Poverty and Children With Special Needs

Categories: OTHERS

Poverty and Children With Special Needs

Poverty is one of the most pervasive conditions associated with children with special needs. Already generally recognized as one of leading factors correlated with a huge number of social issues, poverty is in some ways an umbrella so large that it leads to ask whether it is a cause or an effect. As it relates to the topic, however, we can say definitively that poverty is an adequate way to summarize the existence of a huge number of contributing factors that make a family less likely to be able to adequately support a child with special needs.

Poverty as a Causal Factor

Poverty -- the lack of adequate money -- on the part of the parent(s) can directly contribute to the birth of a special needs child through a huge number of direct physical stressors, including (but not limited to):

• Poor Nutrition: An inadequately-fed fetus is likely to be born prematurely or at a low birth weight, both of which are definitively correlated with special-needs diagnoses.

• Neglect: Poor parents are significantly more likely to neglect their children simply as a matter of necessity, leaving them alone or with inadequate care so that they can pursue opportunities to pay the bills.

• Abuse: Poor parents are also significantly more likely to actively abuse their infants, being unable to cope with the stress of caring for a child while struggling with money and/or being addicted to mood- or mind-altering drugs that cause them to act abusively.

• Exposure: Obviously, homelessness or inadequate shelter is much more commonplace for poor parents, both of which can cause developmental problems in infants.

• Disease: Inadequate healthcare is one of the hallmarks of modern poverty; a child of poor parents is significantly more likely to have the earliest signs of a disease go unrecognized -- or recognized and untreated -- until the opportunity for prevention has passed.

In short, families that suffer from chronic poverty are significantly more likely to have children with special needs -- and are also the least likely to be able to stand up to the stress of raising a child with special needs.

Single Parentage, Poverty, and Special Needs

A significant 8% of children born to two-parent families live at or below the Federal poverty level. That statistic alone is grim enough -- but it's important to note that over the past few decades, the percentage of children born to unwed mothers has skyrocketed to 38%, and a massive 32% of single-parent children live below the poverty line. That averages out to 22% of all American children being 'born poor' -- and thus, at a significantly higher risk of being born with special needs, as described above.

In short, if we intend to seek out a policy solution to the increasing number of special needs children overwhelming our schools, there is an obvious area to begin: with the elimination of poverty. Recent efforts in Utah as well as significant number of experiments a few decades ago across Canada and the US have shown that we have the resources we need to do so -- just not the political will.