Child Poverty Worse than During the Depression

The article is about the states, but Canada isn't far behind.

Children growing up in poor households are likely to lag in their brain development and thereby perform poorly in schools, even if they move in better neighborhoods, a new longitudinal study on child development revealed this week. Examining hundreds of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from a group of children growing up in poor households, researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison discovered that the regional gray matter volume in case study brains was up to 4 percent below the developmental norm for their ages.

We know it's wrong, but we don't care quite enough to fix it. Most of us, that is. A local university student, Elle Crevits, started a Food Not Waste non-profit. She gathers food that would have been tossed from grocery stores and restaurants and brings them to soup kitchens.  It's a local version of Toronto's Second Harvest. I've been saying we need something like that locally for years, but then didn't actually act on my own words in any way. I'm glad somebody did.

But it would be nice if we could stop the problem further upstream. Maybe with the guaranteed basic income that the Greens and some NDP have been on about will actually happen one day.