Nowadays, many people suffer from poverty and cannot allow themselves to live in appropriate conditions all the time. They may earn big money, lose everything within the next day, and become homeless in a week. Such an idea becomes more terrible when poverty touches upon the lives of little children. Frontline makes an amazing attempt to introduce the world of poor children from the Quad Cities and creates a movie where children share their thoughts, hopes, and troubles and prove that family relations cannot be replaced. In the video, there are three different families with two children each. They have different financial troubles and misunderstandings as well as different approaches to solve their problems and visions about their future. The only thing that unites them is poverty and the hope for a better future. The way of how children see their lives and understand poverty differs from one of the grown-ups, and it makes the chosen video an interesting and provocative piece of information that teaches the others how it is necessary to try to be successful regarding the demands of a family.
Not many producers are ready to cooperate with children and convince them to let unknown people in their lives. Frontline combines children’s experience with statistics to prove that child poverty is a burning question. It is not enough to know that some children do not have anything to eat. It is more terrible to comprehend that many American children know that they are starving and cannot allow themselves to eat “that three meals a day, like breakfast, lunch, and dinner” (Frontline, 2012). The producers of the movie admit that the future of such children is bleak; indeed, in case the things stay the way they are now (Chen, 2012). Many little boys and girls cannot be sure their next day because of the inability to eat properly or their parents’ inability to earn a living when the others throw leftover food away and do not know which new T-shirt is better to wear on today. The idea of living conditions’ comparison in America depresses a lot.
Having watched the video, it is now possible to realize that life cannot be fair to all people equally. Sometimes, it is hard to understand why parents neglect their children’s future without any reason. In the movie, there is a family with a little Brittany, who had to lose so many cherished things to make payments and use food help at school to feed the whole family. Her mother is expecting the third child and is not going to do an abortion just because she does not believe in it. She already has two children, who know what it is to starve and have no money for their present (not even for their future). Parents seem to be so irrational. They destroy the lives of their children and make all possible sparkles abandon their eyes. The most terrible thing about the video is to look at little children, who do not even live yet, and realize that they know about life complications, hunger, and inabilities at such an early age and can do nothing to change the situation but to believe that one day their parents can find a new way to improve their lives. Unfortunately, the video proves that parents themselves have nothing expect a hope, and this fact terrifies.
Reference List
Chen, K. (2012). What can children tell us about growing up poor? The Rundown.
Frontline. (Producer). (2012). Poor kids. Web.