Children In Poverty

Today’s children are faced with the different economic problems that will change their futures as a result of the United States recession in 2008. At the peak of the recession more than a third of those living in poverty were children. The result of the recession is that the mental state of a poverty stricken child changes and causes them to grow up much fast than a child that is not living in poverty. A child that is living in poverty is not given the chance to thrive in the school setting because they could be hungry, or exhausted from the stress in their lives outside of school. Students in class may not be friendly to a child that is wearing the same thing from yesterday or did not have the opportunity to have a bath, because society has

The fear of not knowing when or where a family’s next meal will be or if there will be a warm place to sleep was a reality for many as reported by the U.S Census Bureau nearly “35.9 million people during 2008-09 were families living below the poverty line” (“2010 September”). In 2008 Jessica Semega, a statistician for the United States Census Bureau concluded that in “the annual household income decreased 1.2 percent, from $52,673 to $52,029” (Semega). On a state level it was reported by the Department of Health and Human Services that the rate of poverty had increased by almost “17.3% in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and West Virginia”(“2015 Poverty Guidelines”). While other states did not see such a drastic increase of poverty, many states saw an increase of five percent on average. Out of all fifty states only Wyoming, and Alaska were considered to be the only two under eleven percent for poverty for their state in the 2008 census report. By 2008 the National Center for Children in Poverty recorded that “over twenty-one percent of children from fourteen to seventeen that were low-income had some form of a mental health disability which increased from the previous year with only eleven percent” (Cooper and Segman). Another area that saw an increase was the assistance programs, children nutrition programs increased to $13.6 million and all of nutrition programs

Many families are still living paycheck to paycheck or even worse unfortunately resulting in giving their children no chance to excel in school and promoting very low self-esteem that if nothing is done will have a permanent and damaging effect on them as adults. Children in poverty are more in danger of not only repeating the cycle and living in poverty, but also becoming totally dependent on the federal and state assistance. As the rate of federal assistance for families increases the focus on hunger, starvation and death among the poor decreases. Many families that are still living at or below the poverty line have to choose between food and paying the life sustaining bills like water for example. Prior to the recession in 2008 the United States had not seen such a drop in finances in individuals and families since the Great Depression. During the depression the country was able to recover more quickly than the current recession because many people were buying and living much farther than there actual means, causing a much longer lasting ripple effect. In an interview discussing poverty Mahatma Gandhi had this to say “Poverty is the worst kind of torture,” poverty can be preventable if there is a collaboration of all the country and on an individual level the states. Once that is realized poverty would be eradicated once and for all. Though as long as nothing is being done to