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.