Causes of Poverty and Effects on Life Opportunities

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Causes of Poverty and Effects on Life Opportunities

According to Reutter, Veenstra, Stewart, Raphael, Love, Makwarimba, and McMurray (2005 p. 518), “Affordable housing was deemed especially difficult to obtain by 96%, but other resources (obtaining healthy food, giving children a good start in life, and engaging in healthy behaviours) were also viewed as challenging by at least 70% of respondents.”. Poverty has now become of the biggest issues in the world, with devastating effects on life opportunities, more severe in third world countries than first world, but still heavily present in both. Each place has its own unique causes such as personal/familial (Rank, 2001), local/environmental (Murry, Berkel, Gaylord-Harden, Linder, & Nation, 2011) and national/systemic (Ferriss, 2006). Some of the effects are mental health (Kuruvilla, & Jacob, 2007), lifestyle (Reutter, et al, 2005), employment (Rank, 2001), and education (Pagani, Boulerice, Vitaro, & Tremblay, 1999). However, there are always solutions such as policies (Duncan, & Brooks-Gunn, 2000) and financial backing from the government, such as the child defence fund (Sharpe, 1996).

Firstly, it’s better to have a better look at what poverty is and the two main types that currently exist, absolute and relative. According to Kuruvilla and Jacob (2007) absolute poverty is mostly concerned with not having enough resources to continue your ordinary life whereas relative poverty mostly is concerned with the income of the family or individual being substantially lower than that of others. Those two types of poverty have always been around but it has slowly been getting worse and worse through the years. According to Rank (2001) the poverty rate in 1999 was at 11.8% in the U.S howev...

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...(1999). Effects of poverty on academic failure and delinquency in boys: A change and process model approach. Journal of Child Psychology, 40(8), 1209-1219.

Duncan, G.J., Gunn, J.B., Young, W.J., and Smith, J.R. (1998). How much does childhood poverty affect life chances of children? American Sociological Review, 63, 406-423.

Sharpe, M.E. (1996). Child poverty reduces lifetime worker output. The Children’s Defence Fund Report on the Costs of Child Poverty, 1, 38-41.

McBride, V., Berkel, C., Harden, N.K.G., Linder, N.C., and Nation, M. (2011). Neighbourhood Poverty and Adolescent Development, 21(1), 114-128.

Ferriss, A.L. (2006). Approaches to reducing poverty. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 1, 217-226.

Lee, J.S. (2011). The effects of persistent poverty on children’s physical, socio-emotional, and learning outcomes. Child Indicators Research, 4, 725-747.

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