Essay On Children In Poverty

Approximately 14 million children are in poverty in the United States of America (U.S.). That is 14 million kids limited of resources like a good education. Children in poverty have difficulties learning and getting the resources they need to be successful. Poverty is defined as, “the state of being extremely poor”. Poverty affects 14.5% of Americans. The cause of this is believed to be from the government. The latest case of recovery found was that the Republican controlled congress into cutting billions of people’s food-stamp benefits and stopped extended unemployment benefits (Gongloff, huffingtonpost.com). This program gave people of unemployment 73 weeks to get back to working. However, with that program being cut in half and only given 26 weeks to recover, now more than 1 million unemployed workers are rising and the estimate of unemployment will hit 26% compared to around 45% of unemployment (Parlapiano, nytimes.com). Poverty affects more than we would think. Poverty can be found everywhere in the world. Even close to your own home and one would not realize. A struggle that a lot of people relate to that trickles down to the effects of education is jobs with low wages or people whom have no job at all. There is a direct correlation between having a job, the amount the employee is paid, and how well a school is able to educate its kids. Take Reading, Pennsylvania for example, the city is filled with people that have jobs with low wages or no jobs at all. A school’s ability to educate their children is based on the amount of money they draw in from school taxes. Since the citizens of Reading have such low paying jobs, or none at all, it lessens the amount of funding a school district receives (Tighe, readingeagle.com). Without this integral funding schools cannot buy books, school supplies, pay teachers, or have extracurricular activities. This lessens their ability to teach students and groom them into successful adults. Usually when a child in poverty is struggling in school it is not because he/she is dumb, or cannot understand the material. There can be underlying reasons for the lack of success. One reason is children do not have the ability to develop a sense of self. They can struggle with the idea of controlling their own lives and bettering themselves. This can impact them in the educational area because if they have no sense of bettering themselves then when these children come in contact with a bad grade or any type of crisis, it is not looked at as such (Birdsong, scilearn.com). Poverty is a hardship that 45 million people endure every day. So one can imagine how that must impact families and their way of living; leading to the next point that a more demanding household can distract and prevent kids from paying attention in classes. For example, if children have parents addicted to drugs or parents must work all the time to attempt to get out of poverty, children do not get the attention they …show more content…
Thankfully, there are some organizations that go out of their way to help these kids in poverty. Hoping to make a difference and save kids from the unfair fate of poverty. One organization is Save the Children (STC), this organization coaches teachers to be more interactive and prep curriculums that are more effective for these kids. They also teach parents how to be more proactive in their kids’ education. STC also has volunteer opportunities for people to encourage and help kids with reading and math furthering their knowledge and hopefully breaking through to them to continue with education (savethechildren.org). Another organization is the Children’s Defense Fund. they help children come out of poverty as much as possible. They give them moral and spiritual support while also providing them protecting from neglect and abuse. This organization also provides health care which is very important as well (childrensdefense.org). Finally, National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), they target mostly the economic stand point of this. They try to help the parents by also helping the children. Like the other organizations they help the children get better educations and support but what makes them stand out is they try to target the family as a