Week 2, Blog #4 Youth Poverty and Education

What are some similarities between poverty in the U.S. and Internationally in terms of youth experiences?  What are some of the major factors identified in the article and film contributing to poverty? What might be some relationships between poverty, access to and quality of schooling and youth experiences of violence and exposure to crime? Consider some of these relationships in your blog posts today.
  

Triangle:

Three contributing factors to youths growing up in poverty that are applicable between the film and article include education, death of the paternal parent, and lack of affordable housing. In the United States you can throw in factors of substance abuse and internationally generational poverty.

Square:

The article discussed education and how education was less likely to be part of an orphan’s life in Africa. One of the things that stood out for me was that within that article it discussed that having death in a community caused the investment in education to decrease (Case, Paxson, Ableidinger, 2004).  I related that to the United States Public School system. Our school infrastructure is dependent on property taxes to some extent.

If a large number of our heads of households died from an Aids epidemic in the same way they are dying in Africa the communities we lived in would see a marked decrease in maintaining schools.  If you add that to already stressed households it becomes incredibly difficult to ascertain taking in a child or children of a relative who has passed. The article posed that investment in a child may decrease as the relationship between the child and the decision-making adult in the child's household becomes more distant (Case, Paxson, Ableidinger, 2004).

Circle:

There are so many biological factors that play in the maternal bond of a mother to her child. It’s difficult to expect a non-relative or distant relative to care for a child to the degree of the biological parent; if the additional child causes financial hardship to the family than the child may soon represent a cause for resentment.

Interning at Child Protective Services you see cases where it seems as if you can’t get the biological parent to love and care for their own child, nevertheless a stranger in a licensed foster home. A kinship placement is always considered the best option when possible. Sometimes you luck out and placement occurs with a close relative who was already involved and loves and cares for the child. Unfortunately, in some cases no one steps up to take responsibility.

Case, A., Paxson, C., & Ableidinger, J. (2004). Orphans in africa: Parental death, poverty, and school enrollment. Demography, 41(3), 483-508.