Leaving Poverty

Terry Hartle’s article (Editorial Pages, May 27), “Old Can Help Young Escape Poverty,” inspired both alarm and hope in me. It is alarming to think that our most valuable untapped national resource, our children, is increasingly threatened by the specter of poverty. To waste this essential resource will have an economic impact upon our society that makes an oil crisis pale into insignificance.

Dr. Robert Cooke, onetime chief pediatrician of Johns Hopkins Hospital, has stated: “There is considerable evidence that the early years of childhood are a most critical point in the poverty cycle. During these years, the creation of learning patterns, emotional development, and the formation of individual expectations and aspirations take place at a very rapid pace. For the child of poverty, there are clearly observable deficiencies in these process, which lay a foundation for a pattern of failure, and thus a pattern of poverty throughout the child’s entire life.”

On the hopeful side, Terry Hartle has called upon senior citizens to take up the banner on behalf of children, the only citizens in America who have neither a voting voice nor an organization to represent their interests. I would also call on the future senior citizens, those of us in the baby-boom generation, to do the same. We will be looking to these same children for economic support 25 years down the line.

JEANNE SURBER

Altadena