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Partners in Health & Wholeness

Partners in Health & Wholeness

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Childhood Poverty is a Disease

May 16, 2013 · by Sandy Irving, Volunteer Program Associate

Pediatrician and author Perri Klass has written a powerful essay on childhood poverty as a disease. She writes in part:

Toxic stress is the heavy hand of early poverty, scripting a child’s life not in the Horatio Alger scenario of determination and drive, but in the patterns of disappointment and deprivation that shape a life of limitations.

What Klass emphasizes, what many of us know, is that investing in our children is vital to their healthy survival as well as the healthy survival of our society. Such an investment is just, is compassionate, is faithful, and is practical.

–Sandy Irving, Volunteer Program Associate

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Children & Youth, Equality & Reconciliation, Good Government, Health, Housing, Living Wage, Public Education, Race/Ethnicity

About Sandy Irving, Volunteer Program Associate

Health care reform, labor issues, member of NCCC peace, nominating and legislative committees. Activist for justice, grandmother of 6, Presbyterian and retired research associate from Biostatistics Dept, School of Public Health, UNC-CH. Currently on the board of NC Peace Action.

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