Consequences of Stress on Children’s Development ~sub-Saharan Africa

As a child, I experienced poverty, racism, natural disaster, and isolation. I also experienced a near drowning incident. I was about nine-months old and my mother mentioned that it was a tornado on Lake Michigan were my family and I had been camping for the weekend. All of a sudden the clouds got black and my mother said I was just sitting in the sand playing when a huge wave came and took me out to the sea. Luckily, my mother had been a champion swimmer in high school. She jumped in and saved me. She said that I was still breathing and smiling. On the other side of the beach my older brother and sister were at a picnic table and found shelter in a public rest room where they got shelter for several hours. Later that evening all was well and my family returned home.

Also, between 18-24 months, I crawled around the sofa in our front room and ingested rat poison.  The two levels of prevention were applied. My mother had ipecac on hand and she called the emergency physician on duty. And last, at around age 3-4 years, I had a head injury. It was known that I had a fall from a bed and had to have 17-stitches in my left temporal forehead. My parent's took me to the hospital. In the end, I found this happen due to parental neglect and supervision. 

We experienced hunger and poverty because we often got snowed in and my father couldn’t work. Sometimes my father stayed at work and we had no way of getting out due to snow storms. Mainly, we had a deep freezer where we kept food, but sometimes our lights were out and we couldn’t get to the stores to buy food. This is where the isolation comes in; we were sometimes isolated in our house for six weeks to six months at a time due to severe snow storms. The snow would cover our house. 

~sub-Saharan Africa~

The region in the world, I choose is the region of sub-Saharan Africa, the stressor is hunger.

According to The Hunger Project, the four social conditions that give rise to the persistence of hunger and poverty in Africa are the marginalization of women food farmers, poor leadership, too little investment in building people’s capacity in rural areas, and AIDS and the gender inequality that fuels the epidemic.

Dr.  Ernest C Madu* during the 20^th convention on the Rights of the Child wrote:  About half of the world’s 2.2 billion children live in poverty, and 300 million go to bed hungry each night. On average, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day, most from preventable causes, with undernutrition contributing to about one-third of these deaths.

The Child Development Index, developed by Save the Children UK in 2008, combines performance measures specific to children in the areas of education, health and nutrition. By this assessment, sub-Saharan Africa lags behind other regions of the world, reflecting the highest levels of deprivation in essential primary health care and education services. In 2008, the region’s under-five mortality rate stood at 144 per 1,000 live births, more than double the global average of 65 per 1,000 live births. In the same year, roughly 50 per cent of the 8.8 million deaths among children under the age of five occurred in sub-Saharan Africa alone (Madu, 2012).

References:

Madu, Ernest C., PhD. http://www.unicef.org. Retrieved from the web on January 28, 2012.

The Hunger Project, 5 Union Square West, 7th Fl, New York, NY 10003. http://www.thp.org/africa

Retrieved from the web on January 28, 2012.

*Dr. Ernest C. Madu, an internationally respected authority on sustainable health systems in low-resource environments, underscores the problems in health faced by children in developing countries. In order to improve their situation and increase their educational opportunities, he recommends shifting the focus to empowering parents economically.