Divisive Dichotomies and Mother-Headed Families: The Power of Naming

Abstract

The power of naming is capturing the interest of social work practitioners, particularly those who seek to provide gender- and ethnic-sensitive interventions. Dividing families into categories such as intact or broken pejoratively labels mother-headed families, which actually reflect the maternal commitment and strength of women managing on their own (Abramovitz, 1991). Most one-parent families are headed by women, and a disproportionate number are headed by women of color (Van Den Bergh & Cooper, 1986). So divisive dichotomies place women and people of color in positions that legitimize their disempowered social status (Van Den Bergh & Cooper, 1986). The way practitioners refer to and categorize both individuals and families affects problem definitions, interventions, and the helping process in general. A nonintact seeking professional help with a problematic parent-child interaction risks being confronted by a practitioner who attributes family problems to inadequate structure rather than to the normative developmental phases of childhood and family life cycles. Mothers who raise children alone often internalize low expectations about their ability to head families and subsequently develop worried well syndromes. That is, they may attribute all family conflicts to their inability to parent their children alone. The negative impact of pejorative naming has reached full cycle when problems associated with the life cycle of the family, such as adolescent individuation, are attributed by the mother herself to her inability to parent her children in a one-parent home. Placing families in a deviant category is but one of the artificial dichotomies that have negative consequences for mother-headed families. Such dualistic thinking results in other cleavages of women's experiences that, in the interest of the well-being of women and their families, are best perceived in an integrative fashion. The traditional polarity between work and leisure, for example, does not fit the life experiences of women who face multiple challenges associated with the interface of wage labor and child rearing. Employment and family responsibilities are inseparable components of women's lives. Affordable child care, for example, is requisite to mothers being able to participate in the labor market and to provide for their families. Interface of Wage Labor and Child Rearing When wage labor and child rearing are artificially separated as two distinct areas for social policies and programs, comprehensive services that could enable women to perform both roles are overlooked. Guaranteed child support awards (for child rearing) and work training (for employment) are essential to raise impoverished mothers and their children above the poverty level (National Center for Children in Poverty, 1992). Because a majority of fathers do not pay the full amount of child support determined by the courts, the government provides subsidies to mothers and collects payments from fathers. In the United States, 50 percent of all single mother-headed families live below the poverty level, compared with 8 percent of single father-headed families (Gordon, 1990). In addition, mother-headed families are fully one-third of the homeless population (Bassuk, 1991). Gender differences in family poverty rates need to be assessed in terms of persistent gaps in earnings; women still earn only 74 percent of male annual wages (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990). Disparities in earnings are even more pronounced for black and Latino mothers. Nearly one-third of black single mothers who worked for pay in 1987 were below the poverty level, whereas 17 percent of white single mothers in the labor market were poor (Gordon, 1990). Discrimination in hiring based on race and ethnicity also hinders mothers receiving child support payments, because men of color earn disproportionally lower wages compared with their white counterparts. The solution to family poverty is not simply employment, but employment that pays at least $6 to $7 per hour to raise the family out of poverty (Bane, Ellwood, Jargowsky, & Wilson, 1989). …