Causes of poverty and effects on life opportunitiesAccording to Reutter, Veenstra, Stewart, Raphael, Love, Makwarimba and McMurray (2005 p. 518), “Housing affordable was considered particularly difficult to obtain by 96%, but other resources (obtaining healthy food, giving children a good start in life and adopting healthy behaviors) were also considered difficult by at least 70% of people interviewed. Poverty has now become one of the world's most serious problems, with devastating effects on life opportunities, more severe in third world countries than in developed countries, but still strongly present in both. Each place has its own causes, such as personal/family (Rank, 2001), local/environmental (Murry, Berkel, Gaylord-Harden, Linder, & Nation, 2011), and national/systemic (Ferriss, 2006). Some of the effects concern mental health (Kuruvilla and Jacob, 2007), lifestyle (Reutter et al, 2005), employment (Rank, 2001) and education (Pagani, Boulerice, Vitaro and Tremblay, 1999) . However, there are still solutions such as policies (Duncan and Brooks-Gunn, 2000) and financial support from government, such as the Child Defense Fund (Sharpe, 1996). First, it is best to take a closer look at what poverty represents. is and the two main types that currently exist, absolute and relative. According to Kuruvilla and Jacob (2007), absolute poverty mainly concerns not having enough resources to continue one's ordinary life, while relative poverty mainly concerns the fact that the family or individual's income is significantly lower than that of the others. These two types of poverty have always existed, but they have only gotten worse over the years. According to Rank (2001), the poverty rate in 1999 was 11.8% in the United States, however...... middle of document......(1999). Effects of poverty on academic failure and delinquency among boys: A change and process model approach. Journal of Child Psychology, 40(8), 1209-1219. Duncan, GJ, Gunn, JB, Young, WJ, & Smith, JR (1998). How does child poverty affect children's life chances? American Sociological Review, 63, 406-423. Sharpe, M.E. (1996). Child poverty reduces lifetime worker performance. Children's Defense Fund Report on the Costs of Child Poverty, 1, 38-41. McBride, V., Berkel, C., Harden, NKG, Linder, NC and Nation, M. (2011). Neighborhood Poverty and Adolescent Development, 21(1), 114-128. Ferriss, A.L. (2006). Approaches to reducing poverty. Applied Quality of Life Research, 1, 217-226.Lee, J.S. (2011). The effects of persistent poverty on children's physical, social-emotional, and learning outcomes. Research on child indicators, 4, 725-747.