New research suggests that a key cause of poverty is poor parents’ lack of engagement with neonates and toddlers.
I’d have liked to know a lot more about this research. But maybe it is real, valid, and shows some effect on poverty derived from ‘poor parenting’ (shorthand for what is described). Whilst one key cause of poverty may be lack of employment opportunities - as per your stated opinion, which I’d agree with if it had been characterised as ONE of the causes - my own opinion is that many people do lack what is needed, and study after study suggests that kids who show up in school at whatever age school starts in your locale (e.g. 4-5 here in UK) unable to talk in sentences, sit still, respond to an adult’s attention (an instruction or request), or ask to go to the toilet, consistently underperform throughout their school careers, leave school unqualified and under-educated, and guess what their lives turn out like. Early intervention has been demonstrated to work, not only for the kids, but it breaks a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty. And I’m not giving the parents a pass, either, but let’s ask WHY don’t they instinctively have better parenting skills? Maybe if they had little eye contact when babies, the poverty of which we speak is not merely monetary, yet perpetuates both itself and it’s cousin-corollary, financial poverty.
And isn’t lack of eye contact actually a broadly accepted key cause of poor infant development?
I was tempted to seek citations ref ‘study after study’ or ‘widely accepted’. I’ve read more than a few press articles on this in respectable papers, but you’ve noted no evidence of your opening statement, so let’s just leave it as an exchange of opinions. But I would not be so dismissive of this approach, nor would I rely merely on enough jobs solving the problem, because even with jobs, kids like this deserve better lives than they inherit as a result of their parents’ neglect, whether accidental or otherwise.
ETA ref other comments after Ratel’s, I am talking generally. We do see this here in UK, for sure. Brazilian rural parents may not have a problem. It may, instead, be discrimination, in Brazil. But lack of early eye contact and other developmental disadvantages have been showing up in schools here for a long time, represented by the things I described. Such dysfunction does not get fixed by having more jobs.
