Generational Poverty

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While conducting my research on generational poverty, I found that many of us think of poverty simply as being without money or material possessions. However, poverty has many different meanings and can be broken down into different types. I will be discussing with you today the different types of poverty, how individuals find themselves living in poverty, the affects poverty can have on children and how we can help them break the cycle of poverty.
“Poverty is generally divided into to two types: generational poverty and situational poverty. Generational poverty is when the economic level of a family drops and stays in a low economic state for more than two generations. It is very likely that the 25 million generational poverty individuals
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This means that children are overrepresented among our nation’s poor; they represent 23 percent of the population but comprise 33 percent of all people in poverty. Many more children live in families with incomes just above the poverty threshold. Being a child in a low-income or poor family does not happen by chance. Parental education and employment, race/ethnicity, and other factors are associated with children’s experience of economic …show more content…
For example, someone might not get the chance at an education because that has been the case in their family. Instead, they settle for looking for jobs to survive.
Households that are comprised of families that suffer from Generational Poverty, usually have distinguishing characteristics. Ruby Payne outlines them in her book “A Framework for Understanding Poverty”. The characteristics are listed as:
• Background noise-the TV is almost always on, and conversations tend to be noisy, with several people talking at once. Many researchers believe that this leads children to be noisy and disruptive in the classroom.
• Emphasis on Entertainment- Families in poverty value the ability to entertain, tell stories and have a sense of humor.
• Casual language- families in generational poverty have an “oral-language tradition,” meaning they might not know how to speak or write formally. Children of poverty often lack language skills needed for school. Their grammar or vocabulary is poor, and no one at home corrects