Many of us will experience periods of poverty during our lives. We may lose our jobs, divorce our spouses, need a new roof, injure ourselves, or have to pay a large, unexpected cost like a funeral.
All of these may cause temporary poverty, but most of us will eat bread and marge for a while and gradually recover.
That’s not the kind of poverty I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about generational poverty, which destroys lives before they’ve even started.
When a child is raised in poverty, it impacts everything about their life: The nutritional value of the food they eat. The quality of the sleep they get. The amount of quality learning time a parent can spend with them during their formative preschool years. The sicknesses they get and how well they can recover. The behaviours they learn from their role models. The health of the home they live in. And, of course, the quality of education they get.
Each of those circumstances can impact a child’s entire adult life.
It’s scary to think about, especially in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. How many children are going to suffer lifelong poverty because of the struggles their parents are experiencing?
And what wider implications is this going to have on our society?
Youth Employment Aotearoa convener Shirley Johnson told the NZ Herald this week that she believed a reported nationwide drop in school attendance was driven largely by poverty, which caused intergenerational disengagement.
“Kids who are at school are 10 times less likely to get involved in crime. Health, social, financial outcomes — so much of that is linked to them staying in school.”
A review prepared for the Ministry of Social Development in 2018 found evidence that “children and adolescents who experience poverty have worse cognitive, social behavioural and health outcomes … The strongest evidence relates to cognitive development and school achievement and the next strongest relates to social and behavioural development”.
In other words, poverty can cause long-term harm to children. And it can be passed down through the generations.
Think of this fictional (but not unrealistic) scenario, for example. A middle-income family of five is asked to vacate their rental home and they can’t find another rental, so they temporarily move in with their grandparents in a nearby small town.
The parents struggle to find new jobs. The children have had to change their schools and are all sleeping in their grandparents’ spare room, sharing a double bed. The parents find low-paying work and eventually scrape together enough cash to rent a cramped home, but it’s going to mean the children will change schools again.
The parents’ shifts mean the eldest child is having to babysit and cook most meals. He is getting to bed late and is struggling to get his homework done. His grades drop and he can’t get into university like he’d always hoped.
In this scenario, the parents find themselves in a hole they struggle to dig themselves out of, which negatively affects the eldest’s educational opportunities.
Scenarios like this play out every day — ask any worker at one of the Bay of Plenty’s many social agencies.
Gaeleen Wilkie, manager of Taupō Pathways For Youth Employment, told the Herald she is seeing children under 16 leaving school and seeking employment — one child was 12.
Wilkie said most students who left school before the age of 16 would get stuck in low-paid jobs.
“They could get a job cleaning, maybe, but is that what you want your child to do for the rest of their life?”
We like to tell ourselves there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel; that things will get worse before they get better, but get better they will.
But if we keep allowing our children to get trapped in poverty, the poverty cycle will capture more of our coming generations and the social problems we’re experiencing now will only get worse.
Social agencies are busting their backsides doing what they can to keep families afloat, but voting starts next week and I’m yet to hear any substantial plans from the two major political parties to reverse this downward trend. As Thomas Coughlan’s analysis last week showed, there’s been lots of talk about the “squeezed middle” but little on offer for people on low incomes.
Society will suffer if we stand by and allow our children to be deprived of a good future.
The impoverished children of today are the adults of tomorrow. And that should concern all of us.
Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a Millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.
