Child poverty is still one of the biggest barriers to children and young people attaining a decent standard of living. It’s predicted and acknowledged by various organisations that the number of children living in poverty will increase further over the foreseeable future due to the current economic climate and the continuing cuts to welfare and services. The causes of child poverty are all intricately woven into each other. Firstly and unsurprisingly one of the major factors that causes this is those families without work. In 2009/2010, 42% of families below the perceived poverty line were out of work.
Evidence suggests that there are 5 main groups of people who are more at risk from poverty than others. Lone parents, large families, people with disabilities, minority and ethnic groups and working families are the most vulnerable, according to Banardos. Children of today are the futures of this country, and everyone has the right to live in a safe and caring environment, with equal rights and access to education and healthcare. We all need to play a part in breaking the child poverty cycle to ensure every child has an equal chance of success in life. As mentioned above there are many reasons why a child lives in poverty, and we will now look at these in more detail.
Apart from the main direct cause like unemployment, poverty in our society today is the low paid, lone parents and children. However poverty can have a great impact on a child’s life. The people as well as the children who are poor could suffer greatly from problems such as social exclusion, employment, education, mental and physical health and social interaction. This is one fact why child poverty is a direct result of adult poverty, however unlike an adult, experiencing poverty as a child can have lifelong consequences in the future lifespan if they are not helped early age. Poverty is measured in two ways, namely absolute and relative poverty.
(Barnardos, 2013). There are a number of indications as to why child poverty exists, unemployment plays a big part. Unemployment is an indicator of educational disadvantage, which in turn, affects the rest of a child’s life. Lone parent families are also an indication as to why child poverty is on the rise. Single parents have a lack of funds to support their children’s needs.
Peter Singer states that with a mere two hundred dollars an unhealthy two year old child could be raised into a healthy six year old. As a result, one can easily see how the targeted American donating money spent towards material goods could save world poverty. Among Singer's many scenarios buying a television set worth a thousand dollars is morally wrong because according to Singer you could have saved five children's lives for the equivalent of the television set. This concept makes sense and would be of great asset in solving world poverty. America, being under the United Nations standard for a country's gross donation would rise in the ranks to being a charitable country that donates the most which would spread American leadership qualities towards other nations.
Homelessness; poor accommodation such as overcrowding, poor state of repair blights childhood. [3] There is a strong link between poverty and education; which results in social-economic disadvantage. It is researched that children from poor backgrounds do
Recent studies have shown that 36% of all people in poverty are children. 42% of those children live in low income families and one in five of those young children live in poor families (National Center for Children in Poverty, 2010). The statistics provided by National Center for Children and Poverty are alarming. This study shows that 32% of the white infants and toddlers, 68% of the black and as high as 70% of American Indian infants and toddlers live in low income families. Many of those children are not provided with necessity nutrition for healthy development.
Effects of Poverty on Children Hilario Yanez Professor Emmanuel Obi SOC100 November 20, 2014 Effects of Poverty on Children Specific Hypothesis: Poverty is the leading cause for many children from low-income families to have more learning and health problems in the United States. They also experience poverty as their families’ incomes are terribly small. This prevents their children from participating entirely in the society. Applicable Sociological Concepts: The Social-Conflict theory is being used as stated by Macionis (2010); this theory shows how inequality creates conflict to poor families by not providing equal benefits to them. Parents can’t afford good jobs to provide any benefits to their children.
Sociology AS for AQA One for you to try Education p 243 Item B There is considerable evidence to show that pupils from some ethnic-minority backgrounds fall behind in school, particularly during the secondary phase. These include Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils. By contrast, Indian and Chinese pupils do better than average. There are also class and gender differences in achievement within all these groups, just as there among White pupils. One explanation for these patterns of achievement lies in the school itself and the processes at work there.
How is a child to learn the meaning of having friends or of dignity growing up this way? Poverty and homelessness are not just temporary conditions: For hundreds of thousands of children, these circumstances will have an effect on the rest of their lives. The effects of poverty and homelessness on children are numerous. Many of these children grow up with no friends and become emotionally, mentally, and socially disconnected. Scheller, growing up extremely poor herself, explains that spending your childhood in incessant, unflinching poverty can replace normal self-esteem with a feeling of shame (356).