Vocaroo 19 Feb 2024 22_29_09 EST 12Mq6tPWMx0s

Homelessness, particularly its impact on children, is often overlooked. Homeless children may not be visible on the streets, but they experience different levels of homelessness. Understanding the severity is important, ranging from living on the streets to residing in shelters or transitional housing. The reasons for homelessness vary, such as inability to afford housing, poverty, unemployment, personal hardships, and disabilities. Homeless individuals face multiple factors that perpetuate their situation, including addiction, trauma, discrimination, limited access to resources like the internet, transportation, and education. The focus today is on how homelessness affects children's learning and development. Hello, my name is Lucas C. Chase Martin and today we're going to talk about homelessness and its effect on children and their development. So the actual issue of homelessness isn't an unfamiliar one, but an even more hidden aspect of homelessness is actually the children that experience it as well. And what many people say is that you don't often see homeless children out on the street and then that envelops a completely different question of actually the different severity levels of homelessness and the different ways that homelessness manifests itself. So in a chart published by understandinghomelessness.org, it explains the actual different levels and different severities with the most severe being on the streets and then as you go down living in an abandoned building or vehicle, residing in a shelter, transitional housing, and then being put in a single room occupancy place of living. And then another really good question that's just going to help us understand the issue of homelessness is why people actually experience homelessness. And there's a plethora of answers to this question and each situation is different and so it would be wrong to put them all under one category, but some of the most common reasons are inability to afford housing, poverty, inability to find work, personal hardship, and physical or mental disability. Every homeless person has their own experience that has led them to their situation and they also have many factors that keep them in their situation and it's usually a very vicious cycle where many families are trapped, especially when it comes to finding a job or a source of income. Some of these things that keep them in the cycle are addictions, trauma, discrimination, lack of internet, which is absolutely essential if you're going to try to find a job these days, transit and education, all of which keep homeless people homeless and in the cycle of poverty. And so the question we're going to try to answer today is how exactly does homelessness affect children's learning and development?