Consequences of Stress on Children's Development: poverty

There are many factors influence a child’s healthy development, like war, poverty, racism, natural disaster, isolation, hunger, noise, chaos, disease, environmental pollution, violence, etc., the same is during 2-6 years.


I would like to mention poverty specially here when I read these factors with my own experience.


I was born in a small town with more than 1000 people living there. Before 10 years old, I spent almost my whole time there. All the families in town were very poor at that time. We lived a self-sufficient life there. The parents plant wheat and grow rice in the filed, and also other kinds of food, like sweet potato, pumpkin, and many kinds of vegetables. Because every family cherishes a lot of the food, sometimes when the corns are mature, people would steal from each other’s field. When the time to watering the filed was coming, the adults would stay in the field whole nights to watering their own fields. Usually, I will have one or two new clothes for the spring festival but not any other time during the year. The clothes were very plain, my mother will buy a beautiful cloth, took me to the only tailor in the village, measured my size, and the tailor would make a clothes for me. It was very delighted to have the new clothes.


When I was young, I ate whatever we planted in the field, those were all organic, but the types were not so abundant. When I grew up, I found out I only knew few kinds of vegetables, and have no idea of how to eat for a balance. The “eating habits, not genes, were the cause” take a long-term effect on me. And “eating a wide variety of foods may be essential for optimal health”. (Berger, 2012) And I always feel deficient, worried about what I have are less other others. So, I push myself to work hard, and don’t dare to relax.


Talking about poverty, sometimes when I watch international news, I know there are some countries in Africa very poor. The children live there are really in a miserable condition, they don’t have clean water, no enough food, they can not afford the education, so the poverty pass through generations. How can we help those poor children and their families is a global issue now.



Reference:


Berger, K. S. (2012). The developing person through childhood (6th ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.