Unit 3: The Long Road to End Child Poverty in the U.K.

In the late 1990s, Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Labour Party government made a historic commitment: that they would undertake to cut child poverty in half by 2010, and to eradicate child poverty by 2020. The Conservative Party soon joined the commitment, and the UK attempted to mirror the success of other European countries in their low rates of child poverty.

Since that commitment, there has been significant headway in reducing child poverty, but there is concern that the benchmarks for 2010 will not be met. Recent articles suggest that a lack of financial commitment and social support may threaten the movement to end child poverty. Advocacy groups in England and in Scotland have rallied support and resources for a recommitment to Blair's goal.

This degree of commitment to end child poverty has not emerged in many decades in the United States. However, the experience in the UK suggests that such a commitment demands a sustained investment of finances and social support. Are such efforts realistic? How difficult would it be to maintain a commitment over 25 years, with additional budgetary dollars, public support, and political will? How have groups in the UK positioned the issue (e.g., the urgency of ending child poverty for the future success of the UK in a new Europe)?

Unit 3: The Real Pass Through

In class, we discussed limitations of child support laws for low-income families. Most states have laws which collect child support payments from fathers whose children receive welfare benefits, in order to recoup the costs of welfare. We speculated on how such laws would affect the motivation of poor non-residential fathers to pay child support - or to pay money to their children "under the table."

In this article from the New York Times, the current atmosphere of child support laws is examined. Due to a new act passed by Congress last year, starting in 2009, $100 of child support will be passed through to families with one child and $200 for families with two children or more. However, critics argue that this change is too little, too late. A "groundswell" of bipartisan support could not encourage lawmakers to craft new laws to change child support in the recent session of Congress.

According to the article, how are families affected by recoupment of child support, such as through laws in Wisconsin? Why are politicians resistant to changing the law, and to allow all child support money to pass through to poor families?

Unit 3:A New Social Contract

To round out our semester, here is a challenge. We've talked at length about families and social policies, and we're aware of how much burden families are under to raise children as citizens and workers. Phillip Longman and David Gray at the New American Foundation have released a short report, "A Family Based Social Contract," which argues that the US "creates more and more disincentives to invest in children, while also undercompensating parents and other caregivers..." One way to think about their argument is to picture a new approach that would shift expenditures in programs and policies (like Social Security) from families without children to families with children. They also mention new approaches to education, housing, and transportation that would ease the burden on families with children.

In the climate for change in Washington under the Obama administration, would this approach result in positive results for families? Would it attract support from both political parties? Why or why not? What are the downsides to such a proposal for a new approach to a social contract?

Unit 3: The Real Cost of Prisons

In class we discussed the implications of parental incarceration on families and children. A 2005 article in the New Orleans Times Picayune connects rising rates of child poverty in Louisiana to that state's high rate of incarceration. The Kids Count data books (which we used in class) have consistently rated child well-being in Louisiana as very poor, and not coincidentally, Lousiana also has the highest rates of incarceration of any state in the US - a rate that is double the national average at 797 people incarcerated per 100,000.

How do issues of race and class intersect with respect to this issue? How are children affected by the incarceration of a parent, in the short-term and the long-term? What are the implications for the future of families living in this part of the country? Think not just about the families that exist today, but the families that will exist in the next generation, the parents of which will be the children of today's families. What kinds of resources are lacking in Louisiana that have created a situation where this dynamic can exist? What are the relevant cultural and structural factors?

Unit 3: A Calculated Decision

We have spent a great deal of time this semester exploring the experiences of low-income couples, including unmarried mothers and fathers. Many current social policies are based on the assumption that marriage has financial consequences for poor families. But it all seems so complicated: what are the actual financial consequences if unmarried parents decide to get married, or perhaps just cohabit?

One website, administered by the U.S Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, offers some insight into this question. The Marriage Calculator helps policy makers, researchers, and the general public to understand the financial consequences of marriage for individuals earning less than about $40,000 per year. Users can see how taxes and public assistance change when a couple's living arrangement changes from living apart to cohabiting to married.

Open the calculator and "create" information for a hypothetical single mother family and potential spouse. Then specify a set of transfer programs that the couple might use. The calculator will then display the financial impact of getting married; cohabiting that is either reported or not reported to government programs; and continuing to live apart. Write a response to your exercise. What was the most cost-effective solution for your hypothetical couple? Why do you think this is the case?

Unit 2: Poverty & Place- Gas Prices

During the summer of 2008, gas prices reached a national average of $4/gallon for the first time. Gas prices are on the rise again. American families across the country are feeling the pinch of rising gas prices; however none may be feeling the stress of these price increases more than rural families in the U.S. who have found themselves choosing between paying the electric bill or filling the gas tank so they can drive to work

Use your sociological imagination to think about how geographic place shapes families’ experiences related to shifts in the economy, and specifically what it might be like for families living in Mississippi, experiencing rising gas prices. How and why have the high gas prices disproportionably affected rural families? Discuss the specific issues related to poverty that surround people living in rural areas. Are there any ways that the government should aid families and individuals in these situations? What are your ideas for how to solve this disparity?

Unit 2: War, Loss, & Child Development

As we discussed in class, voluntary military service can be an important option for families with few resources. Regarding ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are just beginning to understand the longer term impact of deployment on family life in the United States. For many families, the current rotation of personnel in and out of deployment has resulted in dramatically shorter stays with families and children. The inability to predict when deployment will occur may lead to instability in marital relationships and parent/child relationships as well. As a result, some members of Congress have pushed for longer home stays between deployments for members of the military.

A lingering concern is the effect of injury or loss of life on military families. Research shows that rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injuries (TBI) will climb dramatically, even years after deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, as this article in the New York Times shows, we are beginning to see the effects of a parental loss on children who were toddlers at the beginning of the wars. Pauline Boss, a professor at the University of Minnesota, has conceptualized "ambiguous loss" to describe these circumstances for many children, who struggle with loss of a parent who remains psychologically present despite their physical absence.

After reading this article, consider the impact of parental injury and loss on children and adolescents in military families. What kind of resources to these family members need, both in the short term and the long term? How will these families survive daily challenges for jobs, housing, and health care? What is our responsibility as a society to military families who suffer loss during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan? How do these efforts relate to the efforts to end poverty for families in the US?

Unit 2: Suburban Poverty

In our lecture on Poverty and Place, we discussed implications for family life in conditions of rural, urban, and suburban poverty. Of these, suburban poverty was noted as the newest historical phenomenon, and rates of suburban poverty have increased noticeably in recent years. Please click here to read an article from The Nation about trends, causes, and implications of suburban poverty.

How does the information in this report challenge our notion of the geographical distribution of poverty and affluence? How do you make sense of this information in light of our previous discussion of the outmigration of the middle class from the cities to the suburbs? How are trends in suburban poverty perpetuated by the continued progress of the wealthiest Americans and the increasing inequality that this phenomenon creates? What are the implications for class and family life for suburban families who are not members of the middle or upper classes? Dreier calls for a restructuring of public policy to address the relatively new challenges presented by suburban poverty. What kinds of changes are necessary to address these, and how might they best be implemented?

Unit 2: An Odyssey for whom?

David Brooks, in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, summarized findings from new research on the study of the transition to adulthood. He focuses on "the odyssey," or the "decade of wandering that frequently takes place between adolescence and adulthood." Like in our class discussion, he notes that the pathways through this decade are diverse, and that markers of adulthood are increasingly delayed. In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had left home, achieved financial self-sufficiency, married, and had children. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same. He even suggests that "with a little imagination it's possible even for baby boomers to understand what it's like to be in the middle of the odyssey years. It's possible to see that this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions."

After spending some time in FMSC 381 this semester, you might ask yourself, what is missing from Brooks' reflection on the odyssey period? One letter in response to this article came from Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia. He wrote:For young people from the upper-middle class, whose parents can afford to bankroll them while they experiment with careers, relationships and identities, the period between adolescence and adulthood may in fact be an odyssey of the sort that David Brooks has described. But research shows that this trend is far from universal, and before we accept the notion that a new stage of human development has emerged, it is informative to ask just how widespread it is.

Recent empirical analyses indicate that about 40 percent of American young people follow this pattern. Poor inner-city and rural youth, as well as young people who live in the so-called red states, are far less likely than their advantaged, suburban and blue-state counterparts to delay the transition into conventional work and family roles, both because they choose not to and because they simply can't afford to. Perhaps over time, the odyssey stage will come to characterize the life course of the majority of young Americans, just as adolescence began as a middle-class institution and spread to less affluent groups, but it hasn't happened yet.

Read Brooks' article first. If this decade of odyssey isn't common for all youth, how would you describe the transition into adulthood for young adults with few resources? What does fluidity and improvisation mean for young adults who do not have a support net of a promising career; an undergraduate or graduate degree; family members who will help with a downpayment on a home; or a potential partner with equal or greater earning potential? Is the transition to adulthood a time period in which, increasingly, the lives of advantaged and disadvantaged young adults diverge? How and why?

Unit 2: Making Sense of NCLB

In January 2002, President Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, an attempt at standards-based education reform intended to hold states, districts, and schools accountable for the performance of students in elementary and secondary schools. Under the law, teachers and administrators at chronically failing schools can lose their jobs, and the management of schools can be taken over by private organizations or by the state. The leniency period for the policy has now ended, and consequences for failure at the school wide level are now supposed to be enforced with a heavy hand.

Areas of the country in which there are high rates of poverty and other social problems have experienced negative effects of NCLB, and significant controversy exists in some communities -- Los Angeles, CA is a prime example. You can read about what's going on in that school district by reading this article from the New York Times, published in October 2007. Schools in that district are in real danger of being shut down or taken over, but even such drastic penalties and changes would not likely bring about effective or swift positive change. Thousands of students are falling further and further behind by the year

How have the requirements of NCLB changed the face of public education in the US? What are the results of these changes for families, especially poor families? How has the quality of public education been altered? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the NCLB? How might the NCLB be altered to more effectively serve and protect all participants in the US education system? Is a federal policy an effective way to address what's going on in the widely diverse schools and school districts in the US? If you were a member of Congress, how would you work to address the problems present on this issue?

Unit 2: 'The Lost Generation': Young Adulthood and The Great Recession

In the near future, you will venture out into the exciting world of work! Well, hopefully…

Amidst the United States economic crisis, countless jobs are being slashed and young people are being hit especially hard, which have significant implications on their future and the economy. No matter their education level- high school-drop-outs to college graduates- eager and motivated young individuals are facing unemployment.

Read the following BusinessWeek article, entitled “The Lost Generation” by Peter Coy. To what extent are you concerned over the unemployment status in the US? How do you anticipate you will be affected, if at all, by the current trends? And finally thinking in terms of solutions- how responsible do you believe the US government should be in terms of support for its workforce?

Unit 2: Growing up on Chicago's South Side

In 1993, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman - both 14 years old - reported for an NPR radio documentary on their community. The boys taped for ten days, walking listeners through their daily lives: to school, to a bus ride that takes them out of the ghetto, and to friends and family members in the community. The candor in Jones and Newman's diaries brought listeners face to face with a portrait of poverty its effects on childhood in one of Chicago's worst housing projects. Ghetto Life 101 (30 min audio) became one of the most acclaimed programs in public radio history, winning almost all of the major awards in American broadcasting, including: the Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Ohio State Award, the Livingston Award, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Awards for Excellence in Documentary Radio and Special Achievement in Radio Programming, and others. Ghetto Life 101 was also awarded the Prix Italia, Europe's oldest and most prestigious broadcasting award. It has been translated into a dozen languages and has been broadcast worldwide.

One year later, 1994, the young men reported on the death of 5-year old Eric Morse in the Ida B. Wells Housing Projects in a documentary entitled Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse (39 min audio). As the website Sound Portraits asserts, "They set out to learn about the story from the inside, to see how a tragedy like this can touch a community, and to bring to light the scars it left behind." This project won the Grand Prize Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a Peabody Award in 1995.Listen to one or both of these radio documentaries.

Contrast them with the documentaries we've seen in class (Throwaway People, 30 Days) and Kozol's Amazing Grace. Most importantly, consider that the creators and narrators of this perspective on a Chicago South Side neighborhood are two actual residents - and two young boys at that. How is their perspective valuable in understanding the lived reality of this community? How would Kozol, journalists, social scientists or politicians describe the lives of LeAlan and Lloyd's families and friends? Where do you note discussion of "culture and structure" as related to issues of poverty and poor people?

Unit 2: "Whatever it takes" for Children

The Harlem Children's Zone, writes New York Times reporter Paul Tough, is "the first and so far the only organization in the country that pulls together ... integrated social and educational services for thousands of children" — all under one umbrella, all in one place, all at one time. It's the brainchild of education and social-services reformer Geoffrey Canada, and it's nothing less than an audacious poverty-eradication effort that, as Publishers Weekly explains, is "predicated upon changing everything" in the New York City neighborhoods it targets, "creating an interlocking web of services targeted at the poorest and least likely-to-succeed children."

The agency, with an annual budget of $58 million, serves 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood of Harlem. Tough, who's spent five years reporting on Canada's organization, and who's written a new book on the project, writes that "as students progress through an all-day prekindergarten and then through a charter school, they have continuous access to community supports like family counseling, after-school tutoring and a health clinic." All of that institutional structure is "designed to mimic the often-invisible cocoon of support and nurturance that follows middle-class and upper-middle-class kids through their childhoods." Both Tough and Canada discuss the genesis and the implications of a program whose ultimate goal is "to produce children with the abilities and the character to survive adolescence in a high-poverty neighborhood, to make it to college and to graduate.”

Listen to the interview on NPR, and discuss how this project compares to No Child Left Behind. What is needed for innovative approaches to combat poverty and really address educational opportunities for low-income children? What do you think of a comprehensive approach like Canada's?

Unit 1: Choices & Needs

In his bestseller, Confessions of An Economic Hitman, John Perkins was struck by global inequality, not only in income and wealth, but in spending. He notes that the United States spent $87 billion on a war in Iraq in 2004, while the United Nations Development Program estimates that “for less than half that amount we could provide every person on the planet with: clean water and sanitation ($9 billion); adequate diets and basic health care ($13 billion); basic education ($6 billion); and reproductive health services for all women worldwide ($12 billion). Combined they add up to $40 billion…”

We usually do not see a dollar figure attached to overwhelming global needs, but when compared with the funding for the war in Iraq or the Wall Street and automotive industry bailouts, the amounts may seem "do-able." Is it possible to reduce poverty on a global scale? Why or why not? What role should we, as the wealthiest society on Earth, play in global poverty reduction? Is poverty reduction an issue of "not knowing how to do it" or "not choosing to do it"? If we did choose to reduce global poverty, what effect would it have on our daily lives?

Unit 1: Global Families

In class we discussed the influences of globalization on families throughout the world. As the economy continues to globalize, women from less affluent countries choose to migrate alone to more developed nations to improve their families’ financial means by working as nurses, nannies, and housekeepers for affluent families in Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Western Europe and the United States. Often these women are mothers, who are faced with impossible choices--choosing between leaving their children for years at a time but being able to provide the financial means for their families to be lifted out of poverty, or staying and watching their family spiral into poverty. A recent article in the New York Times depicts the experiences of Romanian families who, since Romania’s admission into the European Union are experiencing both the highs and extreme lows of participating in a global economy.

Read this article and discuss the impact of increased globalization on families throughout the world. Specifically, what does this mean for children in less developed countries who grow up with their mothers and/or fathers being hundreds or even thousands of miles away because they are participating in this globalized economy? Do the positive aspects of globalization and the ability of people to work anywhere in the world to improve their families’ economic positions outweigh the evident darkness of families being separated for years at a time? Finally, speculate on what might happen as the global economy experiences a downturn—in what ways might these global families be impacted?

Unit 1: Measuring Poverty

Major metropolitan cities including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago have taken the matter of measuring poverty into their own hands by developing city specific measures. This city-level movement, coupled with decades of debate and discussion among poverty scholars, economists, and federal legislators regarding the measurement of poverty led to a “bipartisan push” in Congress last year to redesign the U.S. poverty measure to more accurately measure poverty. However, despite this attention from Congress, no new legislation was passed at the federal level last year.

Discuss any benefits and drawbacks to the way we currently measure poverty, and put forth your ideas and reasoning for a new measure. Why might certain ways of measuring poverty be better than others? What would be some of the challenges – political, social, or economic - to establishing a new poverty measure?

Unit 1: Earthquake in Haiti- 'Natural Disaster or Poverty' Disaster Story?

The recent earthquake in Haiti left the small island nation devastated, scrambling for resources to treat survivors, and reliant on other countries as well as international aid organizations for relief. This event shed light on Haiti, the poorest nation in this hemisphere, and its already crumbling infrastructure. Despite the widespread devastation in Haiti some believe that this tragedy may provide opportunity to address the abject poverty already present in Haiti through permanent, positive structural changes to the country; while others like David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times are not so convinced it is simply a matter of changing structures in Haiti but rather that it is necessary to also address deeply held cultural beliefs.

Read the op-editorial that David Brooks recently wrote for the New York Times discussing his ideas of the challenges facing Haiti in terms of both cultural and structural issues related to poverty. In class we are delving into the cultural and structural explanations for poverty. Discuss the merit of Brook’s argument by answering the following questions: What are cultural explanations and/or structural explanations for the situation in Haiti? Which aspects of Brooks’ argument make the most sense to you and why? What other cultural and/or structural explanations regarding the earthquake tragedy in Haiti would you offer? What do you think is the best way to move forward to impact the poverty rates in Haiti? Why?

Unit 1: Developing a Sociological Imagination

Alice Neel (1900-1984) was one of the greatest portraitists and most remarkable women in 20th century American art. She was outspoken and honest about the lives of disadvantaged people throughout her career. This painting is from 1935, entitled Investigation of Poverty at the Russell Sage Foundation. At the time, the Foundation was a social services organization founded in 1907 by Margaret Olivia Sage. Its mission was “a permanent contribution to the improvement of living and social conditions by its studies and its wide cooperation with agencies, rather than by contributing directly to relief.” In the painting, the grief-stricken woman at the center – who was living with her seven children in an overturned car – is observed with great concern by social workers, academics, and even clergy.

Poverty has been "studied" for many decades, alongside real efforts to alleviate it. How does Neel encourage you to think about the contrast between "studying poverty" and "doing something to end poverty"? As a student and an eventual family professional, how do you think the study of poverty is related to action to end poverty? What role does a sociological imagination play in bridging study and action?

Welcome to Our Blog!

Welcome to the Families, Poverty, and Affluence blogspot. Our goal is to offer students a new way to interact and discuss themes of the course. Please read through our posts and join in a conversation about any of the topics raised. Both FMSC 381 sections will be involved in the post commentaries, so you will have up to 120 peers reflecting on your posts.

Please refer to your syllabus for specific instructions and detailed expectations about your participation in the blogging project.

Please use this post to enter a "test comment" using your assigned alias as instructed in class. Successfully completing the test message will let your instructor know that you are ready to go and able to use the blog.

Also, please let us (Dr. Roy or Ms. Vesely) know about other topics you would like to discuss on the blog.