Research+Page

Work Cited Kathleen Kingsbury, Justin Horwath “Keeping Homeless Kids in school.” __Time__ 3/23/2009 42-43 EBSCO Zionsville Middle School, Zionsville IN 2/8/2010 __[|http://web.Ebscohost.com]__

Berck Judith, No Place to be, Voices of Homeless Children Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992

 Homeless Children's Self esteem Factors By: Megan Hill and Logan Brown

 Homeless kids have an extremely challenging lifestyle, but their self-esteem from their education ,or lack there, may be one of the worst experiences. As a homeless child, just staying in school is a desperate struggle. Always traveling around and changing schools, these kids have a very hard time keeping up with homework. If they can't do it, their grades often gradually fall, also lowering homeless children's self esteem. The pressure is on when the federal law required all kids to go to school, and although it is mainly free to homeless children, they must go; like it or not. Once they are actually at school, they have to face friendship problems, and bullies. As a smaller homeless person, they are more picked upon and friendless. All of the at school things more revolting grades, astonishingly, which may cause diminutive self-esteem levels. Despite the fact that homeless children are homeless they still have a “home life”, which may affect their well being related to self-esteem. How they got to this horrid “home life” can be a depressing tale: melancholy feelings, for closer, abuse and poor location are just a few of the words that surround this way of life. Yet, the deeper into this nightmare you transit you can see they are children with low self-esteem who really want to be happier. Their parents may need to be work night shifts so the children may be left on the streets or in the shelter alone. The streets are more likely because on this economic down turn job loss is up and the shelters are beginning to overflow with homeless families. If not having a safe place to rest their heads and do homework in a non-abusive home wasn’t enough, they still need to survive. Hoarding food, steeling, and begging are a few of the tactics they must present in order to survive. Clearly this effect their self-esteem because their parents aren’t around to give parental support and there are typically any “friends in the neighborhood.” Although being just plain homeless is bad enough, their health, both mental and physical, is at many disadvantages also. Living in the dirt and street dust or just in a shelters with hundreds of people can make them more prone to illness. In fact homeless children are in grave danger before they are even born. If their parents are homeless then they may not provide a well balanced diet that has enough substance to nourish both mother and child. Also studies have shown that homeless children typically have more severe cases of things such as asthma and other physical and mental conditions and birth defects. As they continue through life symptoms of such sicknesses such as these may in crease to a life threatening point. This is definitely not a superb condition for children and family who don't have a plentiful supply of money to afford health care or insurance. The gloomy affect of this condition is the that this makes them doomed to be out of school for longer amounts of time and sick on the streets where another virus may be waiting to strike. Obviously this could possibly have major effect on their self-esteem because they will be out of school more and not have valuable time to form quality social relationships.