Its About How Childhood Poverty Affect You Kids (Essay Sample)

Childhood poverty
Name
Institution
Instructor
Date
Childhood poverty
Childhood poverty is one of the aspects that affect the childhood development, social behavior and learning outcome. This is a phenomenon in which a child is living in poverty. Basically, this phenomenon applies to orphans raised with limited or no state resources or children coming from the poor families. Families should be aware of this issue so that they can take any necessary measures to mitigate its effects on the school going children.
Impact on learning
A literature review study by Lacour & Tissington (2011) found that low income kindergarten children could score only 30th percentile in reading achievement assessment while middle income children scored 45th percentile and upper-income children scored 70th percentile. More so, only 13.2% of children from poor households could meet required subject area assessments. The effects of poverty on learning outcome of a child increase with the poverty duration. Children living in persistent poverty scored between 6 and 9 points lower than wealthy children in various assessments (p. 522). A study by Moore, Redd, Burkhauser, Mbwana, & Collins (2009) also found a negative correlation/association between childhood poverty and academic outcome. This means that children who experience poverty perform poorly in their academics hence deteriorating learning outcomes. Chronic stress in the entire family because of poverty undermines impairs concentration and attention of a child, and reduces the child’s creativity, cognition, and working memory (p.4). Therefore, the child will not concentrate in class leading to poor learning outcome and academic performance.
Poverty inflicts chronic stress on the child and the entire family which interferes with child’s adjustment to developmental tasks such as classwork. Children being raised in poor households have increased risk of school dropout. This resulted into inflation-adjusted earnings in the U.S. which declined by 16% between 1979 and 2005 (Engle, & Black, 2008). More so, parents from poor households have higher likelihood to give birth to premature babies who will take long to adjust their cognitive development compared to mature babies. These premature born babies are also at higher risk of school failure compared to children with same neonatal record from high income households (Ferguson, Bovaird & Mueller, 2007). This can be attributed to the fact that poor children are likely to be raised by parents who completed fewer education years and they are also likely to grow up in families/households which are less stimulating cognitively. This can negatively affect academic and cognitive attainment of the child. Poor children are also likely to attend schools which lack adequate learning resources due to their affordability (Moore et...