Abstract
Struggling families, kids living in poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy and other difficult experiences conjure up the images of the backward African countries or temporary refugee settlements somewhere at the Greece’s northern border. However, it will strike your imagination the moment you scroll through Save the Children or UNICEF webpages seeing that there are about sixteen million American children who have been exposed to various social hardships since their birth. (Save the Children, 2015). Growing in the low income-families does not only affect the emotional state of a child, who senses all the difficulties and burdens of being poor, but also limits the chances of development to the very scarce ones. (Locke, Word, 2013). What can be done in this regards and what is being done.
Keywords: low-income family, poverty
There are plenty of ways to struggle against poverty and as hard as I tried, I failed to come up with any feasible plan that would be better than the ones that are being implemented by the charity organizations all over the world. I guess there is no reason to reinvent the wheel because the humanitarian practices do work, and it is not the ideas we lack – it is human resources and financial support, of course. My step to the problem solution would be to join one of the social support projects as a volunteer and try to get as many people involved as possible to work with families in need. A wisely designed project, in my opinion, should target a couple of issues like for example healthy nutrition and sports. The families enrolled in a project of this kind would be taught how to stick to a balanced diet and still be able to spare money, how sport and physical activities can improve children’s performance at school and make them feel better about their life. It would engage children into various games and competitions to show what fun sport can be and ensure that children will be able to move on with it after the project ends. Surely, it will need a huge support from the volunteers and sponsors. To obtain those two one can resort to the social networks, which have recently gained importance as a progress engine in this field.
Another project I was thinking of is a course designed for parents raising chronically ill children; and it should be specially stressed that the project targets the parents not the kids themselves. The idea behind it is that at times the parents find it way more difficult to overcome the obstacles brought about by the child’s disease than the children. The parents facing their child’s disability tend to aggravate the situation by fear, regrets and despair causing emotional disorders, divorces and even suicides. In an effort to support these families, the duty of an educator is to change the parents’ perspective on the disability as such. In order to achieve that in the course I would start with giving people time to live through the grief by letting them speak, complain and cry until gradually they come to the point of accepting it and seeing it as a challenge rather than a mischief.
References
Save the Children (2015). Poverty in the United States. Retrieved from http://www.savethechildren.org/site/c.8rKLIXMGIpI4E/b.6153159/k.C8D5/USA.htm
Locke, B., Word, R., (2013, September 30) Obstacles, crises affect families, children’s education. Daily Journal. Retrieved from http://djournal.com/news/obstacles-crises-affect-families-childrens-education/
