Parenthood and Poverty

SIR John Orr, investigating the state of nutrition' of the people, considered everyone, adult or child, as being of equal significance. Thus he ignores the customary division which considers the requirements of a woman or child as only a fraction of those of a man. There is no distinction in Sir John Orr's work between adults and children, though in the foreword of his book he points out that the group with the lowest income and which averages an expenditure of four shillings per head per week on food contains a disproportionately high number of children. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate in more detail this aspect of nutrition which puts a large proportion of children in the class which is grossly under-nourished, and especially to consider whether this effect is due to assuming that a child requires as much expending upon its food as an adult. For this purpose 7I5 budgets which recorded expenditure on food by members of the Women's Co-operative Guild during one week in April, 1935, have been utilised. These budgets were specially collected for Sir John Orr's investigation and he used 538 of them in the 1,152 budgets from which he inferred the food consumption habits of the people. These 715 budgets contain too many large families, too many children of school age, and too few infants under five to be really typical of the families of the country. Presumably women with adult children have more time, and women with babies less time, than normal wives to belong to Co-operative Guilds. Only 41 per cent. of the persons included in the budgets were infants under five, whilst the corresponding percentage in the I931 census was 7j. In 1931 15 per cent. of the population was between five and fourteen, z8 per cent. of the people in the budgets

Consumption (sociology) · Demographic economics · Economic growth · Economics · Poverty · Social science · Sociology · Demography · Medicine · Psychology · Social Issues and Policies

• La parentalité des uns… et celle des autres

  Yazid Ben Hounet•L Homme•2014

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