Reports of UNICEF

1. The two reports focus on poverty in two similar but also somewhat contrasting ways. The UNICEF report tends to define poverty with two main ideas. The first idea is the simple fact of income per household. The other instance they looked at is the child deprivation index, for smaller European countries, which focused primarily on essential items to a child’s well being. The other source provided was the ChildStats.gov summary, and they concluded that poverty was also based on income, but in relation to the amount of threshold that a family could endure. These thresholds varied by family size and members included in the family. The limitations for these assumptions would be lack of accounting for such incidences as child abuse or alcohol problems within a family. Simple problems like these can account for big impacts on poverty.
2. The multiple year data suggests to me in general that children have become more dull and lazy, which has everything to do with the nurture aspect of our society. Sure they are just children, and I am not talking about real situations, but if one looks at the data from UNICEF it shows that children aged 15 with 10 or less books or owning 6 or less educational possessions for the U.S. is extremely low. That being said, two areas that are much worse are poverty, which has increased 6% and children with single female parents, has increased 2%.
3. Family structure is highly related to poverty and thus, food insecurity. Based on the readings, families that were below the poverty threshold had children that were 44% more likely to be insecure of their food situation. As the percentage of households that are above the poverty threshold increase, the poverty and food insecurity percentages decrease.
4. So what can we do as a nation, to decrease the poverty level and threshold and move past this ongoing depression? For me, the answer is simple. We need a work plan as a nation that can fit all situations. For adults to succeed, their two goals in life should be to be a great worker, and a great parent. In this day of age, its almost impossible. The only solution is to provide greater workplace flexibility nationwide. Parents need to be paid sick days (provided they are telling the truth) and family emergencies. My estimation to this day would be that about 70% of low salary workers don’t have any paid sick days. I believe for us to be a stronger nation, we need to even out the great worker aspect, with the great parent one.