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"Low-income single mothers -- United States -- Social conditions"
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Ain't no trust
Ain’t No Trust explores issues of trust and distrust among low-income women in the U.S.—at work, around childcare, in their relationships, and with caseworkers—and presents richly detailed evidence from in-depth interviews about our welfare system and why it’s failing the very people it is designed to help. By comparing low-income mothers’ experiences before and after welfare reform, Judith A. Levine probes women’s struggles to gain or keep jobs while they simultaneously care for their children, often as single mothers. By offering a new way to understand how structural factors impact the daily experiences of poor women, Ain’t No Trust highlights the pervasiveness of distrust in their lives, uncovering its hidden sources and documenting its most corrosive and paralyzing effects. Levine’s critique and conclusions hold powerful implications for scholars and policymakers alike.
eBook
Mothers' Economic Conditions and Sources of Support in Fragile Families
Rising rates of nonmarital childbirth in the United States have resulted in a new family type, the fragile family. Such families, which include cohabiting couples as well as single mothers, experience significantly higher rates of poverty and material hardship than their married counterparts. Ariel Kalil and Rebecca Ryan summarize the economic challenges facing mothers in fragile families and describe the resources, both public and private, that help them meet these challenges. The authors explain that the economic fragility of these families stems from both mothers' and fathers' low earnings, which result from low education levels, as well as from physical, emotional, and mental health problems. Mothers in fragile families make ends meet in many ways. The authors show that various public programs, particularly those that provide in-kind assistance, do successfully lessen economic hardship in fragile families. Single mothers also turn to private sources of support—friends, family, boyfriends—for cash and in-kind assistance. But though these private safety nets are essential to many mothers' economic survival, according to the authors, private safety nets are not always consistent and dependable. Thus, assistance from private sources may not fundamentally improve mothers' economic circumstances. Policy makers, say Kalil and Ryan, must recognize that with rates of nonmarital childbirth at their current level, and potentially rising still, the fragile family is likely an enduring fixture in this country. It is thus essential to strengthen policies that both support these families' economic self-sufficiency and alleviate their hardship during inevitable times of economic distress. The most important first step, they say, is to strengthen the public safety net, especially such in-kind benefits as food stamps, Medicaid, housing, and child care. A next step would be to bolster community-based programs that can provide private financial support, such as emergency cash assistance, child care, and food aid, when mothers cannot receive it from their own private networks.
Journal Article
Flat Broke with Children
Hays tells the story of welfare reform from the perspective of welfare recipients, describing the challenges that they face in managing their work, their families, and the rules and regulations of welfare reform. The majority of adult welfare clients are mothers--over 90 percent--and the time limits imposed by welfare reform throw millions of these mostly unmarried, desperate women into the labor market, where they must accept low wages, the most menial work, the poorest hours, with no benefits, and little flexibility.
eBook
The Influence of Community Violence and Protective Factors on Asthma Morbidity and Healthcare Utilization in High-Risk Children
We examined the longitudinal effects of community risk and protective factors on asthma morbidity and healthcare utilization. Three hundred urban caregivers of children with poorly controlled asthma were enrolled in a randomized controlled trial testing the effectiveness of a behavioral/educational intervention and completed measures of exposure to community violence (ECV), social cohesion (SC), informal social control (ISC), child asthma control, child asthma symptom days/nights, and healthcare utilization. Latent growth curve modeling examined the direct and interaction effects of ECV, SC, and ISC on the asthma outcomes over 12 months. Caregivers were primarily the biological mother (92 %), single (70 %), and poor (50 % earned less than $10,000). Children were African American (96 %) and young (mean age = 5.5 years, SD = 2.2). ECV at baseline was high, with 24.7 % of caregivers reporting more than two exposures to violence in the previous 6 months (M = 1.45, SD = 1.61). Caregiver ECV-predicted asthma-related healthcare utilization at baseline (
b
= 0.19, SE = 0.07,
p
= 0.003) and 2 months (
b
= 0.12, s.e. = 0.05,
p
= 0.04). ISC and SC moderated the effect of ECV on healthcare utilization. Our findings suggest that multifaceted interventions that include strategies to curb violence and foster feelings of cohesion among low-income urban residents may be needed to reduce asthma-related emergency services.
Journal Article
Reclaiming class
Reclaiming Class offers essays written by women who changed their lives through the pathway of higher education. Collected, they offer a powerful testimony of the importance of higher learning, as well as a critique of the programs designed to alleviate poverty and educational disparity. The contributors explore the ideologies of welfare and American meritocracy that promise hope and autonomy on the one hand, while also perpetuating economic obstacles and indebtedness on the other. Divided into the three sections, Reclaiming Class assesses the psychological, familial, and economic intersections of poverty and the educational process. In the first section, women who left poverty through higher education recall their negotiating the paths of college life to show how their experiences reveal the hidden paradoxes of education. Section two presents first person narratives of students whose lives are shaped by their roles as poor mothers, guardian siblings, and daughters, as well as the ways that race interacts with their poverty. Chapters exploring financial aid and welfare policy, battery and abuse, and the social constructions of the poor woman finish the book. Offering a comprehensive picture of how poor women access all levels of private and public institutions to achieve against great odds, Reclaiming Class shows the workings of higher learning from the vantage point of those most subject to the vicissitudes of policy and reform agendas.
eBook
Assets, Expectations, and Children’s Educational Achievement in Female‐Headed Households
This study examines the relationships of mother's assets (home ownership and savings) to, respectively, mother's expectations of child's educational achievement and child's actual educational outcomes in female‐headed households. Analysis of data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) indicates that assets of single mothers are positively associated with child’s educational achievement and that this relationship is partially mediated through expectations. Positive association of household income with child’s outcomes occurs mainly through mother's assets. The study indicates that regression models that include income but not assets are underspecified. Results support expansion of asset‐based policies for poor women with children.
Journal Article
What Do Low-Income Single Mothers Say about Marriage?
Current theories of marriage under-predict the extent of non-marriage, have not been adequately tested, or do not apply well to women with low-socioeconomic status. Furthermore, scholarly research on marriage attitudes among low-SES women suffers from a lack of up-to-date qualitative work. This study draws on qualitative interviews with 292 low-income single mothers in three U.S. cities. Inductive analysis reveals five primary motivations for non-marriage among low-income single mothers. Most mothers agree that potential marriage partners must earn significantly more than the minimum wage, but also emphasize the importance of stability of employment, source of earnings, and the effort men expend to find and keep their jobs. Mothers place equal or greater emphasis on non-monetary factors such as how marriage may diminish or enhance respectability, how it may limit their control over household decisions, their mistrust of men, and their fear of domestic violence. Affordability, respectability, and control have greater salience for African American mothers, while trust and domestic violence have greater salience for whites. The author discusses these findings in relation to existing theories of marriage and in light of welfare reform.
Journal Article
En-gendering Effective Planning: Spatial Mismatch, Low-Income Women, and Transportation Policy
Welfare-to-work transportation programs are predicated on a conceptualization of the spatial mismatch hypothesis that focuses on the central-city residential locations of welfare participants, rapidly expanding job opportunities in the suburbs, and the long commutes needed to connect them. Feminist scholarship and travel behavior research, however, show that the travel patterns of low-income single mothers are not consistent with this behavior, resulting in a policy mismatch between many welfare recipients and their transportation needs. The research reviewed in this article indicates that policymakers and planners should do more to address the transportation needs of these low-income women. Policies must account for the important role of gender in determining where welfare recipients will look for work, how they are likely to conduct their job searches, and the mode by which they travel to both employment and household-supporting destinations.
Journal Article
Effect on Preschoolers' Literacy when Never-Married Mothers Get Married
Healthy Marriage programs in the United States aim to promote marriage primarily among lowincome individuals. There is little research assessing whether children fare better when their never-married mothers get married. The present study uses the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey - Birth Cohort to test the hypothesis that children have higher literacy scores when their mothers who had never married when the children were 9 months old had married when the children were 48 months old (H = 2,800). A small positive effect was found, but only when marriage was compared with cohabitation. The association between marriage and literacy is partially explained by mothers' increased household income. The children of mothers who were single noncohabitants or married and then divorced or separated were also doing better with respect to literacy than children of cohabiting mothers. Future research is needed to better understand how cohabitation is associated with negative effects on children's literacy.
Journal Article