Chronic Poverty and the Struggle for Family Survival: The Rhetoric and Reality of Welfare "Reform"

Abstract

Right now I'm at the stage where everything is piling, bills and all little things. Little things are things that do it. I can't find a baby-sitter right now 'cos I can't pay her--I try to go get help from welfare and they tell me I make too much ... it's one thing after another going on in my life. I gotta find a way to work, to go to school, to the laundromat, to get food--now my car broke down...No matter how hard you try you're always going to be two steps behind, because whoever the force is, doesn't want you to succeed.--Joey, a young single mother of two-year-old twins [3]I lived in public housing in Detroit, I stayed there for two years, and I know the debilitating factors that it takes just to survive. People have tried and tried and tried to find jobs; it's a vicious circle and after you get the door slammed in your face, you don't have the will to go out there and fight anymore...I got a little slip in my son's pocket saying I owed $900 in child care and saying don't bring my children back until that is paid...I couldn't do it so I tried to go back on welfare. It was either pay my rent or pay child care...so I called social services and asked them about getting my benefits again and my worker said I had to wait two months, so I stopped work in November and she said I wouldn't get any benefits until January. I asked my worker, How'm I supposed to live? and she said, It's not for me to tell you!--Tanya, a single mother of two young children [4]Chronic Poverty and Single Mother FamiliesIn the United States, where chronic poverty has become an endemic feature of the landscape of the other America, the largest constituency of poor Americans is young children--and the younger in age the higher the risk. While 21% of children under 18 are classified as living in 25% of children under 6 and 27% under 3 years old live in poverty (Children's Defense Fund, 1996), with the majority residing in poor single mother households. It is clear that the increasing economic vulnerability of the single mother family represents a child welfare crisis of growing magnitude that has been further exacerbated by recent welfare repeal legislation. The failure of public policy to address the daily survival needs of economically vulnerable single mothers also threatens their children's basic physical, social, and developmental needs.The term, feminization of poverty, has been widely used since the late 1970s to describe the particular plight of women who, as single mothers, are disproportionately poor and face an alarming array of obstacles which threaten their family stability (Ehrenreich & Piven, 1984; Goldberg & Kremen, 1990; Gordon, 1990; Pearce, 1978; Polakow, 1993, 1995); and by the late 1980s women and their children had become a significant majority of America's poor (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1989). Unmet needs in housing, health care, and child care frequently coalesce to form a triple crisis confronting single mothers who, as both providers and nurturers of their children, cannot sustain family viability when they are low wage earners. Gender discrimination in the workplace and low wage service sector jobs providing few, if any, benefits mean that an unskilled employed single mother often lives well below the federal poverty line. In 1995-1996, a full-time minimum wage salary was $8,800 a year, $3,000 under the federal poverty line for a single mother family of three. The child care crisis compounds the situation with many low wage-earning mothers spending up to 50% of their income on child care. In Michigan, for example, costs for child care average over $4,600 per year (Kids Count, 1996).In 1995, 15.3 million children lived in poverty in the United States (Children's Defense Fund, 1996). Statistics (Children's Defense Fund, 1995, 1996) tell an ongoing story of chronic, sustained children's which is integrally linked to the economic vulnerability of their parents--frequently mothers alone, living on the edge:* Over 60% of poor children live in female-headed households with over half of those families subsisting on less than $6,000 a year. …