Money and Childhood

Today in our in class activity we discussed the statement: “It’s bad when families are poor, but if they got off their butts they wouldn’t be in that situation. They got themselves into it, they can get themselves out.” This was just a general statement, but it is an opinion that I think a lot of people hold. I don’t think that it is a fair statement. When we discussed this in small groups, my group thought that we have to consider the situation that a family is in. I think that there are some families that this statement would apply to, especially in North America, and other well developed countries. It does occur in families that they are just too lazy to work for a better life. We also see families that gamble away all of their money, or make bad financial choices that lead them to being poor. While we do see this occurring in some families, I think that the statement is way to general and does not describe every poor family. There are some families who work very hard, but can never seem to pull themselves out of their bad situations. In my group we discussed how difficult it is to move from lower class to middle/upper class. When you are born into a lower class family it will be hard to ever move up to the middle class. Some people may work hard, but if they never had the opportunity to go to college, or get a good job, they will have a hard time making more money. We also talked about the issue on a more global level. There is people in countries like Africa that work all day doing backbreaking labour, and they don’t make any money. The video we watched in class on the chocolate trade really put things in perspective for me. Some of those people, including children, work for nothing in a slave trade. This is an example of a case where people are born into little to no money and won’t have a chance to “get themselves out.” I also think that sometimes life isn’t fair to children. When people have a child and are very poor, the chances of that child getting out of that situation are slim, not that it doesn’t happen. In the video we watched we seen children as young as six years old being taken away from their families to work as slaves in the chocolate trade. So I think that this statement doesn’t consider all the possibilities, and that when considering why people are poor we need to look at every situation separately.