Cycle of Poverty
The cycle of poverty is when a family remains in poverty over many successive generations. For this reason reducing child poverty has been a focus of almost all governments as a way to break this cycle. Improving the quality of education provided to the poor is seen by most as the best way to break this cycle. Improving the environment the child grows up in, ensuring access to health, providing financial incentives (either through benefit schemes or reducing taxes) and promoting family values have all been suggested as ways to break the cycle.
Boys and girls have equal rates of poverty through their childhoods but as women enter their teens and childbearing years the rates of poverty between the genders widens. Globally, women are far more impoverished than men and poor children are more likely to live in female-headed households. Attempts to combat the cycle of poverty, therefore, have often targeted mothers as a way to interrupt the negative patterns of poverty that affect the education, nutrition/health, and psychological/social outcomes for poor children.
Read more about this topic: Child Poverty
Famous quotes containing the words cycle of, cycle and/or poverty:
“The mysteries remain,
I keep the same
cycle of seed-time
and of sun and rain;”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“The lifelong process of caregiving, is the ultimate link between caregivers of all ages. You and I are not just in a phase we will outgrow. This is life—birth, death, and everything in between.... The care continuum is the cycle of life turning full circle in each of our lives. And what we learn when we spoon-feed our babies will echo in our ears as we feed our parents. The point is not to be done. The point is to be ready to do again.”
—Paula C. Lowe (20th century)
“I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruit, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)