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“Nothing is impossible for me” – stories from Young Lives children

Young Lives is in the unique position of being able to study and work with a group of 12,000 children over 15 years as they grow up, start school, drop out or leave school, start work, cope with births and deaths in their families, and maybe even get married and have children themselves. As we pass the mid-point of our study we thought it would be good to share the stories of some of the children we are working with. We now know quite a lot about the children, their family situations, their problems, their hopes and fears and the contexts in which they live.

One of the strong themes running throughout the stories is how parents, even those with little education, are supportive of their children and hopeful about their future. The children themselves are frank about their hopes and fears. Above all they show remarkable resilience in helping their families cope with the difficulties that come their way. As 12-year-old Hadush from Ethiopia, who does not go to school but is proud of his work looking after cattle, said brightly in his interview: “Nothing is impossible for me.”

For these stories we used the interviews our researchers did with the children, individually and in groups, but also with their parents or other caregivers. None of the children appear in the photographs, however, which were separately commissioned. For the same reason, we have also used pseudonyms rather than their real names. This is because we are working with the children and their families over a long period of time and want to protect them from outside interest or interference, or indeed, prevent one child from being singled out over another.

We chose four or five children from each of the four study countries and a range of girls and boys and children from the younger and older groups. We also chose children from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, different family situations, and a mixture of children who live in urban or rural areas.

Each child’s story has a theme of some kind that emerged from the material and which illustrates the issues that the children themselves are having to contend with, but also gives a sense of the wider picture in relation to children’s lives, health, or schooling, or work and family. This ranges from child work and education, to migration, health, domestic violence, inequality, gender, and individual circumstances such as being an orphan or being disabled.

Ethiopia


Andhra Pradesh


Peru


Vietnam


Emerging themes

The importance of education is one of the main themes emerging from Young Lives research. Many of the children in the stories have parents who have had little or no schooling so these children are the first generation to benefit from education. This bodes well for the future – our research clearly shows that households with better educated parents are more likely to escape poverty. But the stories show that even (and perhaps especially) those parents who were not educated themselves are keen for their children to go to school and prepared to make sacrifices to support them in doing so. Both parents and children in our stories have high hopes – perhaps too high – for the future. Educational access is no guarantee of school quality, however, and there is evidence that quality is low – in Ethiopia, 39% of Young Lives’ older group of children can’t read a simple sentence. As the research progresses, we should be able to see whether these hopes are likely to be fulfilled – and what the consequences might be if they are not.

Another theme is how poverty is handed on from generation to generation. We have noticed that if a child is not getting enough to eat this has both short- and long-term effects on children’s educational and cognitive achievements. Within our 12-year-old group of children we found that almost a third are stunted in all our study countries. This varies from 28.7% in Peru to 32.3% in India. Less money in the household can lead to chronic malnutrition in children. Our research shows that this may also result in lower self-esteem, reduced ability to be responsible for their own actions, increased feelings of exclusion and lowered aspirations. This is then likely to be passed on to their own children as missed opportunities in childhood mean they may become caught in the poverty trap as adults. However, we have also seen that even at the local level among families that are already poor, certain decisions can have a big impact on children’s lives. For example, even quite poor families in India are paying for their children – usually their sons – to go to private school where they learn in English. They know that this could transform their job opportunities in future.

Although our sample is too small to be able to say anything about inequality on a national basis, we can say that within our group of 12,000 children and their families there are growing signs of inequality. Children from lower castes or classes, ethnic minorities and from rural areas are much more likely to be poor, and remain poor. About 20% of urban children but over a third of children in rural areas (and up to a half in Peru) suffer from chronic malnutrition in the form of stunting. [ref 1]  In Ethiopia, 85% of both older and younger children in rural areas live below the nationally defined poverty line, while in urban areas the figures are 44% for the younger group and 51% for the older group. These children and their families are increasingly left behind, and as we see clearly in the case Vietnam which has managed to improve the situation of many of its poorer people through economic growth, the real crunch comes with the bottom 20% who will continue to struggle to find a way out of poverty for themselves and their children.

Interestingly, we are finding that gender is not as big an issue as we anticipated it would be at the relatively young ages of both age groups. Gender discrimination is nuanced and complex. One study we did in India showed that as children go to secondary school, more boys stay on at school and more money is therefore spent on boys, not just because there are more boys in school but also because once enrolled expenditure on boys is higher than on girls. However, once a family has decided to educate a child beyond Grade 8, there is no gender-based expenditure bias and an equal proportion of boys and girls are sent to private schools. [ref 2]

We have also found some interesting results in terms of the effects of what are known as ‘shocks’ on individual households and children. In poor families, the number of these is often high – in Ethiopia for example, between 2002 and 2006 around 87% of households of the older children experienced at least one ‘shock’. The effect of a failed harvest, a lost job, or the illness and death of a parent can have both short-term and long-term effects on children’s development. In rural areas of Ethiopia, caregivers felt that household economic shocks such crop failure or the death of livestock had the most impact on the family, while children were far more concerned about situations affecting individual family members, family relations, and the household. They saw family illness in particular as having a major effect. [ref 3]

But our research also shows that children are hugely resilient and determinedly hopeful. There are numerous examples of children overcoming adversity and developing new skills despite financial or other family difficulties. In Ethiopia for instance, where poor families often face particular adversity, children often play an active part in helping their parents to adjust and cope with the new circumstances. If their contributions are seen to be valued this makes a real difference to the child, however difficult their lives may be. As 12-year-old Hadush from Ethiopia said in his interview: “Nothing is impossible for me.”


Photo credits
We would like to thank the photographers who provided such evocative images to support our work:
Ethiopia: © Young Lives / Aida Ashenafi
India: © Young Lives / Farhatullah Beig
Peru: © Young Lives / Lucero Del Castillo Ames; Sebastian Castañeda Vita; Raúl Egúsquiza Turriate
Vietnam: © Young Lives / Pham Viet Anh

Cited references:

[1] Stefan Dercon (2008) Children and the Food Price Crisis, Young Lives Policy Brief 5.

[2] Rozana Himaz (2009) Is There a Boy Bias in Household Education Expenditure? The Case of Andhra Pradesh in India Based on Young Lives Data, Young Lives Working Paper 46.

[3] Jo Boyden (2009, forthcoming) ‘Children’s Experiences of Poverty and Adversity in Ethiopia’, Children, Youth and Environments (summer 2009).
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