Childhood Poverty Grusky Summary

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Hypothetically, I believe that Dr. David Grusky’s idea of how to reduce childhood poverty would work. Dr. Grusky’s idea is definitely one of controversy. He believes that if he could change one thing about the way that American society functions, he would change the occurrence of housing segregation. So ultimately, there would be no “rich neighborhoods” or “poor slums”. Everyone would live together. This idea would mainly work due to how integration of classes would affect people both emotionally and socially. The first aspect that would ideally disappear if upper and lower classes lived in the same neighborhoods would be the stigma attached to being poor. Wealthy Americans often associate being poor with being dirty, uneducated, and criminals. In fact, this belief is so common that instead of being called “lower class”, families that often live on the poverty line are labeled with the term “underclass”. Underclass is the notion that the poor are not only are different from mainstream society in their inability to take advantage of what society has to offer, but also are increasingly deviant and even dangerous to the rest of us. This belief is extremely polarizing and attaches a stigma onto being poor that is extremely hard to get rid of. Getting rid of housing segregation would help to reduce the …show more content…

This is because the “cultures” of lower and middles classes would be mixed. While lower class families will have a different economic status, their children will be growing up in the same neighborhood and around the same people as middle and upper class children. This, ideally, should benefit lower class children and help to reduce the number of practices that are out of the

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