Child Poverty In Canada

Words: 2011
Pages: 9

The shocking truth is that nearly one in every five children live in poverty in Canada (global news, 2013). This means an appalling 1,334,930 Canadian children are living in poverty today. It has been nearly 26 years since the Campaign 200 was released, this campaign was supposed to address the issue of child poverty and partner with different organization across the country to put a stop to it. But still 26 years later the problem is still at hand and the devastating truth is that more children are living in poverty then when the campaign was released. What is this saying about our government and their sense of urgency? The significant questions laid out on the table: are these children given the best resources and help to climb their way …show more content…
Social skills are defined as “any skill facilitating interaction and communication with others”. As one can think while growing up in poverty and being bounced around from shelters and the streets, one normally wouldn’t expect to learn these simple skills. A step that has been proven to be important in cognitive and social development, is the skills that children are taught at a young age. A survey was run on people who grew up in a poor neighbourhood and the results were not surprising. The people who had grew up in a poor neighbourhood showed to have less education and low income jobs. On the other hand, the people who grew up in normal to high income neighbourhoods had the opposite results. The reasons for these results are that these adults did not grow up learning these social skills to be able to be successful in adulthood. “Children raised in poverty rarely chose to behave differently, but they are faced daily with overwhelming challenges that affluent children never have to confront, and their brains have adapted to suboptimal conditions in ways that undermine good school performance” (Jensen,2009). For example, they do not have the skills to succeed in a job interview because they were not educated on how to act in that certain situation. These lack of social skills can punish their children and loved ones in the future. Low income parents are half as likely as higher-income parents to be able to track down where their children are in the neighborhood and be able to remember their children’s friends or teacher’s names (Evans, 2004). Not being able to remember their children’s friends or teacher’s names can cause their child to feel unwanted because one did not try to take the time to remember something as simple as their teacher’s name. One study found that 36 percent of low-income parents were involved in three or more school