The Everyday Environments of Children’s Poverty - special issue of Children, Youth and Environments (vol 19.2)

The latest issue of the on-line journal Children, Youth and Environments includes 2 articles from Young Lives:
http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/19_2/index.htm


Risk and Capability in the Context of Adversity: Children's Contributions to Household Livelihoods in Ethiopia
by Jo Boyden

This article analyses how children in Ethiopia respond to household adversity in the context of poverty. It highlights the association between poverty and other forms of hardship and the complex interplay of risk and protective factors in young people’s lives. It argues that identifying adversity is not straightforward because beliefs affect the outcomes of such experiences, and different cultures and actors hold different views on the matter, so that assumed risks can in some cases be protective and foster specific competencies in the young. To support this argument, children’s work—often viewed as a risk—and their role in preventing and mitigating household hardship are underlined as a potential source of protection, resilience and skills development. In this way, the limitations of research that focuses solely on detrimental child outcomes of risk exposure are revealed and the need for a more nuanced, multi-actor view of these processes is emphasised.


Poverty and the Psychosocial Competencies of Children: Evidence from the Young Lives Sample in Four Developing Countries
by Stefan Dercon and Pramila Krishnan

Using unique data from four developing countries, this paper explores the relationship between material poverty and the psychosocial competencies of children. Within a cohort of 12-year-olds, we find that measures of self-efficacy, sense of inclusion, self-esteem and educational aspirations all correlate with measures of the material well-being of the family in which they are growing up. In short, material circumstances shape these wider dimensions of child well-being. As other evidence has shown, these measures of psychosocial competencies reflect important life skills that affect children as adults and shape their future socio-economic status. This suggests a mechanism by which poverty may be transmitted across generations. In addition, our evidence shows how a caregiver’s education and school participation affects children’s psychosocial competencies. This may indicate a possible means of overcoming such transmission of poverty over time.