Examining the Complex Difficulties Faced by Families Living in Poverty

This essay discusses the multifaceted difficulties faced by families living in poverty, including health issues, financial stress, relationship problems, and substance misuse. It highlights how poverty restricts access to good nutrition, education, and overall quality of life, leading to mental stress and family breakdowns. The essay explores factors contributing to poverty, such as lack of work, rising living costs, and inadequate social security. It further examines the negative impacts of poverty, including higher mortality rates, family stress, reduced family involvement, illiteracy, and psychological health issues. The essay also discusses interventions adopted by the UK government to alleviate poverty, such as welfare benefits, education support, and economic security programs, while also addressing issues like increased substance misuse and frequent housing moves. It concludes by emphasizing the need for governmental and non-governmental bodies to implement policies that facilitate access to education, healthcare, and basic needs for those living in low economic status, encouraging development, charity, and effective policy implementation.

Difficulties Family Face
Introduction
Poverty is a serious issue faced by many families at global level. Families live in poverty are more vulnerable to face many issues
associated to health, finance, relationship problems and substance misuse. Poor financial status restricts people to access good
nutritional diet, good education and overall quality life. Burden of financial stress can result in create mental stress among parents
and children. There are many factors that lead medium class families to low financial status includes; lack of work, rising living
cots, low pay and inadequate social security advantages. Breakdown within families is a common behavior to see due to financial
crisis (Assari, 2018). Lack of money make an individual unable to indulge in higher education, fulfil their needs and demands,
provide them a good life. Such issues lead to breakdown between children and parents and some issues even may raise between both
the parents. Separation of parents can worsen the situation and may adversely impact mental health of children as well as partners
(ROOPAK and et. al., 2018).
Poverty can negatively affect families and caregivers in many ways:
Higher mortality rates:
Poverty leads people to experience worse health outcomes and increase risk of mental health conditions (Like anxiety, stress,
depression, substance abuse disorder, etc.) The burden of poverty, does not allow adequate health care access and limit
financial resources for treatment, exacerbate health conditions (ROOPAK and et. al., 2018).
Family stress model:
Inter-parental conflict plays a key role in family dynamics and can adversely impact child outcomes. Poverty can be
considered as a major stress for families. Conflicts can arise between parents and children due to economic pressure. Living
conditions like overcrowded housing and housing instability generally observe to effect family relationships. Even somehow
impact on relationship between siblings may also get affected (Brady, 2019).
Work-life balance:
Poverty leads people to face many struggles. People living in poor financial conditions have to work irrespective of time,
place, position. Busy work-life generally does not allow them to make time for their children, home caring, get involved in
Higher mortality rates
Family stress model
Work-life balance

Reduced family involvement
Illiteracy among generation
Family dysfunction and
psychological health
Reduced family involvement:
Population with poor financial status are at high risk of reduced family involvement. Busy schedule of parents in
making money to fulfil their and children's basic needs make them unable to get involved with their children, sit with
them, spend quality time with their children. It is essential to consider that the relationship between father involvement
and poverty in complicated, due to active role of systemic barriers and structural violence (ROOPAK and et. al., 2018).
Illiteracy among generation:
Education is an important part of life since ages (Keith-Jennings, Llobrera and Dean, 2019). But education does not
only mean to pass over the different level of standards and score good marks in report. Good education also reflects the
standard, personality, way to communicate, etc. Children with literate parental background seems to be more confident
and able to reflect good personality in society. But illiterate and poor family background does not allow children to
explore good living standards and have quality life (Rob and Cattaneo, 2021).
Family dysfunction and psychological health:
Psychological health defines as an integral part of health, through which an individual is able to recognise their own
abilities and cope up with difficult situations in life. Relationship between parents and child is known to be an
important determinant in maintaining satisfaction and psychological health of children. Highly stressful conditions and
struggles of poverty can negatively impact this relationship which may lead to generate negative psychological effect
on children's mind (McLoyd, 2021). Lower quality of relationship between parents and preschool children can
endanger cognitive development of children and elevate the risk of developing wrong behaviour and many
psychological problems.
Interventions adopted by UK government
to eliminate poverty:UK government spent a lot money to establish welfare benefits for children and pensioners. The government supported
approximately Euro 18 billion on poor families along with children and almost Euro 11 billion on pensioners. Through their new
policies and interventions, providing support to income makers, child and support for working tax credits increases. Government
took active participation and framed labour market activation policies which significantly increases the rate of employment within
country (Morris and et. al., 2018). UK government potentially worked and framed policies to bring improvisations for education
standards and raise skills. For children belong with low economic status; government provides free of cost access to education and
provide them meal with good nutritional value and educational campus only. To identify and address poverty government started
many economic security programs like food assistance, social security, housing assistance and tax credits (Lee, and Zhang, 2022).

Increased substance misuse
Frequent housing moves
Higher risk of infectious disease
Mental and economical stress of eradicate and get over through the poverty promote poor people to indulge in black
marketing of illicit drugs and toxic substances. Illegal marketing and sailing of drugs tends to make good money.
Young generation live in poverty more likely to get involved in alcohol consumption and drug abuse due to lack of
knowledge of circumstances and bad impact on health of drugs and alcohol. Habit of consuming alcohol and
involvement in drugs can destroy life of an individual along with their family members for whom that particular
person supposed to hold responsibility (Lee, Biglan, and Cody, 2018).
Poverty refers to the lack of financial source and hence of shortage of money. Temporary housing is one of the most
common factor associated with poor population. Poor people does not able to afford and buy land or house on
permanent basis. So such people used to live in temporary and raw-structured house with minimal facilities. They
also need to shift their houses and location too frequently due to many reasons like; orders from government to
vacant the space to consider development and sometimes they need to move due to natural disaster like flood, heavy
rain, earthquake, etc. Generally, such people observed to live in area with low level grounding and such areas more
likely to get drowned in case of heavy rain (Karmaker and et. al., 2022).
Inability to access nutritional food and lack of money does not allow them to use resources which can prevent them
Conclusion
In given article, discussion regarding problems faced by families to create understanding about the significance of health and raise
knowledge about impact of poverty. In above discussion it can be concluded that poverty is a major issue especially, in developing
country; which need to be taken into consideration by governmental and non-governmental bodies. They must make frame policies and
strict guidelines to make it easy for people living in low economic status to access education, healthcare provision, basic needs and
make their life easy (Halpern-Meekin, 2019). The discussion covers all the struggles faced by families living in poverty and how it
affects their physical and mental health. It is important to encourage people who have been volunteered to give facilities like nutritional
food, pure water, shelter to poor people and promote development and increment charity services to make poor people lives easy. In
order to reduce poverty, it is essential to take some steps for development of education and healthcare sectors. It is possible to
overcome any issue only by making plans and implement the policies in an effective way throughout the nation without considering
any personal profit (Allison and et. al., 2019).
References
Assari, S., 2018. Parental education better helps white than black families escape poverty: National survey of children’s health. Economies, 6(2), p.30.
Brady, D., 2019. Theories of the Causes of Poverty. Annual Review of Sociology, 45, pp.155-175.
Keith-Jennings, B., Llobrera, J. and Dean, S., 2019. Links of the supplemental nutrition assistance program with food insecurity, poverty, and health: evidence and potential. American journal of public
health, 109(12), pp.1636-1640.
Allison, M.A., Attisha, E., Lerner, M., De Pinto, C.D., Beers, N.S., Gibson, E.J., Gorski, P., Kjolhede, C., O’Leary, S.C., Schumacher, H. and Weiss-Harrison, A., 2019. The link between school attendance
and good health. Pediatrics, 143(2).