Poor Kids Documentary Summary

“The Working Poor: Invisible in America”, written by David Shipler (2004), portrayed many families who faced extreme barriers that directly impacted their families and affected the quality of their lives. This book not only gave the reader a sense of America’s social justice issues, but it also allowed the reader an opportunity to take a look inside the lives of real people struggling with social, economic, and cultural barriers to achieving the “American Dream”. Among many of the individuals and families in the book, most were barely making it financially, despite large efforts. With respect to social work, David Shipler did a fantastic job opening the eyes of the reader to the problems one might face with clients, and the spiral effects

Since the human race began, we have been discovering ways to expand our lives and survive in the world. We have acquired natural instincts when it comes to surviving. For example, fight or flight is a natural response when we feel threatened by something. The Lost Boys of Sudan are an amazing example of what we would do in order to survive.

Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, demonstrates the struggles of mental health issues that generate from poverty through her family’s journeys, both mentally and physically. Jeannette Walls displays how poverty can affect an entire family’s life through her use of realism, in-depth descriptions, and imagery in her memoir, The Glass Castle. The Glass Castle focuses on the tie between mental health issues and poverty through the theme of the lasting effects of poverty.

A lingering question to many of the less fortunate in America pertains to the existence of the so-called “American dream.” Does this American dream exist and is it attainable? The American dream inspires many immigrants move to America, hoping to better their lives and those of their families. However, in the novel, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich’s attempt achieve the American dream deems it not possibly attainable. Likewise, today, in the twenty-first century, the American dream is still not attainable. Ordinarily, no one would go through such physical and mental challenges to achieve a just barely attainable dream, but many of disadvantaged families still do, even today during the twenty-first century.

Adeola claims the growth of poverty in the United States pushes a “disproportionate burden . . . on African-Americans” and single mothers (75). Both of these factors are a part of contribute to Wes’s story. Wes’s mother, Mary, continues the trend of generational poverty as“the first in her family to even begin college”(Moore 14). Mary losing her Pell Grant is another example of oppression Adeola discusses (Moore 17). The study outlines how “[the government] has long been raging war against poor people using a variety of weapons (Adeola 76). For Mary, she lost her grant after President Ronald Reagan passed a budget that gutted funding for the entire program (Moore 17). If Mary would have been able to finish school, a complete education could have been an expectation for Wes. To her son’s misfortune, the government actions that disrupted Mary’s educational career indirectly harmed Wes’s opportunities with the reinforcement of generational poverty. With an impoverished family, an absent father, and a rough neighborhood, Wes’s likelihood of success further declined. As a high school dropout with a criminal record, Wes’s search for a high paying job became nearly impossible (Moore 140). Wes tried to overcome his poverty riddled life by joining the Job Corps with his friend Levy (Moore 139). Through this, Wes hoped to find a steady income without the danger of being in the drug

In the second half of his book Evicted, Matthew Desmond continues to explore the underprivileged housing world and the social and economic strains it places on the poorest inhabitants of Milwaukee, WI.

I was born during a war in Croatia in 1993, so my parents did not have much the first six years of my life. Even though I was young, and do not remember how much my parents struggled, the poverty we faced did impact my life. Allison would agree that poverty impacts a person’s life, she wrote two articles about it. I learned to not take things for granted, especially my education. I have always taken school seriously, and worked hard to earn good grades. Dorothy Allison also thought education was important because she wanted to get out of poverty. I can understand that, if your parents struggled, you

In 2007, 28 percent of Baltimore’s children lived in poverty. Both the author’s mother and the other Wes Moore’s mother struggled to provide for their children. Both took extra jobs in the hopes of providing their children with a better life.

In preparation for this paper I chose to read Fire in the ashes: twenty five years among the poorest children in America by Jonathan Kozol. In this book Kozol has followed these children and their family’s lives for the past twenty five years. In his writing Kozol portrays a point of view most from his background and standing would not be capable of having. He portrays what life is like for those who have been let down by the system that was meant to protect them. Kozols writing style can be very blunt at times, not for shock value, but for the sake of portraying these children’s realities, and not sugarcoating the inequalities that they are faced with. There was a lot of balance within this book. In the book there are two parts: part one

In Bell Hooks’ essay, “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”, Hooks addresses and clarifies the misinterpretations that people have of the assumptions made of the poor, how poor individuals are viewed in human culture and how the poor are represented on television. She helps the audience understand how these assumptions are wrong.

Nearly 8.2% of all American children lived in unimaginable “deep poverty” in 2016, according to the University of California, Davis. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a profound insight into these hidden lives. The Glass Castle is a autobiographical memoir detailing the nonconformist lifestyle of the Walls family. This somewhat dysfunctional family had a number of unconventional experiences. Rex abused alcohol. They leapt out of and fell back into poverty. They roamed. They rejected civilization. However, poverty always wound its way back into Jeannette's childhood. As the family’s financial situation worsened, the family gradually fell apart, and poverty always remained a blotch to their

According to the PBS Frontline video “Poor Kids” 2012, more than 46 million Americans are living beneath the poverty line. The United States alone has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the industrialized world. It is stated that 1 out of 5 children are living in poverty. The video documented the lives of three families who are faced with extreme hardships and are battling to survive a life of being poor. All three families have more than one child and could barely afford to pay their bills and purchase food for their household.

In the passage “What is poverty?”, the author Jo Goodwin Parker, describes a variety of things that she considers to portray the poverty in which she lives in. She seems to do this through her use of first-person point of view to deliver a view of poverty created by a focused use of rhetorical questions, metaphors, imagery, and repetition to fill her audience with a sense of empathy towards the poor.

The short documentary “Child of Rage” presents an example of how experiencing abuse as a child can shape the child later in life and how some children can recover. The intrafamilial abuse that Beth experienced as a one year old affected her behavior later in her childhood when she was adopted. Beth was also able to recover from some of the effects of the child abuse she experienced once she was separated from her adoptive family and taken to a special home.

The frank family fled from their home to Switzerland. But, where did they actually go? All of this panic because they are Jewish. Because they have a different religion?! Keep reading as I tell you the struggles and conditions of how life was in the secret annex.