https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/5b75734b-4ca0-4f6d-b4cd-60b12dd328d0/welcome-to-the-world (Links to an external site.)

Assignment:

Watch the film ‘Welcome to the World’ linked above or another film of your choice about child birth in another culture. Answer the following questions:

a. How does poverty effect early child development in this country?

b. What historical, cultural and economic factors that have caused this type of poverty?

c. What would need to happen to structurally reduce poverty in this country?

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Every year 130 million babies are born.

Their life chances are a lottery depending on where they are born. In Europe, six babies per 1000 will die before their first birthday. In Africa, it’s 82. In America, 1 in 3 will grow up to be obese; in Cambodia, a child is more likely to become malnourished than go to high school. In Sierra Leone, one in eight mothers die in childbirth. Through the stories of mothers and babies around the world, we look at how poverty affects childbirth, childhood – and everything beyond. According to the World Health Organization, 99% of women who die during pregnancy and childbirth are in the developing world. Every minute and a half, a woman dies from pregnancy-related causes and just eight countries account for almost 50% of the world’s maternal deaths every year.

As developmental psychologist we can look at the effects of poverty on lifespan development, it is the greatest factor in predicting many factors related to how a child will develop in terms of health. Yet before we go to far we need to theorize the more basic question: why is there poverty at a point in the human history where we have the resources and technology for every human being to live well?