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Poor Kids Documentary Summary

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I viewed Frontline a documentary series, which episode was entitled Poor Kids. The frontline personnel spent time with three children Kailey, Johnny, and Britany along with their families as they all struggle financially. We perceive a glimpse of what it is like to live below the poverty line in America through a child’s eyes. While observing the documentary, I became consciously aware that children who are considered poor or living below the poverty line were more mindful of the responsibilities of life. The children were worrisome of the lack of employment for their parents, bills, and in Britney’s case; how they would accommodate their way of living to support a new addition to the family. They feared to lose their homes and dreaded departing with …show more content…

However, the unemployment rate had not changed much within those years. With a significant amount of individual unemployed the nation suffers. As the number of unemployed continues to climb or the longer they are without work the more money the government has to pay them in benefits. The effects of being unemployed also affect other businesses; due to unemployed individuals are not being able to spend money as they would if they were working businesses suffer, over long periods of time that particular business may lay off staff; increasing the number of people unemployed or potentially lose the business. Furthermore, the lack of being employed affects a family, Britney’s mother was affected tremendously and caused her hospitalization because she couldn’t deal with the stress of her family lacking an income. While homeless shelters have long waiting list and middle-income families are losing their homes with just a few days’ notice. Britney and Johnny’s families both were doing well until the recession hit and companies began to lay people

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In preparation for this paper I chose to read Fire in the ashes: twenty five years among the poorest children in America by Jonathan Kozol. In this book Kozol has followed these children and their family’s lives for the past twenty five years. In his writing Kozol portrays a point of view most from his background and standing would not be capable of having. He portrays what life is like for those who have been let down by the system that was meant to protect them. Kozols writing style can be very blunt at times, not for shock value, but for the sake of portraying these children’s realities, and not sugarcoating the inequalities that they are faced with.

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Prior to reading these two articles, I had never heard of Dorothy Allison. After reading them, I do not think I will forget her. “A Question of Class” and “Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know” grabbed my attention, but I could relate to “A Question of Class” more. Thankfully, I did not live in poverty the first eighteen years of my life like Dorothy Allison did. Also, I never experienced any kind of sexual abuse.

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These effects additionally bleed into the subsequent generation. Arleen and Vanetta’s children were not given the opportunity to settle in a single neighborhood, matriculate at a single school, and build long-lasting relationships with peers and mentors. This cycle of poverty speaks to the greater effects that a trend can enact on a

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Since the human race began, we have been discovering ways to expand our lives and survive in the world. We have acquired natural instincts when it comes to surviving. For example, fight or flight is a natural response when we feel threatened by something. The Lost Boys of Sudan are an amazing example of what we would do in order to survive.

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Generational Poverty Poverty has been around for numerous years. Poverty can be a generational problem if people let it. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and David Joy’s “Digging in the trash” both show that families in poverty do not have it easy, the children will live in poverty unless something is done, and people either find a way of escape or stand up against it. In the short story, “Sonny’s Blues” Baldwin shows how the lack of monetary resources affects many generations.

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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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According to the PBS Frontline video “Poor Kids” 2012, more than 46 million Americans are living beneath the poverty line. The United States alone has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the industrialized world. It is stated that 1 out of 5 children are living in poverty. The video documented the lives of three families who are faced with extreme hardships and are battling to survive a life of being poor. All three families have more than one child and could barely afford to pay their bills and purchase food for their household.

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People in poverty are generally portrayed as worthless and this is because culture today illustrates a man’s worth from how materially successful they are. Hooks explains how this kind of representation of the poor can mentally and emotionally handicap and entire society of people in poverty. She goes into an example of how a

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Vonnie McLoyd discusses in the book Child Development that black families are more likely to face poverty in America and the effects that poverty has on those children. McLoyd states that children that have faced poverty in their lives can have “impaired socioemotional functioning” (McLoyd 311). As a result from job loss creating parental stress, parents often become

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In fact, they were scared for their lives. They also had a lot of tension around all of them. Both of the families were filled with fear for their lives. This was a little of how it was in the secret annex was for those two years they were for

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The short documentary “Child of Rage” presents an example of how experiencing abuse as a child can shape the child later in life and how some children can recover. The intrafamilial abuse that Beth experienced as a one year old affected her behavior later in her childhood when she was adopted. Beth was also able to recover from some of the effects of the child abuse she experienced once she was separated from her adoptive family and taken to a special home. Beth experienced intrafamilial abuse at the hands of her biological father after her mother passed away when she was one.

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In the passage “What is poverty?”, the author Jo Goodwin Parker, describes a variety of things that she considers to portray the poverty in which she lives in. She seems to do this through her use of first-person point of view to deliver a view of poverty created by a focused use of rhetorical questions, metaphors, imagery, and repetition to fill her audience with a sense of empathy towards the poor. The author’s use of first person point of view creates the effect of knowing exactly what she is feeling. “The baby and I suffered on. I have to decide every day if I can bear to put my cracked hands into the cold water and strong soap.”

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This is very interesting to me because a lot of people equate poverty with neglect and this is not the case, just because you may be poor doesn’t mean that you are a neglectful parent, there are children that live below the poverty level and their parents love them and nurture them and care for them better than a child that lives in a million dollar home. So just because you have money it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are caring for your child, you may not clean or cook or know how to nurture your own child and that is a form of neglect. Now because a family is living in poverty the stress of that may cause neglect, and that is the economic theory of child neglect, so there are some families that live in poverty and are perfectly happy still loving and nurturing their children, and there are some families that can’t handle the poverty that in turn causes stress and in some cases may result in neglect, that is an example of that fine line. There are many

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Never the less, it’s ironic how in the 21st century we prize ourself for being progressive when almost half of us - over 3 billion people - can’t even conjure up what life is like beyond ‘the poverty trap’ they are in. We prize ourselves, when one out of every two children is poor. Can you imagine growing up as one of the 640 million kids whom have no adequate shelter, let alone a place to call home? Or the 400 million to whom safe drinking water is simply a figment of their imagination? Or maybe the 270 million who have no means of getting health care?

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