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Home > Portable Practical Pediatrics > Every Child Can Be a Powerball Winner (Pedcast)
Podcast: Portable Practical Pediatrics
Episode:

Every Child Can Be a Powerball Winner (Pedcast)
Category: Kids & family
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2016-02-08 07:31:31
Description: Topic Introduction Doc Smo here, your pedcast host. Thanks for joining me today for another edition of Portable Practical Pediatrics where we talk about all things kid. Have you noticed that America seems to have gone gaga over lotteries. We called this type of game gambling when I was young but somehow, it has become very mainstream and accepted in today's world.  Personally, I think it is a backhanded way of preying on people's weaknesses and funding what should be the responsibility of the taxpayer and paying with for it with a vice--that vice being gambling. But that is just my opinion. The the driving force behind the Powerball lottery and really all lotteries is the hope of it's players for a quick way to financial security and a better life.  I get that but I think their thinking is all wrong. In today's pedcast we are going to use the backdrop of the Powerball lottery to explore an alternative way that lottery players can become winners- guaranteed winners.  So sit back, open up your imagination and listen to my advice to Powerball players all over the country. Musical Introduction Some Facts About Money In order to comprehend what I am going to suggest, we need to first look at some basic facts about the Powerball lottery.  First understand that Americans spend about $65 billion dollars a year on lottery tickets. That translates to the average family spending $630/year on lotteries. Yes, $65 billion dollars where their chance of winning is extremely remote; something in the order of 1 chance in 292 million. At some level, players of these lotteries must understand that means that for every person who wins, 291, 999,999 people will lose their money. To make matters worse,  a large percentage of these lottery players are really poor.  These must be very desperate people  or  people with money to burn! To make matters even worse, even for the very few players who end up winning, there is a good chance that not only will their families, friends and society prey on them because of their winnings, but they will more than likely end up ultimately in serious financial trouble.  Expensive to play,  an infintesimal chance of winning, along with an often ugly end game makes me wonder why does anyone go for this. Because they want a better and easier life stupid!   Ok, that got me thinking. "What if there were a much easier way to make life better for a family, especially their children?"  "What if you could spend the same amount of money you would have on Powerball and have an almost surefire way to improve your children's chance at a great life?"   In an ever increasing society falling into the haves and have nots, anything that we can do to make every child a winner of life's lottery, we need to do.  Well, we already know how to do that! But first, a little more background information. I think it is generally understood that the higher a child's literacy level and academic level achieved, the higher their earning potential will be during their life. Early access to books, rich language, and reading is paramount to success in life for most children. Listen to what some  old and new research says about how the number of books in a child's home effects their school performance; Having Children Getting Access to Books is Vital for Their Success "Access to Books Is the Key to Successful Reading Development.  Sixty-one percent of low-income families have no books at all in their homes for their children. While low-income children have, on average, four children’s books in their homes, a team of researchers concluded that nearly two-thirds of the low-income families they studied owned no books for their children (US Dept. of Education, 1996)." "Children in low-income families lack essential one-on-one reading time. The average child growing up in a middle-class family has been exposed to 1,000 to 1,700 hours of one-on-one picture book reading. The average child growing up in a less economically stable family,
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