Childhood Poverty In US

3 Pages 867 Words

In America, the issue of childhood poverty is in need of one of the greatest humanitarian efforts in history. One in five children of America live in poverty, with percentages in New York and California reaching above 25%, and the states of Texas, Florida, Massachusetts and Illinois all are above the 20% marker. 10 more states fall in line with those mentioned previously(Schrerrer). Such a decline in the standards of living of our children is even more dire when compared to rates of other industrialized nations. Countries of western Europe have childhood poverty rates that are considerably less troublesome, and services that are offered to people in those countries reflect a different attitude towards those children in need of care they obviously cannot provide for themselves. The people of America use have a system known as welfare which is used to “cushion” those families that require aid, or lost a job. In other countries, benefit packages are considerably higher in amount of money they provide, and in the wide array of services that are provided.
We must examine the cause of these issues, and later on it will be shown relevant to the overall cause of childhood poverty in America. The first of these is the values and morals taught to us by our forefathers, which have perhaps the single greatest impact on our viewpoints today. We, as a culture, have many values that we utilize on a daily basis. These values are often the hardest to point out in members of our own culture due to the fact that our actions that are pertinent to this behavior are automatic. When compared to Values of other countries, apparent correlation can be made between the state of that countries youth and it’s core system of values. Another plausible reason for the grotesque level of children living in poor conditions in this country which is also directly related to values of a culture is the amount of and quality of care provided. This care can b...