Family Poverty in Diverse Contexts

C. Anne Broussard, Alfred L. Joseph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780789037404
• eBook ISBN: 9781135694975
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

Family Poverty in Diverse Contexts addresses the context of poverty in the United States and focuses on poverty issues that family members must confront as they move through the life course.

This edited collection provides a unique perspective that draws together macro and micro research about how poverty affects families throughout their lives, increasing risks and reducing opportunities at every stage. Individual chapters emphasize the context of poverty in the United States, then go on to examine specific life cycle stages and what happens when poverty intersects with family concerns. Contributing authors are respected experts in their fields and represent a broad range of disciplines and perspectives including child development, community health, education, family studies, gerontology, disability, public policy, social work and sociology.

Family Poverty in Diverse Contexts includes a range of pedagogical features to enhance learning such as exercises and discussions relating to each chapter, which will encourage readers to think critically and apply the knowledge to their own lives. It will interest students, academics and researchers of sociology, family studies, social work and health as well as other related disciplines.

1 Introduction

The Poverty Context

C. Anne Broussard and Alfred L. Joseph

The United States (U.S.) boasts one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Yet it leads other industrialized nations with the highest poverty rate. In 2000, Smeeding, Rainwater, and Burtless compared poverty rates across 18 developed nations using three different poverty measures. Their results showed that the U.S. poverty rate was considerably higher than all 17 of the other nations. More recently, Smeeding (2006) ranked 11 wealthy nations and again the United States scored first or second on nearly all poverty measures. In addition to noting that poverty among the elderly was particularly high in comparison to other wealthy nations, Smeeding (2006, p. 86) expressed special concern over U.S. child and family poverty:

In most rich countries, the relative child poverty rate is 10 percent or less; in the United States, it is 21.9 percent. What seems most distinctive about the American poor, especially poor American single parents, is that they work more hours than do the resident parents of other nations while also receiving less in transfer benefits than in other countries.

Closer to home, the U.S. Census Bureau (2007a) recorded the U.S. poverty rate at 22.2% in 1960. Throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, the rate declined dramatically, reaching a low of 11.1% in 1973. It has changed little since then, fluctuating between 11.2% and 15.2%, tending to decrease with economic expansion and increase with economic recession (Rank, 2001, p. 883). The 2006 poverty rate was 12.3, which represented about 36.5 million people. When we add those who were near poverty—living at 125% of poverty level—the rate increases to 16.8% or more than 49 million Americans. That year, more than 15 million of these individuals (5.2%) lived in extreme poverty (below 50% of poverty level).

While the overall rates are high, these numbers vary substantially by context within the United States: They are much higher for some groups than for others. For example, the 12.3% poverty rate listed above represented all races. Breaking this rate down by racial and ethnic status reveals wide variation in the numbers: For Whites, the 2006 poverty rate was 8.2%, for Blacks it was 24.3% and for all Hispanics, the rate was 20.6% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007a). If we break down Hispanic poverty by national origin, we would find that some Hispanic populations experience considerably higher poverty than others.

The results are similar if we examine poverty by gender (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007a). For people of all races in families with a female householder and no husband present, 30.5% were below poverty level in 2006, but the rate ranged from 22.5% (Whites alone) to 39.1% (Blacks alone). In contrast, the poverty rate for all married couple families was a significantly lower 4.9%.

How can such wide variations be explained? The simple answer is context. The family life course is situated within a broadbased structural context that provides opportunities and constraints for individuals and families living in a given culture. Sewell, (1992, p. 862) explained that, “social structures intersect in complex ways such that structures of the life course will interact with broader structures of a gendered, racialized, and class-based society.” Sewell pointed to sociohistorical context and stratification as two important dimensions that dictate opportunities and constraints across the life course (p. 862).

This book examines family poverty across a number of important contexts, highlighting family characteristics that result in disadvantages for broad cross-sections of people. First, though, it is important to define poverty in the United States and to discuss how our history has unfolded to place some people at greater disadvantage than others.

What Is Poverty?

Two common poverty measures are absolute and relative poverty. Absolute poverty refers to the least amount of money needed to meet basic human survival needs, such as food and shelter, while relative poverty is where people fall relative to other members of the society in which they live. Poverty was first measured officially in the United States in the mid-1960s after President Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty. In response to the President’s plan, the President’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) began to actively seek a poverty measure that would avoid an inequality focus (i.e. relative poverty), and focus instead on the specific level of income needed to subsist at a minimal level (i.e. absolute poverty). At the same time, and apart from OEO and CEA, a Social Security Administration economist and statistician named Mollie Orshansky developed a poverty measure (see Orshansky, 1965).

Orshansky’s measure determined the minimum income (using 1963 dollars) required for families of various sizes to purchase a minimally adequate diet according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economy Food Plan (Fisher, 1997). Since individuals need more than a minimal diet (for example, minimal clothing and minimal shelter), she multiplied each of the calculated amounts by three. This multiple of three was not arbitrary; rather it was based on 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey data, which found that families with three or more members spent approximately one-third of their after-tax income on food (Fisher, 1997). Orshansky’s measure defined poor families as those whose pre-tax income fell below the calculated threshold for families of given sizes. While Orshansky’s approach is still used today, her original measure, which took into account the relative wealth of the United States, has evolved into a measure of absolute poverty (Fisher, 1997; Iceland, 2003). If the U.S. government had recalculated the cost of a minimal diet in the United States each year, the poverty rate would to some extent take into account both absolute and relative poverty; however, in 1969, officials began to adjust poverty thresholds for inflation using the Consumer Price Index (CPI). In order to adjust for growth in U.S. incomes, which have increased faster than the CPI, the proportion of income spent on food would have to be recalculated each year. As it is, poverty threshold buying power has not changed since the 1960s. Take a look at the 2008 poverty guidelines in Table 1.1. The income information in this table represents weighted average thresholds. The actual thresholds vary by several characteristics, including whether the family lives in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska or Hawaii and whether individuals in the household are over or under age 65 (the complete 2008 guidelines table is available at: http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/08poverty.shtml). In order to be considered officially poor, a family of four could not have made a penny over $21,200. Families that live above the official threshold may not be able to afford basic necessities; nevertheless, they are not included in the determination of the official poverty rate. Neither are the millions of poor who move frequently, or many of those who live in places like nursing homes, mental hospitals, and prisons (Rodgers, 2006). Rodgers points to a number of other flaws with the official poverty measure, including lack of regional cost adjustments for shelter, health care, and food (pp. 18–19).

Table 1.1 U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (DHHS) Poverty Guidelines by Size of Family, 2008

Who Are the Poor?

The poor are all around us if we would only bother to look. They are invisible. It takes extraordinary people, movements or catastrophes to “remind” us that we need to (re)discover poverty in the “land of plenty.”

Hurricane Katrina, a category-four storm, hit the southeast United States before dawn on 29 August 2005 with unforgiving ferocity. It destroyed millions of dollars worth of residential and commercial property. It disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Mississippi and Louisiana. In New Orleans alone, over 1000 men, women, and children lost their lives. The rest of America watched in horror as the extent of the devastation became clear. We all watched stunned as our fellow citizens gathered on rooftops, waded chest-deep in floodwaters, and crammed into public buildings in an effort to survive the storm and the subsequent flooding. A tragedy like this can expose the weaknesses and contradictions of any society. In times of crisis, fault lines that go unnoticed in “normal” times make their presence known in ways that are difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. The Hurricane Katrina catastrophe taught us a great deal about American society, though the lessons can be uncomfortable. Lessons like these require that we reassess much of our conventional wisdom about the fundamental inequality that permeates all aspects of the American social order. Hurricane Katrina laid bare the deep racial and class divisions in the United States that many of our leaders desperately try to ignore and pretend do not exist. Those who go out on a limb and talk about what is obvious if we would only look are often derided and labeled as proponents of “class warfare.”

Imagine yourself in New Orleans just before, during, and immediately after Hurricane Katrina made contact. Your chances of getting out of New Orleans and other threatened areas increases as your class position edges up the socio economic ladder. Access to a car or cars, and access to cash or credit cards, greatly increases your chances of being able to escape to a more hospitable place. Being middle-class or wealthier increases your chances of having others in your immediate circle of friends or family who can help you. They can use their resources to assist you in your hour of need. You need not wait on the authorities.

The storm taught us that an individual’s chances of living or dying could depend on whether or not they live in poverty. These are not facts that are easy to confront or to accept. Of course, we all realize, on some level, that there are poor people in our midst. But our political leaders and the media, almost to a person, focus on the “great middle class” to the exclusion of the more than 35 million people living in poverty in the United States. The impoverished were and are largely ignored. Indeed, a Brookings Institution analysis (Berube & Katz, 2005) reported that the areas most affected by Hurricane Katrina housed 80% of New Orleans minority residents. In contrast, 54% of the residents in the flooded areas were White.

Another lesson Hurricane Katrina taught us is equally important. Katrina showed us that we hold the poor in contempt. The contempt is based on the fact that many people blame the poor for their own predicament. Writing in 1976, scholar William Ryan defined blaming the victim as, “justifying inequality by finding defects in the victims of inequality” (p. xiii). Think back to Hurricane Katrina: The feelings of pity for those left behind faded quickly as “stories” of various types of criminality began to fill the airwaves. Stories of selflessness and sacrifice that could have been broadcast were pushed aside for stories about criminality, whether verifiable or not. These news stories confirmed what many people already believed about the poor. Pity turned to anger and then to scorn. The storm victims were seen as responsible for their own situation. The message was clear, even in the midst of a grave natural disaster: Poor people behave in ways that exacerbate their already unfortunate situation. This lesson—that poor people continue to behave in ways that further their own degradation, even in the midst of a natural disaster—was powerful.

Even though it took extraordinary circumstances to expose both the vulnerability of the poor and the contempt with which they are held, we must remind ourselves that this is a normal part of the daily lives of poor people. We must also be aware that this is not unique to adults; it is applicable to children as well. The lives of poor children and adults are distorted by their vulnerability to both the vagaries of life and the political reality that many of their fellow citizens hold them accountable for their own poverty. There is no refuge from this reality.

Who Should Be Interested in this Book?

Family Poverty in Diverse Contexts is designed for students, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and other stakeholders invested in alleviating family poverty. There is a great deal of high-quality research about poverty outcomes at various stages throughout the life cycle. There is also abundant research that addresses individual, neighborhood, and structural contexts. However, poverty research cuts across disciplines, which fragments the information and makes it difficult to synthesize. This book pulls together some of the latest family poverty knowledge across the life cycle addressed by scholars from diverse disciplines, including economics, education, family studies, psychology, public health, medical fields, social work, and sociology. Because the contributors and the research they address cuts across a variety of disciplines, this book could serve as a text for a broad range of graduate- and advanced undergraduate-level courses that deal with poverty, structural inequality, the family, and individual life cycles, women and children, and public policy.

The book is organized into three sections. The first section sketches the structural context of family poverty in the United States. Rank (2001) defines three structural sources of poverty—economic, social/political and structural vulnerability—all of which are touched upon in this first section. Kilty (Chapter 2) addresses the way ideology has helped to shape policies that greatly impact the lives of those with little power and influence in society. In Chapter 3, Abramovitz examines the historical relationship between women and the state that has resulted in policies that place women at far greater risk of experiencing poverty throughout the life cycle. Seccombe (Chapter 4) examines the consequences of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA; PL 104-193) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) for poor families in the United States. The final two chapters in this section address specific family poverty contexts: Chapter 5 juxtaposes rural against urban family poverty, while Aponte and Foote (Chapter 6) examine family poverty among Hispanics, the fastest-growing minority population in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, 2007b).

The second section addresses individual and family contexts of poverty at a range of stages across the life cycle from childhood through old age. A key theme throughout the chapters in this section is that poverty and associated policy affect the lives of all generations, from infants through the elderly. Another key theme is that poverty-related problems multiply and continue in the lives of individuals and families; they come not just in threes, but in fours, sixes, and eights, causing stress, lost income, transportation difficulties, compromised physical and mental health, and family conflict and breakup, among other things, and can result in lifelong disadvantage. This section addresses poverty outcomes that change normal development for small children (Segal & Niles, Chapter 7) as well as special problems faced by poor families with children who have disabilities (Shannon, Chapter 8). In Chapter 9, Smith addresses the U.S. foster care system and what it means for poor families in various contexts, while Joseph and Schwartz (Chapter 10) examine the many ways children in poverty experience our nation’s schools. The last two chapters in this section examine family poverty during adulthood in depth: mental health and other outcomes for single mothers (Broussard, Chapter 11) and special problems facing the elderly poor (Bergeron, Chapter 12). Certainly this book does not address all aspects of family poverty across the life cycle. That would take many volumes, as there is enough information in the literature, even using research conducted just since the millennium, to devote multiple books to each chapter topic. Neither do we have solutions for creating equitable and family-friendly policy. Rather, this book provi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The Poverty Context
• PART I Cross-Sections of Oppression and Poverty
• PART II Poverty Across the Life Span: Change, Crisis, and Resilience
• PART III Rethinking Family Poverty