Over the weakend, I met with my content group about how we're going to present the information of "Hard Choices People in Poverty have to Make"
Individaully, we assigned different sections for each of us to research. Based on the hard decisions people in poverty have to make, these are the general categories we figured people in poverty had to choose between: food/diet, health, transportation, work, and childcare.
I was assigned to research health and childcare, and here is what I found:
After coming together as a group, we all put combined our information together onto a presentation.
Childcare:
- The lack of child care assistance for those in poverty has adverse effects on families and lowers the likelihood that parents can sustain employment. Parents lacking child care assistance may go into debt, return to welfare, CHOOSE lower-quality and less stable child care, lose time from work, or BE FORCED TO CHOOSE BETWEEN PAYING FOR CHILD CARE OR PAYING FOR RENT OR CLOTHES.
- a set of studies has found that low-income parents who receive help meeting child care costs are more likely to get and keep work. One research summary reported that “while employment and subsidy use are inherently intertwined, each influencing the other, mothers who use subsidies appear more likely than other low-income mothers to: work at a job, work more hours, work standard schedules, sustain employment, [and] earn more.”
- Swanson stands in line several times every week at the Congress Heights Service Center, the only place where poor and working-poor parents for apply for a subsidy to help pay for child care.
- She has missed several college classes and days of work to stand in line. She even lost a job trying to get the child care subsidy. She landed in a shelter and went on welfare.
Health:
- People whose household income is more than $75,000 a year have very different perceptions of what affects health than those whose household income is less than $25,000.
- low paying jobs or unemployment harms their health. And there's research to back this up. Kate Strully, a sociologist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, studied what happened when healthy people were laid off following a plant closing. She found that losing a job increased the odds of developing stress-related health conditions by 83 percent — conditions like stroke, heart disease, diabetes and emotional or psychiatric conditions.
- This article shares a story about mother of one, Sheila Good, who was in a car accident. This led her to have to quit her job. She and her son, Benjamin, now struggle to live on $940 a month, with $425 going for rent, and $12,000 in areas for accident-related medical expenses
- Sheila Good faced the decision most mothers dread. Should she spend more time raising her son or earning a paycheck? Should she be a better mom or a better provider?
- This has largely affected Benjamin’s health. In fact, his mother says this: "My son never had difficulty with anxiety or a sleeping disorder until our recent struggles to make ends meet," said Ms. Good, who has post-traumatic stress disorder frw disorder.”
- A study from Boston College and Tufts om an impoverished childhood, bipolar disorder and anemia from a genetic bone-marroUniversity published in the Journal of Developmental Psychology found that conditions found inside rundown houses and apartments hinder children's emotional and educational development. Data drawn from 2,400 children, teens and young adults in the six-year study "found emotional and behavioral symptoms of anxiety, depression, lying and aggressive behavior were closely connected to poor housing quality and the related stress placed on parents, children and families."
- Other examples of tough choices regarding health would be examples that Erika gave us:
- The article about the man who killed his wife because they couldn’t afford her medical expenses anymore.
- The example of the kid who couldn’t bob for apples because his teeth were rotten.
Here are the slides I did that covered all my research:
In addition to my slides I did about what I researched, I also created the slide about how we want to frame our content:
