The Power of Older Women and Men in Egyptian and Tunisian Families

Abstract

Phenomenological analysis was used to understand how rural low-income families accessed and used child-care resources to meet the needs of their families using data from Wave 1 of the Rural Families Speak Project. In the aftermath of welfare reform, results highlight the continuing need for policy aimed at building stronger supports for families with inadequate access to child care. Key Words: child care, low-income, phenomenology, policy, rural families, welfare reform. (Family Relations, 2004, 53, 201-209) The passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, commonly known as welfare reform, changed how the government supports low-income families. This legislation changed 61 years of guaranteed benefits to eligible mothers and children, along with many services and programs for low-income families. The safety nets that once existed for these families have been removed and replaced with work-focused programs. In the aftermath of welfare reform, low-income families, perhaps more than ever before, must rely upon many sources within their environments in order to access the resources they need. With the implementation of welfare reform came many policy changes for those families receiving cash assistance and for families relying on other programs and services that changed, such as the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program for children, Food Stamps, child support enforcement, childcare systems, and child nutrition programs. Recent studies have analyzed the impacts of welfare reform by looking at program outcomes using quantitative analysis, econometric methods, and secondary analyses of administrative data to investigate caseload decline, employment status, employment and earnings, welfare spells (Bell, 2001; Loprest, 1999; Weber, Duncan, & Whitener, 2001), and economic well-being (Porterfield, 2001; Weber et al). Although these macro-level studies give insight to general patterns and trends, the family perspective is missing-that is, the voices of families affected by policies often are muted in statistical reports. Instead of allowing families to talk about the triumphs and tribulations of their lives within a changing policy environment, previous studies have offered a generalized picture of their experiences. We argue that to understand the everyday unique experiences of families, policy researchers must begin with the family's perspective. As a decade review of literature on family policy research highlighted, the family's perspective has been virtually ignored (Bogenschneider, 2000). Moreover, few studies have taken the needed qualitative approach to understand the experiences from the perspectives of low-income families, with a few exceptions. Stack (1970) began from the family perspective by describing the survival strategies of a Black community through an ethnographic lens. Edin and Lein (1997) investigated the lived experiences of 379 urban low-income single mothers in four urban cities across the United States to understand how they pieced together the resources needed to meet the needs of their families. Newman (1999) offered an ethnographic view of inner-city poverty by letting families talk about their struggles to survive within their communities. Seccombe (1999) interviewed 47 women from small- and medium-sized communities in Florida to see their perspectives on welfare reform. Monroe and Tiller (2001) described the work of welfare-reliant women and their experiences with participants in the labor force, the rural job market, their use of support networks, and the stigma of welfare. Although these studies provide insight into the everyday experiences of low-income families, missing are those from rural low-income families. Previous studies have focused on urban low-income families or combined all families together, so the impact of one's location as low income was ignored. Rural low-income families face unique challenges due to the variability in availability and affordability of resources to help them get what they need (Lewis, 2000). …