Family & Society

This chapter fits right in with our readings this week on social class.  So who are the poor?  Overwhelmingly, they are single-parent, mom-headed, minority families.  Check out the statistics:  The poverty rate reached 10.8% among all families and 31.1% among female-headed families.  Compare this to Black families – 24.7%.  The children in these families are the innocent victims of poverty:  1.3 million children are living in poverty; 43% of the children in female-headed families are poor (one in three Black children, 3 in 10 Hispanic, one in ten White).  I watched a 20/20 segment this week that broke my heart done by Diane Sawyer.  It was entitled, Waiting on the World to Change:  Children in Poverty.  I sat mesmerized as Sawyer took us into the lives of 3 children living in poverty and followed them for over a year.  Please take time to watch this incredible documentary: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2826860I don’t know what to say except that this should not happen in our country. Why are children going hungry?  Why does not our welfare system provide adequately for these families?  I get so tired of people who are not living in poverty saying that these black moms are having babies so that they can make money.  This chapter does the math for you – they are not making it on welfare.  There must be other reasons.  One of the last comments in the book says this: “The author reports that there is little substantial upward social mobility; people usually live out their lives in the same social class from which they came because of the norms learned and the constraints and privileges they experience.”  How does social class affect our lives?  How do the experiences of these children in poverty set them up for their future?

My blog for this course will be to discuss the chapters in Families in Poverty.    This week the chapter highlights 3 different families living in poverty.  Their stories were very real – I personally know people who fit each of those stories.  This morning I stopped for coffee at McDonalds.  They woman who handed me the coffee out the drive-thru window clearly could be identified as poverty-stricken.  She had that look – bad teeth, poorly cut hair, haggard look.  I wondered if she was worried about her children – this morning there was a 2 hour school delay due to weather.  What would she do?  How did she manage her “non-standard work schedule?”  These books will introduce us to the structure of poverty.   What can we do to change the structure of our society to help these families?  I think these case studies in this chapter make it pretty clear that it was not deficiencies on the part of the individuals that led to their situations of poverty but rather circumstances beyond their control.  The control lies in the hands of all of us - what responsibility do we have to be involved in policies that will help these kinds of people?    One of the things we will focus on in this course is social policy for families.  As you work your way through these next weeks, think about this.  Be creative – what kinds of things can we do as a community to change the face of family poverty?????? 

Welcome to my blog!  We will use this space to discuss issues about the family in our society today.  I hope you will find this to be an interesting endeavor.  I am looking forward to discussing issues from my personal perspective and hearing your opinions.  If you have something you would like to discuss, feel free to introduce a topic and we will see what we all think about it!