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Newt Gingrich: poor kids should work!
Salon published a great piece on Friday covering the most shocking policy ideas proposed throughout the years by Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich. In addition to the fact that Gingrich allegedly tried to divorce his first wife while she was recovering from cancer surgery and cheated on his second wife after she was diagnosed with MS, what do you know about this flip-flopping “family man?”
Here’s where the right-wing candidate stands or has stood on issues that will affect you and your children. (Hint: if you live in public housing, get ready to send your kids to work!) Continue reading »
The US Census Bureau now considers the impact of food stamps on the poverty rate.
More than 16% of Americans now find themselves in poverty, which is the highest level ever, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
People are considered in poverty if they make $11,139 annually for an individual, or $22,314 for a family of four. Right now, 49.1 million Americans live at or below this level, nearly three million more than was initially reported this fall.
The revised number was determined by a new formula created by the Census Bureau that takes into account how programs like food stamps offset poverty and how increased costs of healthcare and housing impact it as well.
Looking for a little perspective for your kids about how the rest of the world lives? Check out this gallery of children’s sleeping spaces all over the planet. The project was created with the support of Save The Children and published in a book by American journalist Chris Booth and photographer James Mollison. The range is pretty mind-blowing: You’ll see a girl with a room full of crowns and a boy whose home is a trash heap.
Most of us live such homogenous lives, and still find ourselves jealous of those with slightly more than us. This photo series really drives home the relativity of the comforts we call home and the lives children lead. Mollison hopes his photos will help children (and presumably, their parents) to think about inequality.
The bedroom above belongs to four year-old Kaya, who lives in Tokyo. See a bigger photo and more kids’ bedrooms after the jump.
Before the recession, Corbyn Hightower was making six figures at her high powered sales job. Then her position was eliminated, leading to a spiral that left her family of five living below the poverty level. They found a cheaper, less comfortable home. They sold their car, and became the only people in their suburban town to use bicycles as transportation instead of recreation. They went from eating “the world’s most rarified smoothie out of acai and goji berries, frozen wheatgrass juice, hemp seeds, a three-dollar organic peach, and raw cacao nibs” to food stamps and dumpster diving.
In this economy, way too many of us are living without a financial cushion. Which makes Hightower’s story incredibly chilling. What stands between here and there, and what would it take to wash it away? But there is inspiration here. In Corbyn Hightower’s self-assured voice, it’s possible to see how a family could survive, even thrive, under the kinds of circumstances we try to pretend could never happen to us—and maybe feel more confident that should we find ourselves in the same bad boat, we might be able to handle it, too.
“Peering through a bag of rejected broccoli from the garbage for signs of brown or yellow patches is something I couldn’t have imagined doing just a few short years ago…
Maybe you’ve seen the signs on the highway: Give a laptop. Change the world.
The One Laptop Per Child project says its mission is to “create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.”
OLPC founder and MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte says, “When children have access to this type of tool they get engaged in their own education. They learn, share, create, and collaborate. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.”
Really? Haven’t we been talking a lot lately about how technology is disconnecting us from our kids and disconnecting our kids from the world around them? Just the other night I was lecturing my 12-year-old niece about how if she never stops texting people she’s not with, she’s never really with the people she’s with. (Even saying that to myself makes my head spin.)
The laptop project is in the news because OLPC announced yesterday that they’ve partnered with Marvell, a computer chip and silicon manufacturer, “to develop a new family of tablet computers for the project.” The price of the tablets, to be used for education and health care in the US, “is supposed to hover around $100, but Mr. Negroponte said the ones distributed by the project could cost less, possibly $75.”
According to The New York Times,“the new tablets will offer a bevy of high-tech parts, including a full high-definition video encoder and 3-D graphics chip. In addition, the tablet will have a built-in video and still camera, a multitouch display and a soft keyboard similar to that of the Apple iPad.” Mr. Negroponte said, “the tablets will have a clean design, and be thin, measuring a height of 10.8 millimeters.” The iPad measures 12.7 millimeters.
So is this about the kids or the computers? Continue reading »
Jamie Smith and her daughter, Wren.
Your life can turn upside down in an instant. I was once the proud wife of a PhD, living the American Dream as I pursued my career in entertainment and raised my beautiful daughter in the heart of Manhattan. After my divorce, I suddenly found myself technically homeless and without income as I scrambled to pick up the pieces and define my new life. I moved in with my mother, and that allows my daughter to attend Head Start, a pre-school program for low-income New Yorkers. There, she’s learned to read and write the alphabet, her name and many other words. Head Start allows me to write, too – providing me with a few hours of childcare a day that I couldn’t otherwise afford. But what happens to single mothers who, facing subsidized childcare cuts by their state governments, are no longer able to afford employment? They begrudgingly turn to welfare to get by, because it makes more financial sense to take a government handout than it does to work. Continue reading »
A non-profit group dedicated to helping build better futures for disadvantaged children in the U.S. says that if we don’t get our kids reading, we will soon be facing a national crisis.
In a report released this week, the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds that kids who are proficient readers by the time they leave third grade are ultimately more successful in school, work and life. And those who aren’t? They might well be on a “glide path” to becoming high school dropouts. And at the end of that dropout path is potential poverty and, ultimately, a negative economic impact on the nation. Continue reading »
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