Poor children are ignored, disregarded, and deprived of fundamental rights. They frequently lack access to both education and job training. As a result, individuals have bad self-esteem, find it challenging to maintain positive interpersonal relationships, and find it nearly impossible to take care of their families and themselves as adults.
Children with poor self-esteem and self-confidence may develop into detached, lonely, angry, and desperate teenagers and adults. They frequently give up and turn into easy prey for abuse and exploitation.
Drought, starvation, unclean water, poor sanitation, conflict, and natural catastrophes are environmental characteristics of poverty on children that make already challenging living conditions and health issues worse. Because being unwell makes it difficult to learn, work, or find good food, which in turn feeds disease, hopelessness, and marginalisation, this feeds the vicious cycle of poverty.
The body reacts by producing toxic quantities of stress hormones, which can further disrupt and impede social, emotional, and cognitive development when this environmental stress is chronic and sustained.
What Effects does Poverty have on Children’s Behaviour?
Children who live in poverty are more likely to feel that their lives are out of control and to have poor emotional and behavioural self-control, and poverty on children hurts a child’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. They are more likely to experience conduct disorders and behaviour problems, such as academic and disciplinary troubles in elementary and middle school and delinquency in adolescence. Along with increased levels of anxiety and sadness, poor children frequently suffer a sense of hopelessness and helplessness.
The body reacts by producing toxic quantities of stress hormones, which can further disrupt and impede social, emotional, and cognitive development when this environmental stress is chronic and sustained.
Poor Children’s Mental Health
Children living in poverty have a shorter life expectancy and are less able to lead fulfilling lives as adults because of not having their mental health needs met.
In children aged 10 to 19 years, mental health disorders represent 16% of the global burden of disease and injury.
The second most common cause of disease burden in children living in poverty aged 10 to 14 is childhood behavioural problems.
More than 90% of adolescent suicides occur among youth living in low- or middle-income nations, where about 90% of the world’s adolescents reside.
Childhood and adolescence are formative years for habits that are vital to one’s physical, emotional, and mental health. Early childhood interventions, youth development programmes, and programmes that help create a stable environment for kids to grow up in are essential because poverty amplifies the challenges, stresses, and trauma aimed at infants, young children, and adolescents at a time when they are ill-prepared or completely unable to handle them.
How Does Poverty Affect the Health of Children?
Childhood determines whether a person will have long-term health or sickness. A good diet provides a lifelong defence against malnutrition, nutritional imbalances, and malnourishment as well as chronic illnesses including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.
Giving a developing body the nourishment and nutrition it needs to grow and thrive will provide the groundwork for a robust brain architecture and the spectrum of wide-ranging physical, social, and emotional skills that go along with it. Additionally, the first few years of life are very crucial for optimum nutrition. Children are more likely to pass away before turning five if they don’t eat a diet rich in nutrients. In 2018, more than 5 million kids died before the age of 5, and 45% of those fatalities were related to malnutrition.
Tens of millions of children under the age of five are badly wasted (low weight-for-height) and hundreds of millions are stunted as a result of children in poverty not receiving the food and nutrients they need to develop healthily (low height-for-age).
Additionally, less fortunate kids are more likely to experience food insecurity, which prevents them from having regular access to an adequate supply of affordable, nourishing food that will keep them healthy and enable them to lead active lives.
How can Child Poverty be Stopped?
Given the extent of global poverty, it is simple to feel pessimistic when considering child poverty. But the issue of child poverty is not insurmountable. Our long-term, all-encompassing strategy to save children considers every form of poverty.
You are assisting in lessening the effects of child poverty in the name of Jesus when you sponsor a kid through our all-encompassing programme for children’s development or give to fulfil urgent needs.
By ensuring that each kid in our programme receives care for their social, educational, health, spiritual, environmental, and economic needs, your sponsorship or donation helps to lessen the negative consequences of poverty.