How Does Poverty Influence Students Education

Children living in poverty tend to be exposed to more intense and longer lasting stress that negatively impacts attention, focus, cognition, IQ, and social skills. They tend to hear less reciprocal conversations. They are also engaged in conversation with less complex vocabulary and sentence structure. Children in poverty tend to have lower levels of verbal and reasoning skills. Some poverty factors that intervene in students’ ability to learn are health and well being, limited literacy and language development, access to material resources, and level of mobility. Substandard housing, inadequate medical care, and poor nutrition can affect the rate of childhood disease, premature births, and low birth rates.

Living in poverty can affect students’ mental health, self-efficiency, self-image, and motivation to do good in school. Children living in poverty often go to school behind their peers because they might not be able to afford the same resources as them. They may have limited access to high-quality day care, limited access to before or after school care, and limited physical space in their homes to have a quiet place to study. Students might have to move from one location to another because their parents might be looking for jobs, or other personal issues. This can disrupt the students education. Moving a lot usually has a negative and social impact on students.

Low-income families might not be able to afford food for school, so children might not eat lunch or breakfast at or before school. Later on in life, the student might just want to make money and not want to actually excel at a career and they could be stuck at a low paying job. They also might believe that the odds are stacked against them and there’s nothing they could do to get out of poverty.