Impacts on Early Emotional Development

This week’s blog assignment is to know the impact of poverty, war, terrorism, abuse and other forms of trauma faced by children around the world and the impact that these hardship may have on children’s wellbeing and development.

I come from a developing country, and I decided to choose an industrialized country because, an industrialized country is an economically developed country, it is a sovereign state that has a highly developed economy and advanced technological infrastructure relative to other less industrialized nations.

So my focus is on Liangshan in Hong Kong, according to official statistics, around 30% of the rural population in Liangshan is struggling below the national rural poverty line. Deep-rooted difficulties such as extreme poverty, poor access health services, low awareness of hospital deliveries, under-equipped health facilities and shortages of qualified health providers, all combine to the imperil the survival and wellbeing of children of the children and women living on the edge.

As early educators we know the effects of poverty on children’s emotional health and cognitive development. If a child does not get the required nutrition right from the womb it affects both physical growth, cognition and emotional wellbeing of the child. Undernutrition has a greater effect on development in children living in poverty, whether in industrialized or in developing countries, than on children who are not poor. If a child does not get access to health care and good nutrition, the child will be faced with numerous health scares. The effects of undernutrition on young children ages 0-8 can impede behavioral and cognitive development, educability and reproductive health, thereby undermining future work productivity.

The first five years of a child’s life are fundamentally important. They are the foundation that shapes children’s future health, happiness, growth, development and learning achievement at school, in the family and community and in life in general.

Each time I ponder about the effects of poverty on children, never in my wildest imagination would I have thought of Hong Kong as one of the regions affected because of their technological advancement and they are one of the many developed nations that is economically stable, and I expect them to be able to provide atheist primary health to majority of their population.

The insights I gained, is that poor nutrition and poor health care facilities delays physical growth, and motor development in children. It also affects the cognitive development which results in lower IQs, greater degree of behavioral problems and deficient social skills at school age. It also decreases a child’s attention span, deficient learning and lower education. For us to have sound children ready for school, we have to be the voice for mothers who are ignorant of these things mentioned above and those that have no access to primary health care because the good health of all children starts from the womb of their mothers.

Reference:

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry