From the Coast Reporter… “Child poverty high in province, on Coast“:
And child poverty is a problem on the Coast, as it is across the province and country, said Sarah Pond, who co-ordinates the Success By 6 program which funds early childhood development programs.
“We have fairly high vulnerabilities on the Coast, including the usual suspects of geographic isolation that brings along the whole aspect of poverty with young parents, single parents, lack of connection with extended family — all that kind of stuff,” Pond said.
But locally, she said, there are some strong supports available — particularly for the under-six age group.
“Children don’t develop to their potential if they live within poverty. However, if they’re given support, if their families can access really good drop-ins and programs and get to those programs and they’re offered for free, then the development is boosted,” she said.
And the paper’s editorial “We’ll all pay for child poverty“:
We can continue to turn our heads from the reality of child poverty in B.C. and for that we will reap what we sow in the years to come. Without proper nourishment, which, you guessed it, costs money; there will be even larger demands on our health system. Without proper childcare, because parents are working ungodly hours to survive and there are no babysitters they can afford, we will pay a big price when lonely, unsupervised children resort to illegal acts.
The reason to bring an end to poverty is because all people deserve equal means to achieve their full potential, which is different from saying that people in poverty “don’t develop to their potential.” Many people who are poor, of all ages, do develop to their full potential. All people can develop to their full potential – even if they were born into poverty.
Social and economic inequities make it harder for some people to achieve their potential, creating barriers and roadblocks that must be overcome. But those barriers can be – and often are – overcome. Communities of people in poverty play a major role in making this a reality. The power of communities in poverty to overcome the challenges placed on them by the conditions of poverty should never be underestimated and should not go unrecognized.
I also think it’s a mistake to justify child care programs on the basis of crime reduction benefits. Children in low-income families are not “future criminals” and should not be characterized as such. The reasons for providing child care supports to families should instead be based on our shared community values.
When communities care for each other and families are supported we create a society based on the values of equity, justice and love. The same is true when we develop justice programs that treat everyone with respect, including offenders of the law. The costs of child care should be justified by how we want children to be treated today, how we want to support families today, how we view and treat all human beings in accordance with our human rights values.
These criticisms aside, the more we cover poverty as a problem and include child care and other publicly funded social measures as part of the solution, the better. We should all be talking about poverty as a first step to building the political power to tackle the economic and political conditions that cause poverty’s continuation.
