Blog #11

A film where you see poor working women is North Country with Charlize Theron. Charlize Theron’s character, Josey, goes to work for a mine. The movie is mainly about sexual discrimination, but the main character is a poor working woman. She leaves her abusive husband and goes into life poverty. She lives with her parents at first, but eventually makes it into a broken down old house that she tries to fix up and make a home for her children. She works really hard, but she can never seem to make it over that hump out of poverty. She is constantly being harassed at work, but she realizes that having any job, no matter how bad it is, is better than no job. She struggles to balance a life between her children and her work. She also struggles with having to buy her children presents for special occasions. She always wants to give them more and do better for them, but you can tell that she is doing the best that she can. Eating out at a restaurant is a big privilege to her and the children and they only do it occasionally. I remember one part where she gets the kids a trampoline for Christmas I believe, but you can tell it took a lot out of her to get it for them. Josey also gets called all these names that a majority of women under Josey’s circumstances probably would not get called unless they were poor working women. She is called white trash and then she is also called a skank and a slut and all the other horrid names women get called simply because the guys at work do not like her. These guys at work see that she needs this job and she is going to do whatever it takes to keep it, so they take advantage of her.

Blog #10

Adaptive survival strategies that women in Chaundry’s study used after the welfare reform constantly changed as the women changed their care preferences and strategies. Mothers also changed their survival strategies “according to changing circumstances, adjusting to changes in their work course to make their care correspond and vice versa. Mothers adapted their changing strategies to the changing context of welfare that emphasized work.” (Chaundry 179) All the mothers that were worked with in this study, saw work and care as strategically interrelated. While some arranged their child care arrangements to coincide with their work schedules, some mothers made it a point to make their work schedules coincide with their child care schedule. A lot of mothers had trouble trying to decide what to put first, child care or work. Some mothers started with putting work before child care, but ended up putting child care before work. Cassandra was a good example of this. Cassandra worked as a nurse at a hospital and tried to make her shifts at work fit her childcare schedule, but in the end she adjusted it so her child care schedule fit her work schedule. Another strategy that a lot of women follow is having their priorities change once the children start to get older. With young children, a lot of mothers worked less, or they would stop working completely because they could not find a balance between the two or they could simply not find childcare. As children get older though, these mothers realize that they can start putting work first and their schedules are much more flexible. Mothers in the sample spent a lot of time and energy developing strategies that would help them balance work and childcare schedules. a lot of these mothers had multiple care arrangements and it can become very exhausting. Ramona was a good example of this, she cycled through several work and training experiences and seemed to develop an expertise in moving between strategies combing care and work and the advice she gives to other mothers is this, “A mother can make more if she works full-time, but then she has to find two, three, four places to leave her kids, and some of these are with strangers. I think it’s better to work part-time, even two part-time jobs, or find work at home.” (Chaundry 181) A few other strategies mothers used were accepting that they were going to work for most of their children’s early development and finding different ways to cope with it and many mothers used very low-cost care.
How these strategies pointed to interrelations between work and care were all over the place. You can’t work without care and you cannot give your child care without working to pay for it. The struggle of finding a balancing schedule between the two seemed to be the biggest problem for mothers and then of course is the problem of finding good enough quality of care for the amount of money that these mothers could afford. Child care and work go hand in hand, what you get out of your childcare depends on your job, the income you receive from it and the schedule you can make out of it.
After reviewing the course material on welfare reform and reviewing Chaundry’s findings and recommendations about survival strategies, I think they are kind of similar. It seems that the course material was relying heavily on these mothers getting help from the government and everybody else. It seemed as if they were really trying to push to get these laws passed that will help mothers and give them a chance. Chaundry on the other hand seemed to be trying to find ways for mothers to do it on their own. It seemed as if in Chaundry’s findings, the mothers knew the situation they were in and they knew that they weren’t going to get any help from the government or anybody else anytime soon so they found ways to do it on their own. These mothers in Chaundry’s study were finding strategies that they themselves could play out, not strategies that relied on the government’s assistance. It seemed as if the course material on welfare reform was trying to find ways to fix the problem through education and government assistance, but the mothers in Chaundry’s study has many different ways to fix the problem, it was just about finding the ones that worked the best and fit their schedule and lifestyle the best.

Blog #9

The relationship between working poor women’s conditions and children in poverty goes hand in hand. Children are in poverty because of the status of the woman who brought them into the world. If their mother’s are poor, then the child is poor and therefore they are born into poverty. I am not saying it is the mother’s fault, but that is how it goes; if your parents are in poverty and you are a child, then you are in poverty as well. Not only do these working poor women have to look after themselves, they have to take care of a child or children as well, therefore making everything that much more difficult. The poor working women can only do so much for her children because she cannot even support herself. Looking at charts from the National Center for Children in Poverty just goes to show that the working poor women’s conditions affect the children in poverty. Characteristic of officially poor children in American are the same as working poor women, a majority are black, Latino and American Indian and Asian; they are minorities. When you are a child, having immigrant parents increases the chances of being poor and being a working poor women and an immigrant increases your chances of being poor as well. Another thing you see in the charts is that poverty rates are highest for young children and that is believed to be true because parents of young children do not earn as much as parents of older children because they have less job experience and are younger. There are a lot of younger poor women out there as well. Hardships that working poor women and children in poverty experience are the same too, they both experience food insecurity, affordable, decent housing, and lack of health insurance. They also both stress about what is going to happen next.

Blog #8

“Urban poverty” creates many specific problems for poor working mothers. It seems as if the mothers in the sample in chapter four of Chaudry’s book all seem to have at least one concern in common, they all worry about what their children will end up like in the future since they do not really have anybody in the neighborhood to look up to. Many times poor working mothers in “urban poverty” have to use unsatisfactory child care and on top of that, they do not know how to decipher, or the just simply can’t decipher because they don’t have time, the quality of the care the child is being put into. These mothers in “urban poverty” don’t have time to sit there and research and inspect every single child care place that they take their children to. A good example of this was Traci, Traci would look for signals like appearance of the setting and the child care provider’s attitude toward the children, things that were obvious enough to pick up on the first time. Other disadvantages or problems that “urban poverty” creates is joblessness, declines in residential real estate and the deterioration and abandonment of homes, loss of businesses and quality of the community, dependence on welfare, poorly functioning public schools, crime and high levels of concern for the safety of residents, violence, drugs, disconnection from the larger city and the absence of residents’ concern for their neighborhoods. Incarceration of the parents, or more specifically the husband or boyfriend, is another specific problem that “urban poverty” creates for poor working mothers. Poor women in mixed income neighborhoods do not face a majority of these problems because there are people who make a better living around them and making the environment and community different. Drugs and violence are probably not all over the streets because the residents do not allow it and the security is probably better.

Blog #7

There are lots of factors that contribute to the instability of child care that Jaqueline and Julia experience. At first, Julia tries to use kin care by having the baby’s father watch the children while she is at work. This did not last long though because eventually they broke up. The next care provider was Julia’s cousin, Izzy, but that ended after five months because Izzy’s work prevented her for continuing to provide the care. Next up, Julia turned to the Agency for Child Development for subsidized care, but she was placed at the end of a long waiting list because she was not a high priority because she was not working or attending school at the time she applied. She finally did make it into a welfare program, Work Experience Program, but shortly after finding care through that program, the welfare program’s system was late in making payments, leaving Julia without child care once again. She lost her next child care provider because of subsidy payment problems again, but this time she risked losing both of her jobs as well. Shortly after this, Julia lost all her assistance from the government and her increased housing and food expenses left her unable to pay for child care. In the end, Julia’s expenses and debt continued to grow and her work schedule also did not fit with any available child care schedule. With minimum wage jobs the schedule is most likely not as flexible. When you work minimum wage jobs as a poor working mother you probably work more than one job, therefore making it even more difficult to find child care for all the time you are at work. Minimum wage jobs make child care very unstable for children and mothers as well. It is also very hard to work your way up when you start at minimum wage jobs, most moms said that they have worked minimum wage jobs their entire lives, never making it over that hump to better pay and a reason for that could be lack of child care in order to give the effort needed in order to move up.

Blog #6

The range of child care used by low-income mothers varies significantly. The different types of care generally fall into four different categories: home-based individualized child care, family child care in caregiver’s home, center care and other settings and types. Types of child care that fall into the home-based, individualized child care is father care, kin care by an adult relative or close family friend, informal care by a nonrelated adult, neighbor, or acquaintance, care by paid nanny or sitter in child’s home, and care by older siblings. Types of care that fall into the family child care in caregiver’s home are family day care (licensed), family day care network (licensed), and family day care group. Types of child care that fall into the center care are group day care and nursery programs, head start and early head start centers, and pre-K and preschool programs. Last, but not least, the types of child care that fall into the other settings and types are mother’s care while working, specialized care or special needs care, and day care in shelters, hospitals or other specialized or service institutions. One thing that mothers have to take into consideration when looking for child care is the setting, the provider, the content and the quality of the care because their children are most likely spending a majority of their time there therefore, wherever these children are staying plays a large role in their development. With Bethany’s story, there were many factors that challenged and put a constraint on her child care choices such as, training for jobs, availability of care providers, subsidy given by welfare programs, reliability of care provider, and conflicts between mother and child care provider.
The type of child care that mothers prefer and the type of child care that the actually use can differ greatly. To me, it seems as if a lot of mothers prefer kin care because trust is a huge issue when looking for someone to take care of your children and who can you trust more than your own family. Harriet, for example, expects her family to provide care. A lot of mothers do not get what they prefer usually because of many different reasons such as money, conflict, or family issues and that is very unfortunate.

Blog # 5

Chaudry argues that “we are asking the less fortunate to strive and work harder, we are deeply discounting our public responsibility for the children born into poor families and disadvantaged communities” (p.14) because he believes that we could have replaced welfare with more support and opportunites for children in addition to strong work requirements. While we were sitting there telling the poor families to work harder and do better, we weren’t thinking about what would be done with these children. People want poor people to stop being “lazy” and get out there and work, but then these people do not want to assist the poor people with taking care of their children, what do they expect these children in poverty to do while their parents are out trying to make a living and work harder because other people told them to? In one of the videos, it starts off with a man defining the working poor as people who go to work and earn a wage, but still don’t have enough money to pay rent or make a house payment or buy food and medicine for their kids. Another man says that the working poor are people who work full time jobs and still can’t make ends meet because of the cost of housing, cost of food, and cost of insurance. This video helped support Chaudry’s perspective that the issue is a public one and not a personal one because all these people blame the reason the poor people are poor because of the cost of things. Almost every single person that answered the question of who are the poor working class stated that they were people who worked, for minimum wage, but still could not pay things. The public, or should I say the government, are the people that set prices on things, they have the power to do something about it, they have the power to change it, so the working poor are the public’s problem because the poor people are working and trying to make a living, but what they make hourly and what they have to pay for doesn’t match up, so they cannot keep up.