Our American Tragedy: The Killing Fields of Childhood Poverty

A simple way to take a human life is to snuff it out with a bullet in the head or heart. A slow way to take a human life is to deprive a growing child of food, shelter, and protection from physical and psychological stress. Deprivation of a child wrecks the mind and body, and if you don't believe that try living in one of our American poverty killing fields. White, black, brown, it makes no difference -- our poverty killing fields don't care about skin color.

So what is "poverty" -- how do we define it? Governments have their own definitions, ideas usually derived from the established classes they represent. My own definition of poverty derives from what people can or cannot do. Any family that cannot afford health insurance for its children is poor -- no matter what the family income. The consequence for that family is almost always inadequate preventive medicine, or inadequate treatment of recognized clinical conditions that already exist, which means that family is essentially living in Michael Harrington's Other America -- the Third World America that lives inside this country ignored by the affluent class that believes the only people who matter are the people who have survived and prospered in the American survival-of-the-fittest game.

Is human life merely some kind of board game in which dice are thrown and moves made from square to square? Is acquiring houses and hotels on Park Place what our trip on this lonely rock is all about? Do Americans really believe that? Republicans apparently believe it. Our Republican Party and its smirking President apparently think it's amusing to tighten their ties, flash their gold cuff-links, and spit on American children without health insurance.

Of course, the fact of children living without health insurance is only part of the American problem. Our real problem is the fact of children living in poverty -- our own Third World within our First World. Americans have been brain-washed into believing that political freedom means that thirty or forty million people in this country need to live in misery on the edge of extinction. The general problem of children in poverty is hardly ever a focus of attention in the media. Corporations don't want their products and services advertised alongside depressing content. Television food shows display well-fed people cooking and stuffing themselves with food -- they don't show you people in chronic hunger. Television broadcasters are happy to show you people starving in Africa, but they rarely focus a camera on hungry people in America. Maybe they don't want you to pay attention to them.

Too many Americans are unaware how chronic poverty wrecks the minds and bodies of children, effectively insuring the transmission of poverty from one generation to the next -- a consequence of the passage of circumstance, not the passage of genes.

Medical people have known for a long time that poverty during early childhood is associated with increased prevalence of disease and a decreased life span in adulthood. It makes no difference if later some poor children become middle-class or even rich adults -- they suffer from their previous childhood poverty.

This suggests that something in the early life experiences of children in poverty sets them on a life trajectory of impaired health. Many clinicians and psychologists believe the "something" is chronic physical and emotional stress, that stress regulatory mechanisms are damaged by excessive exposure to cumulative environmental risks during childhood. The plain fact is that children in poverty live different lives than their wealthier counterparts -- they live in a "killing field" of inadequate health care, poor nutrition, and chronic physical and emotional stress.

Research has demonstrated that the families of children living in poverty tend to have high levels of conflict, greater threat of family break-up, and harsher and more unresponsive parenting. (Yes, it takes "research" to demonstrate this to people who have never known poverty.)

People who flatter themselves about how they blow the horn of "family values" need to understand that if they vote against social programs to alleviate the damages of poverty they are living in a cloud of fetid hypocrisy.

Research has also demonstrated that in the killing fields of childhood poverty a number of environmental physical and social and family factors increase physiological stress, increase blood pressure and activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis in children.

In a new study by G.W. Evans and P. Kim at Cornell University (Psychol. Sci. 2007 18(11):953), a long-term study of 207 white children living in rural areas in upstate New York, evidence shows that the more years spent living in poverty, the greater the signs of physiological stress dysfunction at age 13. It apparently makes no difference if at age 13 the child is now out of poverty: the effects of early poverty are permanent.

The saddest thing about these killing fields of childhood poverty is that we make these fields ourselves -- by our ignorance, inattention, and arrogance.

America has a large population of people who claim they want to help humanity. Are they doing enough to end the killing fields of childhood poverty? Maybe you see it, but I don't. What I see are people refusing to extend the S-CHIP children's health insurance program on the basis of some shameful crackpot conservative "ideology" -- more of an old story with rotten roots in Victorian England. The irony is that the British are now taking better care of their children than we do.

Comments

[Norge]

Yes.

Apathy prevails towards the stigatized group of shame.
The group of shame's dispair, cripples them inside the revolving doors of time, from one generation to the next they live out their existences in squaller.
The survival mechanism of rage, cooks to bitterness as the children grow.

The cages wait, newly built super prisons prepared for the next generation from the group of shame, those individuals who have broken free from the existence of squaller.

www.amnesty.org