The Challenges Of Child Poverty In New Zealand

Child poverty is major factor that 's costing New Zealand millions each year. It is in the media often and conversation on the issue brings up the topics such as its effects on a child 's well being, education and how to tackle it. This paper seeks to address the following questions, what are definitions of poverty, how and what was is poverty measured and the challenges or tension that poverty poses. This paper will also critically examine poverty and how education is hindered, how it affects the five tenets of Hauora and what policies the government has put in place to alleviate the issue.
Bradshaw (2015) uses term child poverty to refer to the children who lack material resources. There are two forms of Poverty. One is coined ‘absolute …show more content…
Myths so ingrain that it takes a catastrophe, such as war and a great depression to make them see child poverty as ‘their’ instead of our problem as a whole. Stock discusses the challenges like educating the general public on the issue of child poverty in New Zealand. He reports one of the myths that are the belief that there is little or ‘no real child poverty’ in New Zealand. As stressed by another article ‘The myth of families in poverty’ (2016), he describes that “Child poverty here is relative, and while not as debilitating or severe malnutrition, it is real measurable and often leaves significant long lasting scars” (Stocks R. 2015). This is only emphasised by Pickett, K., & Wilkinson, R. (2015) stating that there is overwhelming evidence both international and local shows that poverty creates detrimental scars to lifelong health, achievement and behaviour. They also suggest that “family income appears to be more strongly related to children’s ability and achievement than their emotional outcomes” this is an indicator that early childhood factors affects a person’s lifelong outcome and