Over the past months I have extensively researched the topic of children and debt. I have a tremendous personal interest in the topic. I was a childhood debtor myself. Although I initially resisted, my mother persuaded me to take on debt as a 14 year old to attend a private school. The violence and low standards of my local public school district had persuaded her; and she was at least equally persuasive with me. I'm not sure, but I don't think she could have taken the loan instead of me. My prep school, in spite of having an endowment larger than some colleges, had a policy of making it's financial aid students take loans. My experience highlights one of the worst aspects of childhood debt; it throws into sharp relief the often incorrect assumptions that polite moneyed people make about the idea of debt and choice.
Those with the largest array of choices in almost every situation of childhood and young family debt that I found were the creditors, not the debtors. The creditors were often not just huge transnational corporations but people living in the same communities as the debtors. But the creditors had chosen to indoctrinate children into financial debt as a way of life. This 'financialized' debt is very different from the debts that binds a healthy community. In many healthy communities, most people "owe" everyone something. Favors are extended, and an inherent social contract implies that they will be returned if needed. The capitalist market does not reign supreme over every single aspect of life, and some exchanges happen without the exchange of cash. But the kind of debt children are in many cases being indoctrinated towards, or even directly put into, does not tie communities together; it breaks them apart person by person and family by family.
I set out to research the topic of childhood debt and I found many deficits in knowledge that I hope will one day be examined. For example in my own field, medicine, we know that, unfortunately, poverty is a risk factor for child abuse. While there are wealthy people who abuse their children, statistically speaking, the poor are more likely to beat their kids. The mechanism is that poor families go through more crises and more stressors, and something about these conditions make parents more likely to "snap" and start beating up their kids. Obviously, many poor parents are extremely dedicated good parents, but we serve the interests of no one to put our head in the sand about this important correlation, or whether there might be an even stronger correlation with debt. Over past years as the economies of many countries have turned sour, the evidence of this correlation of poverty and child abuse continues to mount. This correlation is just one of many ways in which the health status of children is effected by the economic well-being of their family. Unfortunately, there is very little research on the effects of familial and personal debt on children. The one shining positive exception was the case of human trafficking debt bondage and children, in which academic work has identified the positive role healthcare providers can play. But even on this topic it is well aknowledged there is not enough academic research ( important article = Siva N. Stopping traffic. Lancet. 2010 Dec 18;376(9758):2057–8. [PubMed]) .
Some charity and civil society groups have produced research on childhood debt. The US lags behind in civil society examination of childhood debt; but not for lack of childhood debtors or children effected by debt. One does not even need to personally be a childhood debtor to be influenced by the trends of debt. Millions of children are living in indebted families. Millions more are living in a culture that misrepresents debt to it's most vulnerable members. In a report entitled The Debt Trap, issued by The Children's Society in the UK, the majority of UK children over 10 surveyed reported seeing advertising for loans "often" or "all the time." Other research by different groups reveals the reach of lender's advertisers goes even younger. In the UK, members of civil society have called for banning Payday loan lending from children's TV and programming. Which of course begs the question: why on earth do payday lenders advertise on children's TV to begin with? One reason is that advertisers are keenly aware of marketing research which shows we are more likely to use products introduced to us in our childhoods.
The types of childhood debtors I found over the course of my research were very diverse, but all of them were being indoctrinated to view debt as normative if not positive. This trend is not out of line with the mainstream culture. Although any pediatrician could tell you that exposing children to too much media and television is not good for them, overall the media consumption of children continues to rise. I suspect that even if there was no advertising for loans on television, the constant exposure to American media could drive young adults into a debtor lifestyle by normalizing extravagant consumption with no apparent consequences. But worsening the damage are advertisements which distort the reality of debt aired constantly. I fear the results will be like those I experienced as a debtor who began in childhood. Debt becomes normalized as the only way of life one knows. Indeed, I found that even I, though I had sympathy for childhood debtors and children impacted by family debt, also had a certain level of desensitization towards their situation.
So-called backwards societies find all kinds of ways to make families and children financially viable; yet in the advanced West we seem to be doing the opposite. As the economic situation of many people here worsens, it is really up to us to find a way to not drive our children into the debt based lifestyle we now understand to be so harmful from personal experience in many cases.
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