what children are telling us about poverty and its implications for child development mike wessells...

What Children Are Telling Us About Poverty and Its Implications for Child

Development

Mike Wessells

Christian Children’s Fund,

Columbia University, &

Randolph-Macon College

Overview

• Diverse Contexts of Poverty• Family & household mechanisms of coping with

poverty

- altered patterns of caretaking

- changed roles and risks for children• CCF poverty study and children’s

perspectives on poverty

I. Social Ecologies of Poverty• Transitional & chronic• Displacement• Camps & resettlement areas• Migration• Seasonal changes• Streets• Rural & urban• Political oppression• Exclusion & marginalization• Interactive, dynamic

Diverse Views of Poverty• Dominant economic discourse—monetarized,

commoditized view

• Voices of marginalized, oppressed people seldom heard

• Questions about whether poverty is the dominating experience it is often assumed to be

• Culturally constructed views of family & spiritual‘wealth’ and well-being

• Gendered experiences of poverty

• Developmental stages

II. Household Coping Mechanisms—Afghanistan

• Children assume additional responsibilities, often alongside going to school

• Increased reliance on children for earning family income through activities such as petty business

• Benefits

- increased skills and earning potential

- increased family income

- enhanced child role in family decision-making

- boost to self-esteem and status

Household Coping Mechanisms--Afghanistan

• Dangerous child labor, often with school dropout or nonattendance


• Forced early marriage

- increased poverty

- attraction of the ‘brideprice’

- reduced age of marriage

- protection, health & violence concerns—suicide, reproductive health issues, spouse abuse


• Children on the streets—begging, foraging for food, reducing pressure for meals & care


• Trafficking—modification of older coping mechanism of children going away to work for a member of the extended family

• Baghlan Province—families required their children to go with traffickers through Pakistan and then to Saudi Arabia, where they did petty trading but also suffered abuse, exploitation and detention

Care for Young Children—Northern Uganda IDP Camps

• Separation and risks of rearing

by extended or foster families• Survival choices• Effective care issues

- mothers’ long hours but no child care support

- leaving children on own or ‘in care’ of older

children

- overwhelmed mothers

- understimulation & ineffective feeding

- weak attachment

Risks to Teenagers

• Youth ‘idling’ increases risks of recruitment, engagement in crime and substance abuse

• Joining armed groups to obtain money or goods

• Girls and sex work—household adaptation, sometimes with parental encouragement

CCF Poverty Study

• Collaboration with Oxford University (Jo Boyden & team)

• Objectives:

- Learn more about children’s views of poverty

- Use the insights from children to develop a framework that guides CCF work to alleviate poverty

- Position CCF relative to Millennium Development Goals

Three PartsI. International Perspective: A Review of the Literature

II. Listening to Children and Poor People Themselves—Kenya, Bolivia, Sierra Leone, India, and Belarus

III. Implications for CCF—A Synthesis of the Findings

Available from:

http://www.christianchildrensfund.org under publications

http://www.christianchildrensfund.org/

Methodology• Qualitative methods to elicit local understandings and perspectives

• Emphasis on richness & narrative

• Interviews with children of different ages, parents, elders and community leaders

• Focus group discussions with teenagers, parents

• Drawing, problem trees, visual methods

• Direct observation—transect walks, etc.

• Partnership between outside researchers and local & national CCF staff who were known and trusted by families & communities

• Respect for confidentiality & informed consent, child protection

Assumptions

• The traditional poverty discourse as it relates to children is largely based on adult ideas and assumptions

• It gives prominence to survival and physical health impacts, with a particular focus on infants and under-fives.

What Is Poverty to a Child?

• Children understand poverty as a deeply physical, emotional and social experience.

• This experience is felt acutely and minutely from an early age.

• More about experience than about resources

Children’s Narratives

• “I feel bad. I feel like the odd one out…You lack self-esteem. You feel like you shouldn’t talk wherever you are, like you shouldn’t be expressing your ideas. You feel lonely. You feel ashamed. Like if you have only two underpants and you have to wear one and wash the other and hang it up to dry everyone will always see that you have only two – the red one and the green one – and you are alternating between them.”

16-year-old Kenyan girl

Three Key Factors

International Program GroupCCF • March, 2004

So what are they feeling?

For children, CCF has found that poverty is a deeply relational and relative, dynamic, and multi-dimensional experience.

Poor children are deprived of essential material conditions and services; they are excluded on the basis of their age, gender, class, caste, etc.; and they are vulnerable to the increasing array of threats in their environments.


DEV

Thus, CCF views child poverty as comprising three inter-related domains:

Deprivation

ExclusionVulnerability


Deprivation

A lack of material conditions and services generally held to be essential to the development of children’s full potential.

“We become weak.”


“Of course I want more money because ultimately, food is the ultimate thing you want in life, you know there’s lots of problems we don’t have enough money to get food, for ourselves so we would…we have only two goats and two cows and we have little land, and that’s what we do.”

12 year old boy (Bihar)

Income


“For example, like a rich woman gets her immunisations done, she will have healthy children, she will not be weak. But for us, because we are poor we cannot pay for immunisation, we will have weak children we do not even know whether they will survive or not; we become weak.”

- Muslim woman in her 30s-40s, Bihar

Health


“Nothing is regular in this school, the last time there was a class was about 10, 12 days ago. When the teacher comes there is a class, when he doesn’t come there is no class. But even the madrassa is not regular, it is not well maintained, one side of the wall has fallen off.”

Girl, 13, Bihar

Education


Exclusion

The result of unjust processes through which the dignity, voice, and rights of certain specific groups in society are denied, or their existence threatened.

“They stay as if they are ghosts.”


“Poverty means unequal relationships with others. If you are poor you suffer from stigma. Others look at you in a certain way like you’re worthless. Feeling unimportant: ‘No one will listen to me, no one cares for me’. ‘You don’t count’. ‘I’m poor, I don’t count, I’m a piece of dirt.”

Adolescent girl, Minsk, Belarus

Relative


“My sister got married and I had to take over her household work, so I had to leave school. My father told me, ‘Now that your sister is married, how can you go to school? Graze the cattle during daytime and at night you can study at home.”

Adolescent girl, Oruro, Bolivia

Gender


“It does not look good when Patlia children say on our face that ‘you are Harijan and we do not eat the food served to you’. I do not feel good when they do not eat in the school. It hurts me.”

Nine year old girl, MP, India

Caste


“The name ‘ex-com’ gives us a bad name. People won’t give us work…when an ex-com has a problem and it involves the police. They will sentence you straight to jail. As long as you are an ex-com there is no form of appeal. You get express service to prison.”

Adolescent ex-combatant, Makeni, Sierra Leone

Popular Perception


“There’s no justice. For them (urban population) there’s justice, there’s law, while here there’s nothing, we die and that’s it. Quietly we disappear…that’s how it is.”

30 year-old woman, Opoqueri Village, Bolivia

Urban/Rural


“People think it (disability) has something to do with witchcraft - someone has put something bad on you on you. It’s like the way people used to think of twins - they are a bad omen and they used to be killed. It’s the same with disabled children. They are considered bad luck.”

Interviewee, Nairobi, Kenya

Disability


Vulnerability

An inability to cope with existing or probable threats to children in their environment.

“We don’t know what will happen tomorrow.”


“There are some children here who killed themselves. Three in our slum area - all of them were orphans. This is the last option. It means they have tried everything - they tried here, they tried there and they failed. So they feel there is no other option but to kill themselves. They have no hope of life. They see that there is no future.”

Adolescent boy, Nairobi, Kenya

Marginalized


“You have to be humble to the aunt and uncle and show them respect. You must not be proud. Because you don’t have a mother, you don’t have a father so you have no other choice but to be humble. If you do good things you never get praised - they always shout on you and put you down.”

Adolescent girl, Makeni, Sierra Leone

Family Protection


“My father has many wives and he loves the other wives more than my mother. This means that we never get us much as the other children. My mother is the first wife. The others have gone to the traditional healer to get charms to influence my father so that he prefers them.”

Adolescent girl, Rusinga, Kenya

Practices


“My father is alive but he is sick, he’s had TB for the last two years. He doesn’t work because if he does any heavy work he starts vomiting blood, so he just sits there and doesn’t have any work. We cannot afford to go to the doctor, when he was vomiting blood we went in for an x-ray, and the x ray showed he had TB. He’s never had any medication. All my sisters work, even my elder sister’s son (he is two), he also goes over there and works, look at his scars (on the little boy’s inside ankles).”

14 year-old girl, India

Child Labor


“Both my husband and father were killed by the rebels. I am completely on my own in trying to care for my children. We in this village really suffered in the war. Houses were burnt down. People were beaten to death…they cleared off everything from us. They would strip the women naked to look if they were hiding money.”

Woman, village near Makeni, Sierra Leone

Conflict


“Some of these girls are kidnapped and are sold for money to men.”

Woman, Minsk, Belarus

Trafficking


The DEV Framework

Deprivation

ExclusionVulnerability


So how do children respond?

The research has challenged how we think about childhood:• Tendency to think of children as passive

victims who need rescuing.• The causes of poverty are thought to be

largely structural and involving processes in which children have no say or control.



• Children are attributed lesser ability than adults and seen as not having the needed skills and experience to hold valid views re possible solutions to poverty.

• Seen as dependent on adults and being especially emotionally, physically, and psychologically vulnerable.



Our research has indicated very clearly that children are not passive recipients of experience but active contributors to their own well-being and development.


Child Agency

Just like adults, children are very active in engaging with the world around them and harness their reasoning, insight and expertise to the construction of their own values, meanings, and strategies.

“I live next to my niece, and I see that her brothers do not do anything, anything at all. They have never done…and we have complained, because we had to wash their plates. And still they didn’t do anything. So we have started to tell them if they don’t (wash their plates) we won’t either! And it has started to change, and we ask, demand our rights, because in our houses our brothers don’t do anything.”

14 year-old girl, La Paz, Bolivia


Child Agency

Children have important social and economic responsibilities and many do not regard themselves as dependent on adults so much as interdependent with adults.

“We use it for food...We don’t go home with the actual money, after selling, we use the money immediately for buying cooking items. We buy rice, oil, salt. If your parents are poor, you need to assist them and need to buy food. The money is not enough for food. So even if we wanted to keep some of it for ourselves it is not enough. Even the boys do the same thing: as long as your parents, are poor you need to assist them.” 14-17 year-old girls, village near Kabala, Sierra Leone


Child Agency

Many think of themselves as co-contributors to the family, playing their own part in the care of younger siblings and incapacitated adults and in household maintenance and survival.

“Children are forced to become adults much too soon. One example is a 17 year-old boy with a 15 year-old girlfriend looking after two small children. The mother just took off and left.”

Adolescent girl, Minsk, Belarus


Child Agency

For many children taking on age-appropriate roles and responsibilities within the family and community can be a vital source of self-esteem and motivation for children.


Why DEV?

• Framework for addressing poverty and its structural roots

• Embodiment of concerns expressed by children

• Enables linkage between macro- and micro-levels

• Operationalizes child rights approach

what children are telling us about poverty and its implications for child development mike wessells...

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