World Hunger and Poverty

Recent research in the UK has shown that women’s low pay has huge implications on child poverty.

I think we can apply those findings to most countries. Throughout the world, women both tend to have most of the child raising responsibilities and tend to receive lower pay. For example, many single mothers work hard at multiple jobs and still do not earn enough to support themselves and their children. That means the mothers often do not have enough time to raise their children and do not have enough money to provide their children with quality education since the mothers can neither afford private school nor afford to live in an area with quality public schools.

To break the poverty trap, I believe we must ensure that single mothers and all parents get paid enough to properly raise their children.

What do you think? How do you suggest we raise the pay of women and ensure parents can afford to raise their children? Post your responses and other ideas about the topic in the World Hunger and Poverty Forums.

On this blog, I often stress the importance of using education in efforts to alleviate poverty. Education puts people on a healthy path, giving them self-esteem and self-respect. Quality education gives people the skills and credentials to support themselves and their families.

Today, I want to point out that we need to make sure children get a quality education from a very young age. Poor children usually have already fallen behind before they even get into kindergarten. After that, poor children go to the worst schools in the unhealthiest environments. I suggest that anti-poverty organizations find ways to get young children from poor neighborhoods into quality schools.

If the children get a quality education in a healthy environment, they will have a great chance of not only escaping poverty but also of achieving more success in their life. Later in life, they will make more than enough money to pay back any student loans. In addition to student loans, the kids can get scholarships which they will not even have to pay back.

I think it may greatly help to enable poor kids to go to boarding schools in non-poor neighborhoods. That will not only give them a quality education but it will also get them away from the hindrances and ill-effects of poor neighborhoods, which have large amounts of drugs, violence, hopelessness, unhealthy influences and bad role models.

Getting kids out of poor neighborhoods and into quality private schools could break the poverty cycle.

If you know of any organizations that already provide scholarships to very young children from poor neighborhoods, please post about them in my World Hunger and Poverty Forums. I would love to help spread the word about such organizations. Please also use the forums to post comments about this blog post.

I just read a very interesting article by Howard Husock about Charles Loring Brace’s work to help poor children in New York City. I had not heard much about Charles Loring Brace beforehand, but the article explains his life and the work he did in the 19th Century.

Most notably, Brace helped alleviate child poverty by starting a massive foster-care program which consisted of moving poor kids from the streets of New York City into midwestern farm families. He sent over 50,000 orphans and street children out west to live under the “healthy influence of family life.” He also founded the Children’s Aid Society. I found a PBS documentary about his work: American Experience – The Orphan Trains

He also created “Lodging Houses” for newsboys and other street-kids. These houses took in over 170,000 boys.

Brace focused on teaching the children to take care of themselves as much as possible. He worked to get them into school. He focused on instilling values in the children that would help them make smart decisions throughout their life.

After reading about Brace, I admire him because he did not spend too much effort in advocacy but instead focused on direct action. Nowadays, many anti-poverty groups focus their efforts heavily on advocating policy change in government. But Brice focused more on actually helping the children.

I just read an informative letter to the editor from a newspaper in Michigan, where about 1 in 5 children live in poverty. In the letter, Jack Kresnak points out that the cure for poverty starts with children.

I especially like that he emphasized how much of the first 5 years of a children’s lives affect their future finances. Even just when they start kindergarten, children who grew up poor have already fallen significantly behind children from more affluent families.

And those poor children will continue to grow up with severely limited resources, bad role models, and inadequate education. Many of the poor children will end up in poverty not because they make mistakes but because they never received a sufficient chance at success.

I personally think that education plays the biggest role. Many factors cause the poverty trap, but I think the denial of sufficient education holds poor children back most of all. Quality education gives people the knowledge and credentials to escape and avoid poverty. In contrast, without sufficient education, people will have neither the skills nor the credentials to support themselves financially.

Education starts at home, and poor children receive little. Then poor children go to the worst schools, and the poor children have the least resources at home to assist in their schooling. Then they have the least amount of money to spend on getting into and going to college. Many poor students have to leave school and get a job because they have family to support instead of having family to support them.

Considering the major role education plays, I think we can most effectively end poverty by ensuring that all children receive high quality education from birth until they have enough education to support themselves. With a high quality education, I fully believe the children can pay us back more than it costs us to give them education.

I just read a great op-ed by Paul Krugman about the ways that living in poverty hinders the development of children.

He reported that the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” That leads to impaired language development and memory, which in turn helps destine many of the children to a life of poverty.

Beyond the biological impairments, we all know that poor children do not get a fair shot at success. They get sent to substandard schools. They cannot afford quality education. They do not have powerful connections. They do not have families that can support them in their times of need, but instead they have families that they need to support.

Approximately 50% of children born into poverty in the United States do not escape. Most of the others struggle their entire lives. We call this the poverty trap, referring to the fact that children born into poverty have significantly limited opportunities in their life. Like seeds planted in infertile soil, poor children have potential but not fair opportunity.

This must greatly shame any societies and nations that let their children grow up in poverty.

The United States has the highest child poverty rate in the developed world. Officially, about 13 million American children live in poverty in the United States. Even worse, many more children do not have healthcare coverage or adequate education.

We have to do something about this. A society will not survive if it allows this type of horror to continue. I think the government has shown that it will not solve major problems such as child poverty, despite the trillions of dollars it spends every year on other things. So I think we the people need to work together to find non-governmental solutions to poverty. Whatever we do, we have to do something.