United Way of the Midlands Blog

As we mentioned in a previous post, several students at Blythewood High School recently participated in the SNAP Challenge. The SNAP Challenge asks participants to live on the same budget as people living on food stamps, approximately $4 per person per day for a week. In honor of the upcoming National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week (Nov. 12-18), we’ll be sharing these reflections periodically with our readers.

What I liked about the Snap Challenge is we learned about the different challenges people have to go through. Such as finding the cheapest food, but also the healthiest food. You only have a certain amount of money depending on how many people in your family. My family had two parents, one child, and a diabetic. We were most focused on the diabetic because we had watch out what we bought. Finding out what food we had to get was hard and expensive also. We had $20 per day to spend on food. At the end of the day, we had to make sure that we got all of our food groups. It was challenging, but eventually we got through the hard parts. We look at the food group chart, and then we look at the different groceries papers to see what items we needed.

Everyone should do the Snap Challenge because it teaches you about the different programs that the government offer to people in poverty. It will people teach how hard it is for people trying to provide their families with healthy meals every day. People do not know how good they have it, and they take things for granted. When people they are try to buy groceries, they can’t always get what they want. They have to worry about the people there are providing for. The Snap Challenge taught me about poverty, and how the government tries to help.

-Quinton Madison

Chronic diseases can make an otherwise difficult situation almost an impossibility, especially when you are responsible for providing nutritious meals for your whole family. Quinton learned how difficult it can be for someone with a chronic disease who is living in poverty, and the difficulties it can place on a family. Check the blog next time for more reflections, and if you’re interested in taking the SNAP Challenge with your family please let us know so we can share your experiences as well! Thank you, students of Blythewood High School for LIVING UNITED!

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

-Fredrick Douglass

An interesting article was posted in the New York Times in January with the simple idea that we could end poverty with a hug, or lots of hugs, rather. In the article, Nicholas D. Kristof examined the impact of “toxic stress” in early life, and even before.

Where does toxic stress come from? Kristof explains it as something that can “arise from parental abuse of alcohol or drugs. It could occur in a home where children are threatened and beaten. It might derive from chronic neglect — a child cries without being cuddled […] the stress emerges when a child senses persistent threats but no protector.”

This toxic stress has an immediate and lasting impact on young children, perhaps even before leaving the womb. Cortisol, a stress hormone, can change children’s metabolism or even decrease brain function, and children facing toxic stress are more likely to have trouble with academics, be quick to anger, and tangle with the law. Stress in early childhood development can cause lasting symptoms as adults, too, with higher rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes and other physical problems.

Kristof suggests addressing poverty with this information by using it to break the cycle. He says, “Poverty is difficult to overcome partly because of self-destructive behaviors. Children from poor homes often shine, but others may skip school, abuse narcotics, break the law, and have trouble settling down in a marriage and a job. Then their children may replicate this pattern.”

It is our job to set up programs to raise awareness and help young children. Many times no one steps in until the child starts school, but as Kristof points out, this is already too late:

“At age 6, studies have found, these children are only one-third as likely to have behavioral or intellectual problems as others who weren’t enrolled. At age 15, the children are less than half as likely to have been arrested.”

By simply teaching parents to pay attention to children and act as protectors, maybe we can help break the cycle of poverty.

What do you think? Read the article and share your thoughts below.