Essay On Homeless Children

in the United States today, “an estimated 3.5 million people - of whom nearly 1.4 million are children - are homeless” (Mantsios 381). Homeless children face enormous consequences due to their circumstances such as poor living conditions, lack of education,and the endless cycle of the poor staying poor. One of the main consequences of a child being homeless is their poor living conditions. Homeless children will be placed within a shelter with the rest of their immediate family. The issue with the shelter placement is that it is often random. With random placement comes the issue of “families being moved further from the neighborhoods they know, and from family and friends who might be able to help them” (Harris). Another result of the living conditions within the homeless shelter’s is the organization. Homeless shelters in New York City house hundreds of people. These poor people are unorganized and are forced to stay alerted at all times because “some shelters require that parents be present for room inspections, which sometimes occur at night, keeping the children up late, or in the morning, when …show more content…
Many children growing up homeless “are far less likely than other students to live with two parents or have a college-educated mother or father” (Dynarski). Since many parents are uneducated they are most likely working minimum wage jobs or have no job at all which could not possibly support a family. The lack of education in the poor adult population causes the statistic that “roughly one out of every 13 children in the New York City public school system is now homeless” (Harris). This is because families working low wage jobs cannot afford proper housing. Also, growing up with uneducated parents could cause students to fall behind because they are not learning at home and cannot ask their parents for help when it comes to things such as