Chaos/Poverty

Chaos/Poverty  

 

 

 

 

As a child I experienced chaos in my house due to my parents arguing all of the time. My mom was and still is the best mom ever hands down. She worked in as a lab proctor and bus driver in the school system for thirty years. She also was and still is one of the managers at my family’s restaurant. My mom is the kind of person that just makes things happen, no matter what the situation is. My father on the other hand was totally opposite, he was very laid back and took things one day at a time.  His mother died when he was about fifteen and I feel that her death took an emotional toll on him, that he never dealt with. Which led to issues in his adulthood hence my mother and his marriage.

I always felt that he was jealous of my mother because she had so much support from her sisters and brothers whether it was finically or emotionally, they are just a family that sticks together. I was told that my father and my mother had issues while my mom was pregnant with me. My mother being the woman that she was tried to still make things work. Now let’s fast forward to when I was in elementary school. I can remember my parents arguing almost every day mainly about money. Even though I was a child I still could tell that there was great tension between my parents and my father’s jealousy didn’t make it any better. Their fussing and fighting stressed me out a great deal, my brother wouldn’t begin to show symptoms of being stressed when my parents divorced.

I would go to school and go through the motions of my daily schedule, but in the back of my mind I would dread going home because I knew what I would be facing. I knew I was really stressed when I began to feel the need to defend my mother, which was not my job as a child. I do feel that I didn’t perform to the best of my abilities due to the chaos that I was experiencing at home. My parents never got physical with each other but the words that they used towards each other where enough for me. It also affected my social emotional skills also I was very shy and took the friendships I had very seriously. Today while raising my own child I have did my best to shield her as much as I can. I don’t want her to be stressed about anything, because I want her to stay on the path that she is on. Children so be able to stay children for as long as they can, and I plan to give her a very good one with lots of fun positive memories.   

When I was a child one of the many places that we went on vacation to was Canada. Niagara Falls was one of the most beautiful places that I had seen. I would love to go back one day, so it wasn’t hard to decide the place that I wanted to research for this assignment. From my research on what stressors affect the children in Canada, I came to the conclusion that poverty is one of the number one stressors of children in Canada. Persistent socioeconomic disadvantage has a negative impact on the life outcomes of many Canadian children. Research from the Ontario Child Health Study in the mid-1980s reported noteworthy associations between low income and psychiatric disorders (5), social and academic functioning (6), and chronic physical health problems (7) (Ferguson- Bovaird- Mueller,2007).  Children who live in poverty often start school later than children who do not live in poverty, which makes them already behind of their peers. Sadly the number of families living in poverty in Canada is growing. However governmental and school officials are aware of this problem and see the need of intervention to help reverse this issue. Prevention and intervention programs that target health concerns (eg, immunization and prenatal care) are associated with better health outcomes for low-income children and result in increased cognitive ability (27) (Ferguson- Bovaird- Mueller,2007).  Canada has programs like Ontario Early Years Centres, the Aboriginal Head Start Program in Northern communities, and programs related to the Alberta Children and Youth Initiative (Ferguson- Bovaird- Mueller,2007).

Sadly poverty is an issue that many countries deal with, it has horrible effects on the development of children and their families. I am glad that there are people in the world who do want to make a difference, and try to make things better for these children. No child should ever have to worry about how they are going to eat, or where they are going to lay their heads. The only job children should have is being a child, you can’t get those years back once they are gone.

 

 

Reference

Ferguson, H., Bovaird, S., & Mueller, M. (2007). The impact of poverty on educational outcomes for children. Paediatrics & Child Health, 12(8), 701–706.