The effacts of poverty on children living - Essay Example

EFFECT OF POVERTY ON CHILDREN Effect of poverty on children Poverty reduces the readiness gap for a child’s education. In most instances, home life, associated health challenges, and poor neighborhoods decrease a child’s readiness gap. Therefore, children from poor environments begin education at a low standard than their colleagues from affluent areas. The readiness gap influences a child’s comprehension of subjects and the overall performance (Ferguson & Mueller, 2007). Poor neighborhoods lack adequate facilities for quality education.

The inefficient facilities such as lowly paid or unmotivated teachers, inadequate libraries and lack of books usually contribute to the overall decline in the education standards. Therefore, children from poor backgrounds lack the necessities to ensure success. In other instances, the poor parents lack the capacity to offer their children the conditions for success such as books (Ferguson & Mueller, 2007). Poverty causes psychological challenges to the children. The challenges result from parents inability to afford childrens basic needs.

The situation in turn lowers their concentration level in class. Therefore, such condition makes children from poor families to score low grades in communication skills, use of vocabulary and knowledge of numerical. In addition, poverty also causes segregation among school going children. Therefore, it affects the nature of relationships and corporation among children from different social classes (Ferguson & Mueller, 2007). Parental unpredictability and change of caregivers are challenges in the poor neighborhoods.

They arise because the parents take multiple and inconsistent jobs to support their families. Therefore, they contribute to declining performance among their children because they lack role modeling and supervision. In most instances, these children engage in bad social activities such as theft. Lack of parental guidance and role modeling breeds a culture that is unaware of benefits of schooling (Ferguson & Mueller, 2007). Hence, poor environments adversely affect the cognitive, social, and academic performance of children.

ReferenceFerguson, H., Bovaird, S., & Mueller, M. (2007). The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children. Paediatrics & Child Health, 12(8), 701–706.