Poverty In The Early Stages

Many kids in the United States have been affected by poverty at some point in their lives. In fact, one in five children have been affected by poverty. A survey was done within the last year by the Scholastic company that interviewed a group of the State Teachers of the Year and asked them what they thought were some of the effects of poverty. Some popular answers were that it affects the way you perform in school greatly and that we need more anti-poverty programs to help out with these children. Poverty affects the success of students in many ways. These include not having the academic achievement that more advantaged kids did, not having experiences other kids did, and not having the early development they needed.

To start, little is actually known about the importance and effect of timing of poverty on children’s psychological development. Economic deprivation during different phases and time frames of childhood can also alter the outcome of the child. Studies that have been done about children's early cognitive and physical development suggest that family income in the first five years of life has the most

The second study I used focused more on the significance of the timing a duration of poverty for a child from birth until third grade and the effect held on the child’s development and was titled “Duration and Developmental Timing of Poverty and Children's Cognitive and Social Development from Birth Through Third Grade”. Allhusen et al. examined the effects of different amounts of poverty by comparing children from families that were never poor, poor during the child’s infancy, poor after infancy, and always poor. In this study, poverty is defined as living 200% below the federal poverty threshold (Allhusen et al, 2005). Children in poverty scored lower on cognitive and pre- academic tests, lower competence, and exhibited a higher level of behavior problems (Allhusen et al, 2005).

As of 2015, 14.5 million children are living in poverty. What is poverty you ask? Poverty defined by Webster’s Dictionary is the state of being extremely poor. In my opinion, poverty is much more than not having enough money to supply basic needs. Poverty is lack of shelter, lack of food in most cases, being sick and not able to see a doctor. Having very little to no resources in order to acquire the proper education, poverty is one of the major problems among society today. Affecting all ages at any place and time, it is not selective, but very common. However, the impact is worse when exposed to a child in their early developmental stage. The effects of poverty can be devastating. Preventing young children’s desire to thrive while overall negatively affecting their development. This paper exposes the various impacts of poverty in early childhood development.

One of the most obvious and frequently researched consequences of child poverty is low academic achievement. Duncan et al. (1994) concluded that family income and poverty level remain the most powerful determining factors of the cognitive development of children even after many other factors such as family structure and parental education are considered. The same study also found that there was a positive correlation between family income

What is it like living in a home with low income? Poverty is the state of not having enough money to meet basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. What affects does it have on children? Children living in low income homes face more challenges than others. The have to endure the pain of not having family members at home when they need them. Children living in poverty have to cope with the stress of taking care of themselves as well as their siblings at times, while trying to maintain satisfactory grades in school. In this paper I will discuss the effect of poverty on a child’s social development, academic performance, and health conditions.

Early childhood. During the 1990s, the nation was inundated with reports on the importance of the early years on children's brain development and later cognitive achievement. While some of the reports may have overstated the issue and understated the importance of a child's later years on development, evidence suggests that the early years may be a critical period of development in which family poverty has particularly strong effects on young children. As seen in Table 1, poverty occurring early in a child's life (age two to four) is associated with large effects on indices of child school readiness and cognitive outcomes.

It is widely known that poverty has many negative effects on the development of children who grow up in impoverished homes. One of the most influential outcomes of a person’s life is their intellectual development, which takes place primarily within the first years of life. Not only can childhood poverty result in less enjoyable childhoods, but adversely affects the cognitive and behavioral development; yet more specifically, children’s intellectual development (Duncan 406). In fact, the economic conditions that a child is subjected to during early and middle childhood is very crucial for forming ability, achievement, and intellectual development (Duncan 408). Poverty has

Every society has a class whether that be lower-middle, upper-middle or high class. Differences between children that grow up in favorable conditions and those who grow up in poverty are noticeable around 9 months (Moore, McDonald, Carlon, & O’Rourke, 2015). The class you are in sometimes can have effects on your health and lifetime. This article Early childhood development and the social determinants of health inequities points out the indicators pertaining to children and families. It is said that poor children worsen in health as they progress while those in higher class improve.

Prenatal poverty could influence a child’s physical development throughout the rest of their life. “Children who are poor have higher rates of hospital admissions, disability days, and death rates. They have inadequate access to preventive, curative, and emergency care and are affected more frequently by poor nutrition, single-parent families, dysfunctional families, and poor housing,” (Dawson, 1988). “Studies conducted by Currie and Stabile (2003) demonstrate that children from families, which can be classified as poor, have lower birth weight, higher risk of infant mortality.” Although depending on the reasoning for the low birth weight, these issues may be due to being born prematurely, a medical condition, lack of proper nutrition, or other

The Associations between early life adversity and executive function in children adopted internationally from orphanages written by Camelia E. Hostinar, Sarah A. Stellern, Catherine Schaefer, Stephanie M. Carlson, and Megan R. Gunnar was an experimental study done to examine level of executive function in adopted children. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children who experienced early life deprivation showed a reduction in executive brain functioning about one year after they were adopted. In order to investigate this claim, a study needed to be done comparing the adopted children’s brain functioning to other children around the same age who were not adopted. The study also investigated early-life adversity influence later

In the article “How Poverty Affects Classroom Engagement”, the author Eric Jensen, supports the idea of how poverty affects a child’s education. The article cites information to explain how socio economic conditions affect kids from low and high social classes and how they differ. In the article, Jensen also discusses how health and nutrition affect

Inequality exists across the world. Too many disadvantaged children grow up without the skills needed to overcome poverty in the twentieth century. The outcomes are attributed to several factors including family of origin, gender, social class, achievement, and health status. However, the most obvious root of inequality is income. The gap between the rich and the poor are widening and it is causing disparities across the life cycle of many children. According to a New York Times article, wealthy children spend 1300 more hours than low-income children before the age of six in places than their homes, including day care centers or schools. By the time they start school, they have spent about 400 hours or more than poor children in literacy activities

Socio-economic factors are widely acknowledged as important determinants of poverty. If an individual experiences adverse living conditions in childhood, majority of them will have inadequate income and result in low socio-economic status as adults (Carroll et al, 2011). Children born in poor households have difficulty in accessing the basic needs (e.g. food, clothing, and good living environment) and this can affect their learning ability at school, unable to focus. In other words, they have a higher chance of dropping out of school or lower education attainment, unable to provide appropriate qualifications when they move onto adulthood, seeking for job opportunities. These children are finding day-to-day life tough, they are living in cold, damp houses, do not have warm or rain-proof clothing, their shoes are worn, and many days they go hungry (Children's Commissioner, 2012). Often this has taken place over a long period of time, impacting on their development, behaviour and physical health furthermore limiting their potential as they grow into adults.

About one in five children in the United States has the misfortune of living in a family whose income is below the official poverty threshold (Borman and Reimers 454). Poverty has harmful effects on a child’s academic outcomes, general health, development, and school readiness. The impact of poverty has on a child depends on many factors for instance community features ( crime rate in neighborhood and school characteristics) and the individuals present in the child’s life like their parents, neighbors, or relatives. It is clear that schools and outside environmental factors contribute to whether a child is successful or not in their academic life. A child’s family, neighborhood, and type of school effects that are related with poverty