The Working Poor

by David K. Shipler

  When welfare forced her into the workplace, the best she could find was four hours a day at $6.15 faxing, filing, mailing, photocopying, and sitting at the receptionist’s desk of the Metropolitan Boys and Girls Club, a job with no light of promotion at the end of the tunnel. In fact, there wasn’t even a tunnel, just a windowless reception area boxed in by dead ends.

  Life at home was no better. Her sister—the sister who had rescued Marquita’s children—was now strung out on drugs, living on the street and in crack houses. So Marquita now rescued her sister’s teenage son and brought him to live in her small apartment, where they waited for the day when her sister hit bottom and found that moment of lucidity.

  To make matters worse, Marquita’s daughter Kiyonna began to duplicate some of Marquita’s patterns. The girl hated school, dropped out in her junior year, and went to work cleaning houses. Marquita, seeing her own mistakes being replayed, grieved and raged and pleaded with Kiyonna to go back into the classroom. The girl stubbornly refused. At least she wasn’t pregnant, Marquita noted, but that consolation did not last long. Within a couple of years, Kiyonna gave birth to one child out of wedlock, then to another two years later. She went on welfare, thereby extending the syndrome to three generations in a row. “Not good,” Marquita observed sadly, “not really good.”

  And yet, that newest generation was dividing itself at a fork in the road. Along the fast track of bad decisions and corrosive failures that led to poverty, there appeared an occasional exit opened by wise choices and small successes. While Kiyonna seemed to be speeding toward lifetime destitution, her teenage brother Garry took a different course, thanks to a smart move by Marquita and Garry’s father. Of the three fathers of her four children, only one was able to help. Kiyonna’s father was “deceased,” Marquita pronounced formally, and another was “incarcerated.” But the third, Garry’s, was concerned enough to offer his suburban Maryland address so that his son could enroll in a good high school and escape from D.C.’s inner-city system. Marquita happily embraced the opportunity— not only for his better education but also to pull him from the whirlpool of the drug-laced neighborhood. It worked. Garry graduated, went on to college in Nebraska, and began to think about becoming a teacher.

  Then Marquita took an exit herself. She studied hard for her commercial driver’s license and, on the third attempt, passed the test. She went to work for the post office, though the unrelenting overtime hours were tough on her kids, and she disliked the laborious task of sorting and carrying mail. So she started driving a bus for Washington’s public school system at the comfortable wage of $15 an hour plus benefits. Everything went well until she slipped up one morning after delivering kids to school. She forgot to check that all the children had gotten off. A little boy in the back had fallen asleep, and only after she returned the bus to the yard did she discover him there, snoozing peacefully on a seat. She took him directly to school, but no matter: An important rule had been broken, and she was fired. Perhaps at another time, she would have quietly sunk back onto the welfare rolls, but that wasn’t an option under current law, so she got a job at a private school driving what she called “a limousine bus, a luxury bus with thirty-five passengers,” to transport children to and from school every day. She earned $13 an hour but no benefits. The privileged children never saw her scars.

  Her mother, who had created that crucial vacuum in Marquita’s childhood, died at age fifty-nine, a victim of kidney disease. Her passing did not erase the past, however. “Look in the Bible,” Marquita remarked. “You’re my father, and you have did this awful crime or something like that, or you have sinned, that sin would go passed on, if the family’s not livin’ the right way or something like that. So it continues on. And it sometimes goes down to that. It might skip a couple of generations and go to another generation, you know.” She gave a sour laugh. So it continues on.

  The psychological techniques that help a child cope with sexual or physical abuse do not work when the child herself becomes a parent. The dissociative reaction, the emotional closedown, interferes with the grown survivor’s responses to her own children. She may be defensive and overprotective, emotionally unavailable, and ill-equipped to sustain empathy. Everyday stress can reactivate the post-traumatic symptoms.

  Here again, the dynamics may vary with socio-economic level. While a child of privilege can be damaged by a parent’s inability to nurture, his access to good education, special services, therapy, and other opportunities may help him survive more successfully than his counterpart in or near poverty. Without the buffers of family affluence, achievement, and ambition, a child is dangerously exposed.

  This does not mean that poor people are automatically worse parents than rich. It means that neglectful parenting can have more damaging results in poverty. A family, like a house, can withstand only as much wind and weather as its construction and maintenance allow; the storms that rage around the poor would test the resilience of any structure. As Americans of all classes know from their own high divorce rates, family can be a fragile thing indeed.

  There is no more highly charged subject in the discussion of poverty, for impoverished families have long been stigmatized as dysfunctional. The father is a drunken or addicted ne’er-do-well, if he’s around at all, and the mother an angry shrew or submissive incompetent. The parents don’t read to their children, don’t value education, don’t teach or exhibit morality. That is the image. Absent from the picture are the devoted grandmothers and parents who love zealously, the sensible adults who make smart choices within limited means, the supportive web of relatives, all of whom could overcome with more help from the society at large.

  At the extremes of the debate, liberals don’t want to see the dysfunctional family, and conservatives want to see nothing else. Depending on the ideology, destructive parenting is either not a cause or the only cause of poverty. Neither stereotype is correct. In my research along the edges of poverty, I didn’t find many adults without troubled childhoods, and I came to see those histories as both cause and effect, intertwined with the myriad other difficulties of money, housing, schooling, health, job, and neighborhood that reinforce one another.

  The interactions were described by Dr. Robert Needlman, a behavioral pediatrician who sees children from all socio-economic levels in Cleveland. “Horrendous parenting can cause severe behavior problems that have, as part of them, difficulty in paying attention,” he said. “It takes a lot of psychological health to be able to go to school and pay attention to a teacher, and care and do the work. The kids who do that are healthy. Really bad parenting can prevent that.” And what prevents bad parenting? “It’s really a lot easier to be a good parent if you’re well rested, you can afford baby-sitters, and you have someone to clean your house. People who have those psychological resources that allow them to be good parents quite often have the resources that allow them to be relatively secure financially.”

  Some parents never play with their children, so when their children become parents themselves, they have no experience to bring to the important job of playing with children of their own. The disability can be dramatic enough to be recorded on videotape, even when the parent knows the camera is rolling. Such has been the discovery of a Baltimore malnutrition clinic that tapes low-income families with their kids to show parents their mistakes.

  In one recording, a little boy sits in a highchair playing with his food but not eating. His mother watches for a moment, then pulls out a magazine and reads. Nothing ever goes into his mouth, and she pays no attention.

  In the second session, the same boy sits on the floor, putting blocks in a plastic bucket. His mother watches, yawns, puts her head down, and closes her eyes. She has no interaction with her son.

  The third session finds both mother and child sitting at a low table, each playing separately with plastic blocks. The staff has told her, “Play with your child,” but she evidently thinks that means to play as if he weren’t there, or to play as if she were a child herself
. Having built a stack of blocks, the boy says proudly, “Look, Mommy.”

  She mocks him, repeating in a sarcastic tone, “Look what I did, Mommy.” Then, without including her son, she tries to assemble the blocks into a formation pictured on the bucket’s label. The boy reaches for a block on the table in front of her. She snatches it away and snaps, “No!” Then she even dismantles the stack of blocks he’s made to use a couple of them in her construction, all the while saying to him mockingly, “Look, Mommy! Look, Mommy!”

  Again in the fourth session, they sit at the low table, each doing a separate puzzle. The mother holds hers on her lap, tilted up so her son can’t see it. The boy picks up his puzzle, which is all together, then turns it over and dumps the pieces on the table with a clatter.

  “You’re gonna pick them all up!” she says harshly. “You’re making a mess!”

  The boy plays nicely and quietly, putting all the pieces carefully together again while the mother continues with her own puzzle, ignoring her son except to scold him.

  Can anything be done about this? Can parents so deeply deprived be taught how to nurture? Jackie Katz thought so. Just before 9:30 on a May morning, she strode up to Delaware’s Webb Correctional Facility, a small building made of old brick, just around the corner from a bowling alley between Newark and Wilmington, and surrounded by a chain-link fence with concertina wire. She pushed a button and was buzzed into a tiny anteroom, where she faced a wall of wire mesh and a heavy door reinforced by three-quarter-inch bars. The face of a clean-cut guard appeared behind a small window. He recognized Jackie, turned a key, and swung the door open for her. Inside, she handed over her keys and driver’s license, submitted to a scanning with a handheld metal detector, and signed the visitors’ log. Under the column headed “Purpose of Visit,” she wrote, “Parenting.”

  Tall, slim, with long brown hair straight down her back, Jackie had grown up poor; her father had died in prison when she was eleven. She had not been parented very well herself, and she had taken the deprivation as a series of lessons that she now passed on to others. In a large cell upstairs, where the sky came in through many big, barred windows, seven men in pristine white jumpsuits stood and chanted, “Good morning, Jackie! Good morning, Guest!” They then took seats on double-decker bunks made up in neat military style. They were about to finish sentences for selling crack, forging checks, possessing deadly weapons, and other nonviolent crimes, but all hardness dissolved when they talked about their children. They missed their kids acutely and waited eagerly for “play days,” when Jackie and other facilitators taught them how to give their youngsters undiluted, constructive attention—something most of them had never done outside the prison walls. Now they were meeting with Jackie alone, without their kids, for the twelfth and final session of a weekly parenting course, a time for summing up what they had learned.

  As children, many of these fathers had never played with an adult, Jackie said, only with other children. The same was true of many welfare mothers whom she also taught; Delaware required them to receive parenting instruction along with their checks. Their upbringing had given many of them no model to emulate, no intuitive knowledge of how to give their children the companionship, the deference, the empowerment that adult-child play promotes. A child’s play is critical in fostering cognitive development and problem-solving skills—and also in building cooperative relationships with important grown-ups.

  On play days, Jackie explained, the children were told that their fathers or mothers “are gonna pay real close attention to what you want to play.” The fathers, in turn, were urged not to impose their own wishes but to “let the kids lead the activities.” Through their play, children were trying to figure something out, she told them, so let them do so, and give them plenty of encouragement. “We tell them to recognize what they like about their child during that time,” Jackie said, “to be their cheerleader. They might just get on a pogo stick, or might just play basketball. You play up to their level, but you let them win.” She recommended that the parent comment positively on what his kids were doing: “You may say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know you could do that.’ ”

  Parents were advised that an occasional period of undivided attention was a vital resource to a child, like food and shelter. Finding fifteen or thirty or even sixty minutes at home for such “special time” was essential, “and during that time you’re not adjusting the drapes or answering the telephone or picking up toys in their room,” said Gwen Brown, a professor of education at the University of Delaware and director of Parents As Counselors and Teachers, a family support network that ran Jackie’s classes. “You’re just paying attention to them,” Gwen insisted. “It’s an agreement to be completely for them and with them,” a hard thing to do in a house full of many children, she acknowledged. When parents complain, “ ‘Oh, they’re just trying to get attention,’ that’s because it’s attention that they need. When they grow up, people will pay $100 an hour just to get attention that they need.”

  If the inmates sitting on the bunks were to follow all the advice that Jackie gave as she reviewed the course on its final day, they would probably have been model fathers. But they had already gotten into trouble with their wives by giving them tips over the phone, from inside the penitentiary, far removed from the whirl of daily family life. Andrew, a gambling addict in jail for forging checks, had scolded his wife by phone when he heard her snarl at one of the children: “Get away from me! You’ve been around me all day!” He said to the class: “That makes me so angry, because I’d just as soon she ignored me and paid attention to them.”

  Jackie told the prisoners that a parent was the youngster’s first teacher, counselor, and disciplinarian. In “taking care of the emotional needs of our children,” she advised, listening was central. “Sometimes it takes a long time listening,” she said. “You’re going to have to listen to a lot of messy feelings, but eventually you may hear what’s really going on. If we don’t listen to problems about a broken lollipop, ‘Somebody doesn’t like me,’ the little things, we’re surely not gonna hear about the larger problems later.” As fathers, then, they had to be around to listen after their release; kids with dads did better, she told them. “You don’t have to be with their mother; just be around,” she urged. “Make sure they go to school, make sure they get plenty of sleep, make sure they have plenty in their stomachs nutritionally.”

  The remarks triggered spasms of guilt. “Maybe I didn’t read enough books with her at home,” admitted Leon, who was in jail for selling crack. “I shouldn’t place all the blame on the teacher.” Jackie had given them a handout entitled “Seven Things to Do to Help Your Child Do Homework.”

  “My wife sends me her report card,” said Eddie. “She’s on the phone and she can’t wait to read me a book. She’s only seven, and she writes cursive already. It’s amazing for me. She’s more advanced than I was!” His voice carried a beautiful lilt of pride.

  “They need a safe place at home to practice sounding out the words,” Jackie said, “where nobody laughs at them or jumps in with the answer.”

  Her tidbits of advice provoked a flurry of questions. The men asked Jackie for pointers on giving rewards for good grades (it’s OK, but “you need something every week; don’t take away a reward”); on encouraging children to write (“Let them spell incorrectly; children get so caught up in that that they forget all their creativity”); and on being the child’s advocate (“If parents are involved with school, kids know you care, and teachers know you care”). Michael, convicted of narcotics possession, said of his wife: “Two weeks ago I was trying to stress to her the importance of just listening. If you have a four- or five-year-old that just cries, you say he’s trying to manipulate, but there may be some real hurt.” He thought that both parents should take a course together.

  It was easy enough to be the wise critic from the sheltered perspective of prison. The question was how durable the insights would be in the tough world outside. Within a few months all would
be released into the complexities of family, putting their newly acquired parenting skills to the test. Only a couple of the men seemed able to pinpoint how they would behave differently—one pledged to find individual time for each child, another promised to give attention to their schooling. All yearned for deep involvement, if they could find a way back into their children’s lives.

  “When you’re in here, you cherish the times you’re missing,” said Nick, who was in jail for reckless endangerment and other crimes, “but when you get out you seem to lose focus.”

  Most of us never get explicit lessons on how to be parents. Whatever we know we learn by osmosis, absorbing unconsciously from our own parents, sometimes repeating their mistakes, sometimes rebelling by turning one error into its opposite—too little discipline into too much, for example. “The way we were raised plays a role in every part of our parenting,” Jackie noted, no matter what the socio-economic class. Low-income families have no monopoly on wrongdoing.

  Nevertheless, at the bottom of the economy, the task of raising children is vulnerable to the destructive synergy of many hardships. The elements of poverty combine to suck people down, and it takes exceptional parenting to pull a child out of the quagmire. Fragmented programs have appeared across the country to help low-income parents do just that. If they were more extensive, they might have more impact.

  Some are based on decades of research demonstrating how crucial the earliest years after birth can be. Watching mothers closely in the late 1960s, for example, the Harvard Pre-School Project found sharp differences in parenting techniques that correlated with the children’s later competence in first grade.4 More recent studies have shown that “sensitive, responsive care in the first few years of life” leads to greater school achievement and less need for special education, fewer behavioral problems, less use of drugs and alcohol during adolescence, and a higher ability to form relationships among peers from preschool on.5