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Chasing a dream against all odds

BACKGROUND: Youth of color growing up in poverty face many challenges that children from more affluent families never experience. These children often reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods with substandard housing, inadequate medical care, and under resourced schools. This places these children at r...

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Autores principales: Vivian, Eva, Chewning, Betty, Flanagan, Constance
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9476302/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36109735
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14130-8
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author Vivian, Eva
Chewning, Betty
Flanagan, Constance
author_facet Vivian, Eva
Chewning, Betty
Flanagan, Constance
author_sort Vivian, Eva
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Youth of color growing up in poverty face many challenges that children from more affluent families never experience. These children often reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods with substandard housing, inadequate medical care, and under resourced schools. This places these children at risk for poor academic achievement, school dropout, abuse and neglect, behavioral and socioemotional problems, and physical health problems. In spite of these risks, some children “beat the odds” and overcome the challenges and adversities in their external contexts. The paper reports the findings of a draw-and-write activity designed to learn the processes whereby protective factors promote resilience from a child’s point of view. METHODS: In this qualitative study, a draw-and-write activity was conducted with a convenience sample of 33 children, (23 females and 10 males of which 10 were Hmong, 11 were Middle Eastern, and 12 were African Americans) .The children were asked to make visual representations of resources (persons or things that, in their view, contribute to their wellbeing.) In depth interviews with a subset of 15 of the children was conducted to discuss the meaning of the images in their drawings. A summative content analysis of the visual and narrative data was performed using a resilience framework. RESULTS: Regardless of racial/ethnic background, parents, and especially mothers, were the main “person or thing” identified by these children living in poverty as helping them “make it thus far in life.” Ninety seven percent of the participants in this study described their parent(s) as nurturing and supportive, enabling them to overcome obstacles and adversities within their environment. Forty five percent of participants identified their mother as a key anchor in their life Fifty eight percent of the African American children indicated that their parent(s) encouraged education to escape poverty. CONCLUSION: The findings support that families, particularly parents have the strongest influence on supporting the resilience process in a child. These findings were consistent across ethnicity and gender. Families, particularly parents, should be the target of future interventions designed to produce resilient behaviors in youth of color living in poverty.
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spelling pubmed-94763022022-09-16 Chasing a dream against all odds Vivian, Eva Chewning, Betty Flanagan, Constance BMC Public Health Research BACKGROUND: Youth of color growing up in poverty face many challenges that children from more affluent families never experience. These children often reside in disadvantaged neighborhoods with substandard housing, inadequate medical care, and under resourced schools. This places these children at risk for poor academic achievement, school dropout, abuse and neglect, behavioral and socioemotional problems, and physical health problems. In spite of these risks, some children “beat the odds” and overcome the challenges and adversities in their external contexts. The paper reports the findings of a draw-and-write activity designed to learn the processes whereby protective factors promote resilience from a child’s point of view. METHODS: In this qualitative study, a draw-and-write activity was conducted with a convenience sample of 33 children, (23 females and 10 males of which 10 were Hmong, 11 were Middle Eastern, and 12 were African Americans) .The children were asked to make visual representations of resources (persons or things that, in their view, contribute to their wellbeing.) In depth interviews with a subset of 15 of the children was conducted to discuss the meaning of the images in their drawings. A summative content analysis of the visual and narrative data was performed using a resilience framework. RESULTS: Regardless of racial/ethnic background, parents, and especially mothers, were the main “person or thing” identified by these children living in poverty as helping them “make it thus far in life.” Ninety seven percent of the participants in this study described their parent(s) as nurturing and supportive, enabling them to overcome obstacles and adversities within their environment. Forty five percent of participants identified their mother as a key anchor in their life Fifty eight percent of the African American children indicated that their parent(s) encouraged education to escape poverty. CONCLUSION: The findings support that families, particularly parents have the strongest influence on supporting the resilience process in a child. These findings were consistent across ethnicity and gender. Families, particularly parents, should be the target of future interventions designed to produce resilient behaviors in youth of color living in poverty. BioMed Central 2022-09-15 /pmc/articles/PMC9476302/ /pubmed/36109735 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14130-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Vivian, Eva
Chewning, Betty
Flanagan, Constance
Chasing a dream against all odds
title Chasing a dream against all odds
title_full Chasing a dream against all odds
title_fullStr Chasing a dream against all odds
title_full_unstemmed Chasing a dream against all odds
title_short Chasing a dream against all odds
title_sort chasing a dream against all odds
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9476302/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36109735
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14130-8
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