The Effects of Poverty on Children

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As of 2010, there are more than 72 million children under age eighteen living in the United States. Forty-four percent (31.9 million) belong to low-income families, while twenty-one percent (15.5 million) belong to poor families. At twenty-one percent, the United States holds the highest child poverty rate among all developed countries. The US shows no signs of declining from this standing in the near future. In fact, the proportion of children living in low-income and poor families has increased with time. From 16.2 percent in 2000, to forty percent in 2005, and forty-four percent in 2010, the percentage of children living in poverty illustrates a worrisome trend. Factors such as parents’ country of birth, parents’ education, family structure and race, all come into play in determining the likelihood of a child’s status as “living in poverty,” but what the statistics ultimately relay is that poverty is a prevalent issue in America today.
A dire consequence of this phenomenon is that poverty does not affect children one-dimensionally. Rather, it is far-reaching and has both short-term and long-term effects on many aspects of life. Specifically, an increasingly visible developmental problem that correlates with living in poverty as a child is substance abuse. What links the two issues is poverty-related stress:
“Poverty creates a context of stress in which stressors build on one another and contribute to further stress. Economic strain (the day-today hassles that arise when living with less money than one needs) is one example of this type of stress. Also poverty is associated with a host of additional stressors that can affect children and adolescents adversely, such as conflict among family members, exposure to violenc...

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...y go to the extreme of altering the chemistry of a child’s body. Stress is a concrete result of child poverty, and has concrete deleterious effects on individuals. It can branch to a developmental problem as serious as substance abuse, or it can be alleviated with the knowledge of simple coping techniques. The key to the issues that are present due to child poverty is to address the foundational problem—to prevent the development of a problem such as substance abuse. The effects of poverty-related stress do not imitate a domino effect. Such an analogy implies inevitability and permanency of impoverished children’s developmental problems. Rather, poverty-related negative outcomes can be avoided with tailored, hands-on approaches. Though poverty is something that cannot be tackled as simply, poverty-related developmental problems can be mitigated completely.

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