Module 3 Readings
This weeks readings focusing on child poverty was actually pretty eye opening. When reading and watching the videos about helping children in poverty, the whole time I was thinking to myself “in order to help child poverty, don’t we have to help out the family they are living with?” I was thinking this because ending child poverty starts with the family, not the children. After reading, this is something that I don’t think that was really talked about.
In chapter 5 of Karen Sternheimer’s book, there were a quite a bit of information. One thing that really stood out to me from the entire chapter was the story of the twelve year old boy beating and killing a six year old child. He said that he was using wrestling moves that he learned from watching tv. Which leads me to what Sternheimer kept mentioning I felt. She said repeatedly that media violence isn’t the primary cause of violence in real life. She mentions the imitation hypothesis from the case of the 12 year old was violence in the media pushes children over the edge and makes them snap. Sternheimer says that there is a problem with this. This imitation hypothesis is saying that we should focus on the media and not the other more likely possibilities that could trigger the violence. There is one thing that is mentioned towards the end of the chapter called the “mean-world syndrome” created by George Gerbner. Now, I have actually learned about this in a lot of my communication classes but I always found it interesting. What this syndrome is “by watching television violence, people mistakenly believe that the world is a violent place” (Sternheimer, 2013, 130). After learning this the first time, I have never forgotten it because I think it is something that is so true.
Out of all of the readings, I think my favorite one was Basic Facts about Low-Income Children by Yang Jiang. This article is full of statistics and a lot of them were really eye opening. For example, 33% of all people in poverty are children under the age of 18. Also, there are 72 million children under the age of 18, that is a lot of kids. Now of those kids, 44% of them live in low income families and 22% of them live in poor families. From looking at this article, it looks like the education levels of the parents highly affect the percentages. It is also mentioned that race plays a role into that too, but I feel like race and poverty is a stupid generalization. The piece of information that really stood out for me was that the level of children living in low income families is on the rise, increasing from 39% to 44% between the years of 2007 to 2013.
I never really thought about how little poverty is talked about on the news (I also don’t really watch the news, too much sad stuff), but after reading Poor Will Always Be With Us by Neil deMause it really clicked. deMause conducted a study for just over three years and in that time frame, there were only 58 news stories about poverty. That calculates to about one story every 15 weeks. This article went on and on and I will be honest, it was a lot of information and kind of difficult to read. But from what I got from it, it really did click in my head that there is very little poverty that is talked about on the news.
I could type for hours about all of the articles that I read and the videos that were watched. All of it was very interesting and eye opening. I never really realized how many children (and families) are living under the poverty line.
