written inside of the Social Science Research journal and it is Volume 76 written in November of 2018. During their research, they used 65 sources.
The article I read was all about the link between childhood poverty and how that can translate into adulthood obesity. It looks at the link between early childhood poverty against chronic childhood poverty and how it seems as the obesity rates seem to stay the same between the two groups “suggesting that the effects of early childhood exposure persist despite subsequent upward mobility”. All of this links to the idea that early childhood is a very important period in which adulthood obesity can occur and if poverty is present during this time the likelihood of that child becoming obese as an adult increase dramatically.
Then the article I read that was used as a source was called “The Dynamics of Poverty in the United States: A review of data, methods, and findings”. It was written by Cellini S.R, McKernan, S.M, and Ratcliff. C. It was published in “Journal of Policy Analysis and Management” and was volume 27, issue 3. This article was all about studying different theories about poverty and they posed three questions but the most important and most relevant to my topic question they posed was “what events are associated with entering and exiting poverty”. For the most part, when people enter poverty it is something they are born into and less of something people fall into later in life. When exiting poverty it was a pretty simple answer, obtaining a steady income.
These two articles relate to each other because they both go into the science of how childhood poverty affects a human when they grow up. They both provided graphs and tables to get into the deep science of it all and overall were very useful for learning more about my topic. They both related to my research question because I started out wanting to learn about just the general facts of childhood poverty, but ended up expanding into learning about how it transitions into adulthood.
For my primary source, I knew I wanted to do an interview but I was not sure how I should approach it. I was first having trouble finding someone who came from a poor childhood because asking that question is very personal. But after some asking and searching for the right person. My dorm roommate (who asked to remain anonymous) stated they he grew up in a poverty-ridden environment and when asked he said he was comfortable with me asking him a few questions.
First I’ll provide some background about his past and where he comes from. He lives right outside of Lancaster city in a poorer area of Lancaster. When he was young his parents split up and he grew up mainly with his mom but also would visit his father every once and a while. He grew up always having to try and make money to help support his family, and everything he earned he shared.
Now on to some things I asked and some of the answers I had received. I will be continuing using (Q) to show a question I asked and (A) to show answers given. An analysis of answers will be provided at the end.
Q - How was your relationship with your parents during your childhood?
A - “Um, it was pretty good I guess, it got a little rocky at times, um I don't know I never really was like close with my dad until I was like 16, I was kind of like afraid of him the whole time but like I don't know I was a momma's boy I guess. I never really ended up getting close with him just because of that fear.”
Q - Did a lack of money affect your friend group/did you feel indifferent?
A - “Um, I wouldn't ever say like not having money held me back from making friends, but like I definitely knew I didn’t have money and other people did cause like at the book fair I asked my friend Patrick if he had any money for the book fair and my mom gave me $11 and his mom gave him $65, that was pretty eye-opening as a child. I kind of always knew I was different because I didn’t have money.”
Q - While growing up did you feel as if you missed out on opportunities due to financial issues?
A - “There are definitely some opportunities I missed out on, I mean my mom worked really hard to get me everything that kids who had money had, but like I remember I would miss out on most school trips because we couldn’t pay for it at the time, but during that time I also became homeless which made me miss a lot.”
Q - Were you ever picked on by other kids for anything financially?
A - “ I was only ever picked on in elementary school because like when I was homeless, like when we got off the actual street we moved into a hotel, but it was outside of my school district so my school had a special van that would pick up homeless kids and drop us off at school, and kids at school saw me get out of the van so they made fun of me because I didn’t have a home. But other than that I stopped getting picked on because I started to stand up for myself.”
Q - Looking back on your childhood, do you wish you were wealthier?
A - “To be perfectly honest I am kind of glad I grew up in like those circumstances just because I feel like I’ve been a humble person since I was like 6 just because I had to be, I mean I missed out on a bunch of childhood activities other kids experienced because I was kind of forced to mature faster than others, but to put it, in summary, no not really.”
Overall from the one interview, I was able to establish that poverty does have an impact on young children. In some cases, it makes them into a humble and quiet person like my roommate and others it may make a little crazier. Overall I learned a good amount from the interview and am happy I had the opportunity to do so.
The book I have chosen to read is Poor Kids in a Rich Country. It was written by Lee Rainwater and Timothy M. Smeeding and was intended to provide the audience with an understanding of what it is like to be below the poverty line as a child growing up in America. The book itself is written in a monographic style as it has chapters but they all focus on the main idea of studying child poverty.
In my opinion, the book was surprisingly very enjoyable to read. I say surprisingly because as I skimmed through it the first time there were a lot of data tables and statistics which I usually don’t enjoy reading. But as I started to really dive deep into reading it I loved the way in how they included interesting facts into these data tables. For example, on page 56 they provide a table that shows different percentages of child poverty in 10 countries. They show the percentages between families where there is no earner, one earner, and two earners living in the family. I found this interesting because the United States is actually very low on the percentage of children living in poverty with no earner in the family coming in at 24.7%. Then the book provided with this probably is, they said because unlike a lot of the other country’s they compared the United States actually has a very good welfare system that provides good benefits to the unemployed. They provided a lot more of these interesting facts and I wish I could list them all.
In the introduction of the book, it states that its purpose is to “...help the reader to gain a fuller understanding of how economic inequality in the United States impacts families with children...” (13). After reading a good amount of the book I can say that they definitely achieved this through the pretty much endless amount of tables and charts they provided, through all of these it definitely gave me a better understanding of the economic inequality we all live in today. One question that may be asked if the book is well written. After reading some chapters I have mixed opinions on it. If we are defining well written as something that is entertaining and wants to you keep reading for the content I would have to say it is a little lacking. But if well-written means the content inside is well thought out and they know what they are talking about, then yes it is very well written as they provided a lot of details in the different topics of child poverty.
Overall this book provided a lot of great details and facts that I will be keeping it checked out so I will be able to continue to look over it. I believe that Lee Rainwater and Timothy M. Seeding did a great job in researching the topic for the book and I would definitely recommend the book to anyone who is interested into looking into statistics about child poverty.
The documentary I chose to watch was one by PBS titled “Poor Kids”. I thought this would be a good one to pick because it went right along with my blog where I am looking into how different environments may effect childhood psychology. The documentary was about 55 minutes long and it followed the lives of 3 main real families as they struggle to raise their kids in their harsh financial situation. It also has no narrator which I found to be very interesting, instead they let the kids do the talking. One big question I had going into this was will these conditions of poverty effect the kids as they grow old.
In the documentry we first meet a 10 year old girl named Kaylie who lives with her brother Tyler(pictured above), her mother, and their dog. Right at the start we are hit with a powerful example of pathos, Kaylie can be heard saying “I don’t think we are a rich family, I think we are kind of a poor family”. The producers put this in to get the audience feeling some emotion and maybe some connection to who we see on screen. Then they hit us with even more pathos by including Tyler saying that most nights they cannot eat and it makes it worse when he sees cooking channels on TV. Pathos continues to be used all throughout the film as a way to keep the audience engaged. They follow Kaylie and her family as they eventually have to sell their home and move into a motel to then selling their dog just to have some extra money. It ends with them talking about finally get a stable place to live inside a trailer home and though the kids don’t like it, it is much better than staying in their one room, one bed motel, and thats where it ends for Kaylie and her family
We also see two other families who are in very similar situations, one being a poor inter-city family and the other a rural family struggling to make ends meet. Something I found interesting with the rural family was how the mother is expecting a newborn on the way which was crazy to hear considering their situation.
But anyways back to my question about how will poverty change the kids while they grow, I think it drastically changes the way they view the world. These kids are going up not knowing if theres going to be dinner on the table and they don’t know if they will have heat while they sleep. This changes the brain to not only be more appreciative of what they have/don’t have but also I think it will make them want to work hard as adults, so that they won’t have to live in poverty forever. The documentary shows this in a way, they show Tyler (Kaylie’s brother) mowing peoples lawns for very little money and with the money he does he it goes right to his mom to pay the bills. By showing this it is proving that the poverty is changing the way Tyler’s brain thinks of money. For example when most kids mow others lawn they do it so they have some spending money, but the way Tyler was raised he knows his family needs the money more than him.
Overall the documentary was very well produced and I think it helped a lot with me understanding my topic in more depth.
Recently I had a meeting with Kutztown’s own librarian Stefani Gomez. She is a researcher who obtained degree’s from prestigious universities such as Rutgers University, Penn State University, and the University of Manchester. She has worked in Kutztown University’s library for a little over a year now.
Going into the meeting I wanted to talk about how to know if a source that I am using is credible and also I wanted some more help on how to get around on the Kutztown library website. I met with her at on February 6th at 4:30 and we talked right outside her office. She gave me some very good tips and here are some of them. She said that whenever you find an article to research the author a little bit, you do this to see if the author is credible if what they are talking about and you also want to see if the work is original. She said that when you find a piece of writing you should check the date and if it is more than 10 years old maybe consider not using it as the information could be outdated, she said if it is historic research though that would be acceptable. Historic research would be something that changed that field of study forever.
She recommended to make an excel spreadsheet that way you can keep track of all the websites you used and plan to use. This is useful as then you have one place you can look and make sure you don’t keep using the same source. When I was going into the meeting I had been using google scholar to find my research but she said that I should stick to “omisearch” as if can give the full text right in the website. Also through omisearch you can see how many people cited the article, this is great information because the more people that cited it, the more likely it is to be credible. She also said to take advantage of interlibrary loans, this is when Kutztown may not have a book and another school does we have a system where that school can loan us the book to use which is very useful. One last piece of advice she left me with was when looking for textbooks always check to see if there is a newer version of the book then the one you are reading.
Overall the meeting was very beneficial and I now know where to go if I need any help with library related topics and with who to meet with.
Welcome to my blog that will be all about how an environment that a child grows up will effect mental growth. I’m going to go into topics such as having an overcrowded household, growing up with one parent instead of two, and how a parents emotional bond effect how a child may grow up and what kind of person they will become.
The textbook SAGE Key Concepts series: Key Concepts in Family Studies states the definition of childhood is “Childhood refers to the state or time of being a child, as a phase of life that is understood both as separate from, and in preparation for, being an adult; whereas ‘child/ren’ refers to specific individuals or a group”. We will also dive into how a divorce of parents will effect ones mind and how it may alter negatively because of how much more the child will have to deal with. Another big topic I will focus on is how a parents emotional connection will change a kid’s personality and how he will develop as an adult. I think everyone has either been effected or know someone that has been effected something like if the parents does not spend enough time with a child that kid may end up misbehaving with other children and adults and may not develop proper social skills so we will also be looking into this. We will be looking into all of these things in my blog as we go along. I can’t wait to share more!
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