ISTANBUL (AP) — In a dim one-room apartment in one of Istanbul’s poorest neighborhoods, 11-year-old Atakan Sahin curls up on a threadbare sofa with his siblings to watch TV while their mother stirs a pot of pasta.

The simple meal is all the family of six can look forward to most evenings. Atakan, his two younger brothers and 5-year-old sister are among the one-third of Turkish children living in poverty.

“Look at the state of my children,” said Rukiye Sahin, 28. “I have four children. They don’t get to eat chicken, they don’t get to eat meat. I send them to school with torn shoes.”

Persistently high inflation, triggered by currency depreciation and unconventional economic policies that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pursued but later abandoned, has left many families struggling to pay for food and housing. Experts say it’s creating a lost generation of children who have been forced to grow up too quickly to help their families eke out an existence.

According to a 2023 joint report by UNICEF and the Turkish Statistical Institute, about 7 million of Turkey’s roughly 22.2 million children live in poverty.

That deprivation is brought into stark focus in neighborhoods such as Istanbul’s Tarlabasi, where the Sahin family lives just a few minutes’ walk from Istiklal Avenue, a tourism hot spot bristling with brightly lit shops and expensive restaurants.

Meanwhile, the Sahins eat sitting on the floor of their room — the same floor Rukiye and her husband sleep on while their children occupy the room’s sofas. In the chilly early December night, a stove burns scraps of wood to keep them warm. They sometimes fall asleep to the sound of rats scuttling through the building.

Atakan spends his days helping his father scour dumpsters in search of recyclable material to earn the family a meager income.

Poor children in Istanbul also earn money for their families by selling small items such as pens, tissues or bracelets at the bars and cafes in the city’s entertainment districts, often working late into the night.

“I can’t go to school because I have no money,” he said. “We have nothing. Can you tell me how I can go? On sunny days, when I don’t go to school, I collect plastic and other things with my father. We sell whatever we find.”

The cash helps buy basic foodstuffs and pay for his siblings to attend school. On the days Atakan can attend, he is ill-equipped to succeed, lacking proper shoes, a coat and textbooks for the English class he loves.

The Sahins struggle to scrape together the money to cover the rent, utilities and other basic expenses as Turkey’s cost-of-living crisis continues to rage. Inflation stood at 47% in November, having peaked at 85% in late 2022. Prices of food and nonalcoholic drinks were 5.1% higher in November than in the previous month.