Children living in low-income communities experience adversity, chronic stress, and exposure to numerous risk factors. Hope is one central factor that contributes to resilience and well-being. To further explore children’s personal experiences with hope in low-income communities, we conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty-one children (ages 9-12) residing in Flint, Michigan. Our inductive, qualitative analysis focused on the specific hopes children have and their experience with feeling hopeful or less hopeful about the future.
Children expressed hopes across multiple social-ecological domains, including hopes for themselves, their interpersonal relationships, and the community. Children placed greatest importance on their hopes of helping others— which included providing for their families and the community. Children, however, expressed uncertainty about career aspirations, academic achievement, and financial stability. Facilitators of hope included positive self-views, perceptions of success, optimism, social support, and positive dimensions of the environment (e.g., the availability of resources and limited exposure to violence). Our findings expand what is known about children’s internal dialogues with feeling hopeful/less hopeful in low-income communities. These findings can enrich community and school-based programs, so they further attune to areas in which children are most in need of hope-engendering strategies, and help strengthen individual, family, and community facilitators of hope.