Giving Compass' Take:

• Vox's podcast discusses if the Canadian government's child poverty benefit program (that gives parents money each month) is successful. 

• How should our government respond to child poverty? How can funders work to break cycles of poverty?

• Here are five myths about welfare and child poverty. 

Natasha Razouk has lots of piercings, and her skin is decorated with tattoos: gargoyles, fairy wings, diamonds, stars, and spades.

In August 2019, she also had four rose tattoos. She was a heroin addict for seventeen years, and she gets a rose for every year that she stays sober — though in August, she’d actually been sober for five years, not four.

“The first year that I was clean, I didn’t do it, because for me the first year ... it was easier,” she explained, “Not that it wasn’t hard, but I was surrounded. I was structured. I was very followed.”

Natasha went got clean after she had her daughter Scarlett, who is now 7.

Scarlett is very different from her mother. On this day, she was wearing her hair in a perky ponytail, and lots of pink.

“She’s a lot more girly than I was,” Natasha said, laughing. “She loves to dance. She loves music. She loves to sing.”

But differences in taste aside, the two were clearly very close. During our interview, Natasha helped her daughter with a bouncy ball she’d made as at a nearby booth, and they laughed together as it bounced around.

The booth was part of a back-to-school fair at a charitable organization in Montreal. Kids could make bouncy balls, but they also got free winter boots, free backpacks, and a free set of school supplies: glue and colored pencils and erasers and notebooks. Even a lunchbox.

That was definitely helpful for Natasha. But it didn’t come close to covering all the costs of raising her daughter. Kids are expensive, after all. They need clothes and food and health care and day care and any number of other costly things.

Read the full article about Canada's child benefit program by Byrd Pinkerton, Dylan Matthews, Jillian Weinberger, and Amy Drozdowska at Vox.