Childhood poverty in India

Since I still have not heard back from those international professionals I attempted to contact, I selected to learn about childhood poverty in India from http://www.childhoodpoverty.org.   Here are some of the insights that I learned about India.

In India, drought and environmental deterioration have significantly undermined livelihoods and exacerbated poverty.   Responses to these contribute to poverty cycles that include pressures on children to work, undermining their education and health.   Children from 10-15 percent of households migrate for work, usually with parents, but sometimes alone.   Income from migrant children's work constituted up to 45 percent of the poorest households' income.  India accounts for 20 percent of the world's out-of-school children.  It has the largest numbers of working children in the world, with nearly a third of children below 16 years working.

The focus in India is to get the children from poor families into primary schools, increase the retention rate so that more children finish primary grades, and upgrade the quality of the schooling they receive.  In health, the country is facing high rates of communicable diseases, malnutrition, and maternal and perinatal illnesses, predominantly among poor people.  Almost half of all children under the age of five are malnourished and 34 percent of new-borns are significantly underweight.

Gender biases limit girls' life chances.  The cycle of disadvantage starts at birth and continues through childhood to motherhood and the next generation.  It is reflected in the inferior health and educational status of women, the high maternal mortality rate, the neglect of the girl child, the declining sex ratio, and girl's lower rates of school enrolment and subsequent higher participation in the child labor force.

These insights have shown me that poverty around the world looks very different.  In the United States, we have laws limiting child workers, requiring school attendance, and protecting gender equality.

THE GLOBAL FUND FOR CHILDREN

The Global Fund for Children (https://www.globalfundforchildren.org) works to transform the lives of children on the edges of society—trafficked children, refugees, child laborers—and help them regain their rights and pursue their dreams.  Since 1997, they’ve reached 8 million children worldwide.

They find and invest in grassroots organizations that enable the most vulnerable children in their communities to thrive.   Their model can be summarized in three steps: scout (seeking out organizations that serve the most marginalized children in the world), support (they invest in undercapitalized organizations that provide critical services to vulnerable children), and strengthen (through management assistance, capacity building, and networking opportunities to help them become sustainable resources in their communities).

In a recent blog “Voices from Hay al-Gharbeh” By Emmanuel Otoo on December 26th, 2012, the author discusses poverty in Lebanon.  It is estimated that 8 percent of the population lives in extreme poverty while an additional 28 percent are considered below the poverty line.  There are also huge disparities in poverty demographics, with a heavy concentration of poverty in certain regions and increased poverty in urban areas, especially around large cities like Beirut.

Tahaddi, a GFC partner, works to address these challenges by providing children and women in Hay al-Gharbeh, a shantytown in Beirut, with access to quality education, psychosocial support, and basic health services. The children are given the opportunity to learn and play in a safe environment and are guided and socialized to become productive and responsible adults.

The author visited and spent time with over 100 vulnerable boys and girls between the ages of 6 and 16 who are receiving various forms of support from Tahaddi. The children quizzed him about the United States and taught him key words in Arabic.  They shared their dreams and aspirations with the author and shared that they are receiving the needed guidance from Tahaddi to enable them to achieve their dreams.  One 9-year-old girl said that when she grows up, she wants to help children who are sick to be well and those who are hungry to have food. When asked why, she said, “Sickness and hunger make children unhappy, and so I want to do that to make sure children are happy all the time.”

Tahaddi’s strategy centers on providing support to vulnerable children and youth affected by conflict and poverty, including those with disabilities. The organization currently serves over 110 beneficiaries. Tahaddi provides community sensitization on the rights of children, supports families in obtaining the legal documentation necessary to access basic amenities, and operates social inclusion, mentorship, youth empowerment, and enterprise and livelihood programs.

GFC selects grantee partners such as Tahaddi based on their demonstrated potential to actively engage their communities and find sustainable solutions to the issues facing vulnerable children and youth. They serve as a resource for these grassroots organizations and, through their financial investment and other services, help to strengthen the capacity of their partners to enable them to continue addressing emerging issues long after their support ends.

Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources

To locate and establish contact with early childhood professionals outside the United States, I visited the UNICEF website and contacted local representatives in New Zealand and Bolivia.  I have always been interested in New Zealand and Australia and decided on Bolivia because one of my current students was born in Bolivia (her mother is a native) and they still have many family members there.  I thought this relationship could provide me with additional resources/information on the region.  I have not heard back from either e-mail yet and may have to contact others if I don't hear back soon.

Because of my ancestry, I was interested to see what the European Early Childhood Education Research Association website had to offer.  While the website contains lots of research papers, it doesn't really discuss current issues or much as far as "hands-on" work.  I next checked out the Center for Child Care Workforce website.  This is a very interesting website for professionals in the early childhood field.  They discuss such topics as wage issues, professional development, and ways to make early childhood professionals voices heard.  This still wasn't exactly what I was looking for, so I checked out The Global Fund for Children's website for an international look at early childhood.  When explaining what they do, they said, "we transform the lives of children on the edges of society—trafficked children, refugees, child laborers—and help them regain their rights and pursue their dreams.  In other words, we do all we can to let kids be kids—no matter what their circumstances."  This was something that definately interested me and I can't wait to dig further into their work!

My Supports

Some of the emotional supports that I have in my life include my boyfriend and his children. They show me love and affection when I’m down, they laugh with me, and they’re happy for me when something good happens to me. My friends also provide emotional support in that they listen to my issues, share a laugh with me, and are happy when things are good. My parents show their support by demonstrating that they are proud of my accomplishments. Finally, my dogs provide me love no matter what I say or do.

One of the biggest practical supports in my life is my associate teacher. She helps me plan for our classroom, supports decisions that I make, and offers helpful suggestions. Money is a practical support in that it allows me to meet my needs and some of my wants. Technology such as phones and computers support me to communicate with others and get information that I need. My boyfriend and his daughters support me because they help around the house such as getting themselves dressed, helping with dinner, picking up after themselves, etc. I don’t feel that I require much physical support. The only thing I could think of was my car which gives me the freedom to get me where I need and want to go. 

The benefit of these supports is that they help me meet all my needs and wants. If I didn’t have these supports, my life would be extremely difficult. I wouldn’t be able to do my job as effectively as I do now. If I didn’t have money, I wouldn’t have my house or my dogs. If my family and friends weren’t part of my support system, I would not have made it through college, and probably not even through high school. 

If I were blind, my supports would change dramatically. Some of the supports I have in my life would be unnecessary while others would become more necessary. I imagine that my emotional supports would remain the same. However, my practical and physical supports would be very different. I would have to lean much more on my associate teacher for feedback on what the students are doing and I would not be able to complete my observations of the students in the same way. I would have to rely much more on listening to the children. I wouldn’t be able to use computers like I do now and would need more support around the house from my boyfriend and his daughters. I would require the assistance of a Seeing Eye dog in order to maintain the same amount of freedom that I experience now. If I didn’t have these supports, I would not be able to work and therefore would not have the monetary support that I have now.

A favorite quote about childhood

One of my all time favorite quotes regarding children is the following:

If we don't stand up for children, then we don't stand for much.
-Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund

Testing for Intelligence

I believe that it is important to measure all aspects of a child. Because learning and aptitude may change through life, just measuring a child’s linguistic or problem-solving performance at one given time doesn’t give a clear picture of what the child may be capable of. 

Unfortunately, standardized tests are aimed at children who are strong in linguistics. A child has to be able to read the questions, internalize and understand what is being asked, and answer them. They don’t take into account a child that may understand the material but need to express it through another way. A perfect example of this is when I taught eighth grade science. We were studying the states of matter and I allowed my students to demonstrate in any way they chose what they learned. Some chose to write, some drew, and others chose to “act” the states out as a group. The important thing was that I could assess which students understood states of matter and which didn’t. Had I assessed this with a traditional “paper & pencil” test, some of these students may not have been able to demonstrate their knowledge. 

Howard Garner and his multiple intelligence theory show that children can be intelligent in many different ways. They may be stronger in logical-mathematical thinking, musical, spatial, or bodily-kinesthetic. Only through performance assessments (such as the one I described above) can you truly measure what a student has learned. 

In France, the "baccalaureat" used to be a narrow examination with focus on humanities and mathematics. But as French schools became more diversified, it has become a differentiated with 28 different options and 23 different sets of questions. At age 15 to 16, students begin a three-year, specialized course of study. The exam includes essay-type questions in the core subjects (history and geography, French, and philosophy) and students take additional exams in their area of concentration (philosophy and liberal arts, economics and social sciences, or mathematics and the sciences). Some subjects, usually languages, also include oral exams.

Consequences of Stress on Child Development

My foster son is a prime example of what stressors like violence do to people.  He experienced a lot of violence when he was young from his mother, father, teachers, foster parents, and older children.  He was beat with brooms and baseball bats by his mother, had a foster parent push him down the stairs, and had a teacher slam him to the ground and hold him there while calling him racial slurs.  He had a gun pulled in his face by a stranger and has been beat up while sleeping on numerous occasions.  All of these things happened before he turned 14.  Because of all this violence, he has a terrible temper and as a young child was sent to counseling by his mother.  It didn't help his anger issues.  He was put on medication and went through anger management twice, neither helped.  His only way of coping with all the violence around him was to absorb it and try to find an outlet.  Unfortuantely, that outlet was by picking fights with peers and starting arguements with teachers and parents.  Now that he's older, he has found some more acceptable outlets such as exercise and martial arts but still has to work to control his temper when dealing with difficult situations.

In Brazil, children face many issues. There are many Street Children (either children who work the street, children who are runaways, abused, alienated children from deprived and poverty stricken families who are unable to maintain normal family units, or children who are orphans and abandoned children who parents may have died from war, illness or simply been unable to look after the children because of their family circumstance) and most of these are expected to be killed before they are 18. On a daily basis they face hunger, military police beatings, drug addition (often glue), becoming involved in stealing, prostitution, drug running, and gunfights.
The government is trying to eradicate poverty through taxation and public works projects and has promised to reduce ecomonically inequality before Rio de Janerio hosts the 2016 Olympics. The rich in Brazil hold charity events like the Zero Hunger drive aimed at providing food. The public sector too has started addressing poverty by creating jobs in some of the poorest neighborhoods.