Poverty Stricken Children
When I was in grade school, one of my best friends was a little girl named Kelsie. Kelsie was born four months after I was, but even in first grade, she looked about two years younger than me. Despite having always been tall for my age, when I met Kelsie in first grade, she was about six inches shorter and weighed about twenty pounds less than me. My mother explained to me that Kelsie was born prematurely, which was what I attributed her tiny stature to. In the third grade, I began to notice that the school was giving her Pediasure to drink during the day. This struck me as odd because here was a person who always cleaned her plate drinking a nutritional supplement for small children who won’t eat their vegetables. Around this time I also began to notice that Kelsie always seemed tired and would sometimes fall asleep in class. I knew Kelsie’s family had a hard time making ends meet, but it didn’t occur to me until sometime later that my friend, whose housing complex was only a short drive from my neighborhood, was malnourished. Kelsie, like a gross majority of other poverty-stricken children, was born to a mother who had no money, who had been born 17 years earlier to a mother who was destitute. Poverty is not a state; it is a vicious cycle. Without some form of aid (usually a sound education and/or financial assistance), the odds of poverty-stricken children rising above The Line are slim to none.
The poverty in the United States is hard to treat because there are no …show more content…
Law professor at Georgetown University Peter Edleman pointed out in an interview with The Nation that “Economist Harry Holzer has shown that the cost of sustained childhood poverty is more than $500 billion per year, or 4 percent of GDP. Clearly, from under-education and under-inclusion in the economy you can see there must be obvious costs in terms of crime, public benefits, lost
When I was in grade school, one of my best friends was a little girl named Kelsie. Kelsie was born four months after I was, but even in first grade, she looked about two years younger than me. Despite having always been tall for my age, when I met Kelsie in first grade, she was about six inches shorter and weighed about twenty pounds less than me. My mother explained to me that Kelsie was born prematurely, which was what I attributed her tiny stature to. In the third grade, I began to notice that the school was giving her Pediasure to drink during the day. This struck me as odd because here was a person who always cleaned her plate drinking a nutritional supplement for small children who won’t eat their vegetables. Around this time I also began to notice that Kelsie always seemed tired and would sometimes fall asleep in class. I knew Kelsie’s family had a hard time making ends meet, but it didn’t occur to me until sometime later that my friend, whose housing complex was only a short drive from my neighborhood, was malnourished. Kelsie, like a gross majority of other poverty-stricken children, was born to a mother who had no money, who had been born 17 years earlier to a mother who was destitute. Poverty is not a state; it is a vicious cycle. Without some form of aid (usually a sound education and/or financial assistance), the odds of poverty-stricken children rising above The Line are slim to none.
The poverty in the United States is hard to treat because there are no …show more content…
Law professor at Georgetown University Peter Edleman pointed out in an interview with The Nation that “Economist Harry Holzer has shown that the cost of sustained childhood poverty is more than $500 billion per year, or 4 percent of GDP. Clearly, from under-education and under-inclusion in the economy you can see there must be obvious costs in terms of crime, public benefits, lost