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Documentary Essay: How Kids Handle Poverty

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How Kids Handle Poverty Social class, in and of itself can affect how people live and perceive life in its entirety. Social class is where someone exists in comparison to others, this is altered by many traits such as economic status and marital status, but also depends on inborn traits such as race and gender. One’s social class usually can be seen in their peers, habits and lifestyle choices. This inarguably affects a person’s life greatly; and in most cases, is the foundation upon which people build their lives, unless they find some form of dissatisfaction and seek to reside within another social class. This can be seen in the documentary through how these children describe their lives, as most of them have never known anything else versus …show more content…

Seeing how much people can struggle financially and how much its affects their lives puts things in a different perspective for myself, taking things for granted almost never ends well. Seeing one family that had a fair amount of financial security, yet lose it all due to a job loss was humbling, showing me how truly temporary all of these things are. I also find it interesting to see the dynamic of circumstances, situations and problems that all of these families dealt with and how they all dealt with a few similar and different things in comparison to one another. As well as seeing how each family, and the members of these families, dealt with each one of these issues showed me just how much one’s financial situation can change their perspective and beliefs. Most of all, I find the varying backgrounds of each family to be of greatest interest; I see each family and I see how each one fell to this situation, and I wonder how can all of these people have the same problem through so many different ways and how each of them plans to deal with it in turn (Neumann & Mucciolo, 2012). In conclusion, I found the documentary very educational and interesting and I have a far better understanding of how living in poverty can affect the lives of children in this day and

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Jeanette said,“One night when I was almost ten, I was awakened by someone running his hands over my private parts,” (Walls 103). The actions of her parents cause Jeannette’s trust in her parents to deteriorate. According to The Future of Children, poverty has many physical effects, but mental effects play a larger role in the lifestyle of a person. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn states, “Emotional outcomes are often grouped along two dimensions: externalizing behaviors including aggression, fighting, and acting out, and internalizing behaviors such as anxiety, social withdrawal, and depression” (Brooks-Gunn 62). Jeanette and her siblings suffer from the “internalized behaviors” as stated by The Future of Children as a result of the family’s continuous poverty throughout the children’s lives.

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