by Monica Palmer
A pre-school teacher was silently observing the free play of a group of three and four year-olds. She was especially enjoying the interaction of two little “mommies” who were preparing a make-believe dinner for their baby doll family. One of the girls put the dolls in their high chairs and set the table as the other finished stirring the pot on the plastic stovetop. When it came time to eat, the girl at the stove instructed the girl at the table to take one of the plates away. The other little girl obliged, but the teacher’s curiosity prompted her to intrude.
“Why did you have Amy take that plate away,” the teacher asked.
The little girl looked into her plastic pot, shrugged, and stated in a matter-of-fact tone, “not enough for everybody, so I won’t eat this time.”
Albert Bandura’s “Social Learning Theory” claims that most human behavior is learned by observing and modelling the behavior around us. Indeed, any parent knows there comes a time when you must begin spelling out words and monitoring your actions, because you are in the presence of a tiny human sponge that will absorb and then leak your ugliest traits and most private discussions to anyone at any time.
The little girl in the scenario above inadvertently revealed to her teacher that she lives in a home struggling with food insecurity. Food insecurity is essentially hunger, but more to the point, it is a term that means not every member of the household has access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle. This little girl may not be deprived of food, but she is being deprived of a core concept that everyone in a household should be able to eat.
To me, the most heart-wrenching detail in this story is the fact that the little girl was nonplussed by the idea that someone needs to go without, so others can have enough. Perhaps she lives in a household where generational poverty exists, and perhaps food insecurity seems normal, because it’s all she’s ever known.
Generational poverty is the condition of having been in poverty for at least two generations. Situational poverty identifies those who experience a sudden change in financial resources because of job loss, divorce, death, etc. While both conditions are fraught with difficulty, situational poverty typically has a greater likelihood of being a short-term condition, because those affected generally focus urgently on creating a plan to get back to where they were. Generational poverty often has a less optimistic prognosis, however, because the focus is not on planning for the future, but on surviving the present.
When a person has been raised in a home where the observational lessons have been tinged with the anxiety and stress of day-to-day survival, she adopts a kind of hopeless acceptance of the way things are. This hopelessness is arguably a contributing factor in the cycle of poverty.
Some people believe that food banks do nothing to break the cycle of poverty. In fact, they argue that the support provided to those in need develops a “chronic dependence” on charity rather than encouraging people to take care of themselves.
I invite anyone who shares that opinion to take a moment right now to look up the nearest food pantry or soup kitchen and sign up for a volunteer shift. I found this experience to be profoundly impacting, because it helped me to understand an important, intangible benefit these agencies provide to children and to our collective future.
Children learn what they observe. At the food pantries and soup kitchens, children see a new kind of adult and a new display of adult behavior. They witness adults giving of their time and resources to make things better for other people. This may seem insignificant, but to a child who lives in a home where adults are constantly focused on their own survival, it can drastically rock a child’s worldview.
If you ask a handful of volunteers why they do what they do, you will inevitably turn up more than a few who volunteer as a way of giving back for a time when they were in need of assistance. Some of them even remember being impacted as children.
Breaking the cycle of generational poverty is possible only if a child observes behavior that will inspire them to reject the inevitability of the circumstances into which they were born. They must begin to hope and plan for a future without need and a future where they may someday be able to continue a new cycle—the cycle of giving.