why do some young people from really tough backgrounds beat the odds and what can we all learn from them [Music] when I was a child I was bounced from children's home to Children's Home yeah it was tough but I made it as a writer and as a poet so this subject above all is very close to my heart how do you do it said night how do you wake and shine I keep it simple said like one day at a time there are no simple answers but we do have some really interesting clues some come
from a major study which has been following 12 000 children in four different countries over a period of 20 years the young lives team led by the University of Oxford tracks children in Ethiopia Rue Vietnam and India they looked at those who'd managed to beat the odds and pulled out a few common threads here are three key ones I didn't have family around me and the absence of it actually gives you an opportunity to see just how important these supportive relationships are for a child I saw them because I didn't have them think of a
baby just learning to crawl they only go so far before they look back when I looked back there was nobody there however tenuous having somebody who's on your side it's really important for me I didn't realize it at the time but the truth is my social worker was that person he didn't feel like a role model he didn't feel like a friend but he was something more he was a person keeping his binoculars focused on my emotional state and that that proved pivotal to me second key element is the importance of a safety net studies
in the UK of consistently shown a link between poverty and poor outcomes for kids children who experience persistent poverty are four times more likely to be in the bottom 10 in vocabulary aged five small things can make a big difference like the warmth of the relationship between a parent and a child reading to kids and having a safety net in those early years is so important in Ethiopia and Peru the young lives team found children whose parents had received government support for Basics like food when they were very young had significantly better long-term memory and
cognitive skills at the age of 12 than those who hadn't the more disadvantaged the family the greater the impact and their similar evidence from the US were the baby's first Year's study looked at the impact of giving money to the poorest families in four cities they gave twenty dollars a month to one set of families the control group and 333 dollars a month to the other group they then scammed the brains of the babies at the age of one and just look at the difference the images on the left show the babies from The High
cash group and those on the right from the low cash group the babies whose mothers received the high cash gift showed significantly more activity in parts of the brain associated with language and cognitive skills wow [Music] when I look back at my younger self all I wanted was compassion and second chances are about just that compassion I was given a book of poetry by a teacher in the children's home when I was 13 years of age but it wasn't just the book of poetry which helped me though it did immensely it was also the fact
that I was worth giving a book to I was lucky because I found the thing I love poetry and regardless of your upbringing that's one of the greatest things that a child or a person can ever find what it is that they love I'm not defined by Darkness confined in the night each Dawn I am reminded I am defined by light foreign
