Over one million Canadian children live in poverty. Child poverty is a pernicious childhood adversity that has detrimental long-term impacts on health, development and well-being throughout life.
The reason it’s framed as “child poverty” specifically is because growing up in poverty has very specific and lifelong consequences ranging from lowered IQs to behavior and mental illness issues. It’s really highly correlated, to the point of being deterministic.
I agree that poverty needs to be fixed for everyone, but for children in particular it can have long lasting effects for an entire generation and more because of what it does to brain development.
It’s not “child poverty”, but “family poverty”. Families are struggling, and that impacts kids, too.
Unless, children are expected to get a job and support themselves, which they aren’t… at least, not yet.
The reason it’s framed as “child poverty” specifically is because growing up in poverty has very specific and lifelong consequences ranging from lowered IQs to behavior and mental illness issues. It’s really highly correlated, to the point of being deterministic.
I agree that poverty needs to be fixed for everyone, but for children in particular it can have long lasting effects for an entire generation and more because of what it does to brain development.