Reflections
I learnt that children of low-income background are more likely to be exposed to stressful living environments, family disruption, frequent change of residence and lower-quality child care than their peers (Evans; Evans et al., cited in Bobbitt & Gershoff 2016).
Higher chaotic home environments predicted higher problem behaviours and fewer social skills (Bobbitt & Gershoff, 2016). Children from a stressful home environment also tend to display disruptive behaviours, such as impulsivity, in school, which serve as their survival mechanism to respond to stress, and they are less able to develop a healthy balance between their social and academic lives (Bradley & Corwyn, cited in Jensen 2009), which may result in them getting ostracised by their peers.
Based on my experience, while there are some children who are struggling academically, most of them just lack someone to talk to about their day and what they had learnt in school. Thus, I recommend a mentoring/buddy programme for future work with student care centres.
Each volunteer will be paired with a child or two if they can manage, and the volunteers and children will meet once a week to catch up and the volunteer will also help them with their homework if necessary.
I learnt that primary school students require a lot of attention because at their age, they are very curious about the world and have just started to explore it without guidance, and thus, they could be very reckless and land themselves in dangerous situations unknowingly.
It is also fairly hard for me, being at least a decade older than them, to understand how they think and anticipate their behaviour, considering the fact that the children nowadays are very different from my peers and I back when we were children.
In the second session of my group’s intervention programme, we planned to educate the children on the importance of listening to instructions carefully, and thus we came up with an outdoor activity where the children had to tap the coloured balloons, which we had stuck on the walls earlier on before the session started, in a particular order decided by us to receive stickers for their token cards.
However, during the debrief, one of the children suddenly stood up and ran towards the road because one of the balloons had fell off the wall and was flying towards the trench drain outside the void deck.
I was actually sitting in front of Alex (not real name) at the time but I did not notice him running off because I was conversing with the child next to me who was telling me something and I thought someone was watching over Alex.
It was only until one of my groupmates shouted for me to chase after him that I realised what was going on.
I was stunned and for a moment, my mind went blank and I did not know what to do.
Fortunately, nothing happened because one of my groupmates was able to stop Alex before he could go near the road, and the road was also empty. However, if something similar were to occur again, and I was there but did not act in time because of my negligence and lack of situational awareness, I dread to think what might happen.
I know for sure that I would regret it for the rest of my life, and therefore, after that incident, I realised my tendency of being oblivious to my surroundings when I am focused on something, and I promised myself that I will not let my guard down so easily in the future because I can never be too careful. (600 words)
References
Bobbitt, K. C., & Gershoff, E. T. (2016). Chaotic experiences and
low-income children’s social-emotional development.
Children and Youth Service Review, 70, 19-29.
doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2016.09.006
Jensen, E. (2009). Teaching with poverty in mind: What being
poor does to kids’ brains and what schools can do about it.
Alexandria, VA: ASCD.