Week 8 Post 1

While I reading about different family troubles in Chapter 13, I learned a lot about family structures. Unfortunately, I feel like family income plays a huge role in childhood development. Parents of low-income families tend to have little education and therefore have a difficult time finding a job. Being unemployed makes it very difficult for parents to provide for their children especially if they are a single parent or divorced. Stress comes from the lack of money parents have to support their children.  Stress from low-income can cause parents to be upset with each other as well as with their children which can impact a child’s overall development as they grow. Children of low-income families often worry about when their next meal will be or they fear what will happen if the spill some milk that their parents worked hard to pay for so they could have something to drink (Berger, p. 362). However, parents with low-income are not the only people that may cause their children to have development problems. Generally, speaking parents with higher-incomes tend to pressure their kids more to do well in school. The pressure that these parents put on their children can sometimes cause so much stress, that their kids begin to internalize or externalize their problems. This results in children actually doing poorly in school. Children who are pressured by their parents are also more likely to have delinquency issues and start to using drugs (Berger, p. 362). In my opinion, it is sad to see that family income can cause stress on child development.