How does growing up in poverty impact someone throughout their childhood and into their adult life? Dr Sharon Lambert, School of Applied Psychology at UCC and Lisa O'Brien, South and South-East Youth Services Manager in Focus Ireland joined RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne to discuss this and how these inequalities can be addressed. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been edited for length and clarity - you can hear the discussion in full above).
What do we mean when we talk about child poverty in Ireland?
"What we mean when we say children are living in poverty, is if their income and their resources - it's not just money, it's access to cultural things, social things - [are] inadequate to allow you to have a good standard of living in comparison to the rest of society," explains Lambert. "We have children living in terrible poverty. We have children who are going to school and who are going to bed at night time who are hungry."
The number of children accessing emergency accommodation now stands at 3,895 in Ireland, the highest ever level since records began. What are the implications on those children of that experience in their lives? "We've an intersection of issues going on there," says Lambert. For example, children who are in homelessness are statistically more likely to be living in a family with one parent parenting alone and 85% of single-headed households are women.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ News, record number of children in emergency accommodation
If you're parenting alone and experiencing homelessness, it's "very, very difficult to be able to access the things that you need," she says. "It actually creates this vicious cycle pushing you further and further into poverty. Outside of the almost 4,000 children who are living in homelessness, there were 90,000 children who are in consistent poverty in Ireland in 2022. That was a representative 40% increase from the year before. And there were 236,000 children who are experiencing other forms of deprivation."
What is toxic stress?
"We all experience stress and there's good stress and there's bad stress, but toxic stress is where you're stressed all of the time. So when you have a family who's living in poverty, they're stressed all of the time. I've spoken to people this week who do not know whether they will have light on next week. So this is your basic needs not being met: not having access to food, not having access to good housing, and you're constantly stressed all the time."
Lambert explains: "When you're stressed you activate your stress response system and that's really bad for you because it impacts on your immune system. It impacts on your mental well-being as well. So we know, for example, that children who are living in poverty are much more likely to have really chronic health conditions because their immune system has been impacted by the stress. For some people it's a trauma: all day, everyday, constant worrying about where food is going to come from."
What happens when these young people turn 18?
O'Brien works with adults aged between 18 and 26 who are emerging into the world from having experienced poverty in their childhood years. This includes young people who have presented as homeless or young people who are coming from State care and who are going through a transitional period and are identified as at risk of homelessness.
Read more: Do policies keep women from improving their financial well-being?
Young people who are coming from State care get an aftercare plan at age 18 if they meet the criteria or eligibility for aftercare supports. But "we do have a cohort of young people who are just on the periphery, who have perhaps been known to social services as they've grown up but haven't come into care, and they're not eligible for those support," O'Brien explains.
"I can really recognise what Sharon is talking about there in terms of toxic stress and that leading to trauma, and the results of the of that trauma can really impact on the way that a young person engages with our service," says O'Brien. "Poverty is not just about that financial poverty, but there's also a social poverty that comes with the young people that we meet. That lack of social connection means that it's really, really difficult for them to access the supports that they need to stay out of homelessness or not enter it in the first place."
These young people are "without a shadow of a doubt" at the back of the queue when it comes to finding a home, she says. "We have some housing stock that we're able to utilise specifically for young people, but we also need to utilise stocks such as private rented. Young people in general are at the back of the queue in accessing our private rented market and the young people that we work with from these difficult backgrounds are at the very, very bottom."
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Countrywide, Della Kilroy visits The Boyle Family Resource Centre in Roscommon where they help by providing food when people cannot afford it
Why is the trauma of poverty so difficult to overcome?
"Often when people think about trauma they think about the "Big Ts" - a big event that happened. But the problem with poverty is it's an all day, everyday experience that can be very difficult to get out of. There's not just the financial deprivation, living in poverty carries with it a lot of stigma and discrimination. It's very difficult to access the services that you need, children don't get to participate in extracurricular activities, so it affects your social, emotional, and cognitive development," Lambert says. "If we don't invest in children it actually costs a lot more money down the line in terms of physical health, psychological well-being and other related difficulties."
Using the example of a teenager from a middle class background deciding to experiment with drugs and a. teenager who's living in poverty deciding to do the same thing, Lambert explains how the outcomes can be very different. Data on drug trends in Ireland from the Health Research Board shows "the two groups of people who who use the most drugs are the people in the highest socioeconomic status and the people in the lowest. But the impact on people in the lowest socioeconomic group is much more profound," she says.
"It's not unusual for teenagers to experiment with drugs. So I suppose the issue is your relationship with it, what does it do for you? There are some young people who will experiment with drugs and they will think it's great fun and then they grow out of it and off they go to college. Then there will be other young people, whose mental health is really poor, they're really struggling to access services, and they might choose drugs, and it might relieve the misery of their lives. Then they form a different relationship with that substance. So problematic drug use in young people is a mental health issue."
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, Senior researcher with the Health Research Board Dr Suzi Lyons discusses drug and alcohol addiction trends
"Bearing in mind the waiting lists that we have for CAMHS, if you're a young person who's got a mental health issue, who is using drugs to medicate that, you're going to wait even longer because we don't have the appropriate services for young people who are using drugs and have mental health-related difficulties," says Lambert.
O'Brien adds that a lack of family support contributes to the problem. "One of the key things that we would see in terms of young people who are accessing homeless services or young people coming from state care who have those experiences, they don't have that family support that will help them through it. Even outside of the access to services, they don't have that stability in the background to help them to even identify that this is becoming a problematic behaviour."
