Doug Wallace: Inspirational Stories of Childhood Poverty

Poor parenting can cause a child to fail in life, or become incarcerated, or have a bad marriage, and it can cause the child to become a poor parent themeselves later in life.

The USA Today publised an article titled, “Study:Poverty dramatically affects children’s brains.” 

This article makes the argument that certain brain functions of low-income 9 and 10-year-olds pale in comparison with those of wealthy children, and that the difference is almost equivalent to the damage from a stroke.

It goes on to conclude that there’s a growing body of evidence that malnutrition, stress, illiteracy and toxic environments in low-income children’s lives affects their brains.

A parent’s income does not hold back the opportunity of a child, but poor parenting skills can.

Influence of Mentors

Research conducted by the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), shows that the overwhelming majority of the children will experience dramatic improvements in behavior, performance and test scores if they receive the proper mentoring.

In other words, poor parenting creates negative influences that alters the course of the child’s future.

Positve Parental Characteristics

Parental characteristics, such as those that employers value, like reliability, diligence, and honesty are far more important when it comes to studying children in the public school system—they are the critical factors that affect a child’s behavior and improve life chances.

When parents are not reliable, when they fail in character and honesty, then poor parenting causes the children to repeat the cycle.

Most families that suddenly fall below the poverty line because of an unexpected job loss, are headed by competent parents who can care for their children quiet adequately.

When they fall upon hard times, they may need short term cash assistance, just as they would if their homes were destroyed by fire or floods, but their children will be fine. These parents usually bounce back.

But parents who fall below the poverty line and stay there, are not able to provide their children with the proper nourishment and support that middle classs children take for granted.

These parents will inevitably hold thier children back because of poor parenting skills.  Allowing your family to remain stuck in poverty is a failure in parenting.

The parents must accept responsibility to insure their children are given an equal opportunity to succeed later in life. Raising a child in continuous poverty is not a good way to make that happen.

Cause and Effect

Bad parenting causes a child to fail to make consistent connections between cause and effect, which leaves them feeling powerless to influence the course of their lives—a sense of defeat keeps them without hope and with a low sense of self-worth.

Influence of Role Models  

Poor parenting can be so damaging that it causes the child to need the help of supportive role models to help them overcome the developmental barriers, and to resist the negative influences at home and in their neighborhoods.