What I hear from educators more than anything else right now is the numbers of children who are coming to them with emotional issues. Anxiety. The number of parents who are out of control. Kindergartners who are actually in alternative centers for their behavior. So how do we begin to address this issue?
Well, in America we’ve always thought of poverty as financial, but what we’re seeing is more and more emotional poverty—regardless of the financial status of the family. So for the purposes of this series, we’re going to define emotional poverty and emotional wealth as the extent to which your resources are stable or unstable.
One of the things we know is this: The more unstable your resources—and those of you who are familiar with Framework know about the resources: financial, emotional, mental, physical, support systems, relationships, and role models, language—all those resources that help you survive your environment. When they become unstable, then it threatens two things.
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