For this blog post, I’m going to mention the different perspectives of low-income parents and some differences on how low-income families have been dealing with the pandemic compared to higher-income families.
In this article by Ngoc Truong, he assessed the effect of socioeconomic effects of low-income communities. Truong mentions “While the virus does not discriminate against people regardless of their race, and wealth, many social and healthcare experts have cautioned that low-income communities are the most vulnerable in contracting the virus due to the decrease of economic mobility and the high cost of medical care,” this means that even though race and wealth doesn’t change whether you can get the virus or not, but low-income communities are said to be more vulnerable to contracting the virus because when they do contract it, they don’t have the financial stability to get it treated. This implies that higher-income families have money to self-isolate and get treated when they need to. This article provides a lot of statistics from the CDC which is great cause there’s a lot of evidence. They don’t really mention the perspective of higher-income families much which I don’t blame because their main focus is on low-income communities.
In this article from the Education Trust, they conducted a survey/poll for parents on how they’ve been dealing with the pandemic and what their main concerns were. 48% of those parents said that their biggest worry was providing for their child financially and also worrying about whether their child is going to fall behind academically. 41% of the parents do not have enough devices at home for their children to participate in online learning with and 29% them don’t have reliable high speed internet which is another barrier that prevents their children from successfully participating in online classes. Non-English home speakers are more likely to have difficulty accessing remote learning software than native English speakers. “Navigating remote learning software can be challenging even for English-speaking parents,” this indicates that if you don’t speak english it’s exceptionally harder for those to navigate the internet especially with no in person help anymore. This article mentions a poll/survey from real parents and their own struggles. There’s a lot of examples of specific issues these parents are dealing with which is great because they are not just broad problems.
After reading these articles, I’ve learned a lot about the perspectives of the parents of low-income families and what their main concerns were during the pandemic. I also learned about how low-income communities are more vulnerable to the virus than high-income families because of the difference between financial stability.