Social Poverty

Low-Income Parents and the Struggle for Family and Community Ties

Sarah Halpern-Meekin

• Éditeur: NYU Press
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479823659
• Sujet: Sciences sociales
• Sous-sujet: Sociologie du mariage et de la famille

How low-income people cope with the emotional dimensions of poverty

Could a lack of close, meaningful social ties be a public—rather than just a private—problem? In Social Poverty, Sarah Halpern-Meekin provides a much-needed window into the nature of social ties among low-income, unmarried parents, highlighting their often-ignored forms of hardship. Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty-one couples, collected during their participation in a government-sponsored relationship education program called Family Expectations, she brings unprecedented attention to the relational and emotional dimensions of socioeconomic disadvantage.

Poverty scholars typically focus on the economic use value of social ties—for example, how relationships enable access to job leads, informal loans, or a spare bedroom.However, Halpern-Meekin introduces the important new concept of “social poverty,” identifying it not just as a derivative of economic poverty, but as its own condition, which also perpetuates poverty. Through a careful and nuanced analysis of the strengths and limitations of relationship classes, she shines a light on the fundamental place of core socioemotional needs in our lives.
Engaging and compassionate, Social Poverty highlights a new direction for policy and poverty research that can enrich our understanding of disadvantaged families around the country.

1

Young, Poor Parents

Lacking Social Support and Social Capital

I meet Jessica and Will for the first time at their house, set back from a busy road. It feels far removed from the city environment. A box that’s not yet unpacked from their recent move sits just inside the front door, next to a pair of Will’s massive work boots that are covered in a fine layer of red Oklahoma dirt. Jessica has a smattering of freckles across her cheery, youthful face. Her toenails and fingernails show remnants of a bright pink polish. She wears two chunky rings, one on each hand, which she unconsciously plays with while we talk. Will has blond cropped hair and sideburns, and some light blond scruff on his face. He has the bulky build of a former football player. He is wearing a red American Eagle T-shirt, faded jeans, and camouflage pattern flip-flops.

Jessica, nineteen, and Will, twenty-two, have been together since high school, although their path has been rocky, with repeated breakups and one broken engagement. Three of Jessica’s closest friends hooked up with Will back when they were in high school; while this ended those friendships, she holds all involved accountable, noting wryly that Will “wasn’t the nicest guy” back then. The couple has raised Will’s daughter, now two, since she was born. They’re expecting their first child together; their new little one was conceived during their most recent breakup, propelling them back together. Will has a relatively well-paying job, especially considering he dropped out after his first year of college to raise a child; this allows Jessica to be a stay-at-home mom. Now that they’re having a child together, they’re committed to making their relationship work. Will pledged to be far more involved around the house and with the children—the issues behind their most recent breakup—and Jessica is turning to Family Expectations to help with their communication and her trust issues.

Jessica explains:

I think that’s why it’s hard for me to have relationships, anyways, because with my dad, he has never been there, and my stepdad, he is just not a father figure at all. And losing my grandpa, it was just like, there’s nothing left. So I mean, it’s just hard for relationships and trust and everything, ’cause my dad cheated on my mom when she was pregnant with me. I know I wasn’t there for it, but the stress that she felt, I felt.

She is very aware of how her history with her father and stepfather, and with Will back in high school, affects her today: “I’m always going to have trust issues, but that’s just something I’m gonna have to deal with, because it didn’t help what [Will] did in the beginning, but the past males in my life, figures that were supposed to be good, weren’t.” Having her trust violated at every turn—by her father, her stepfather, Will, and her friends—has left Jessica feeling relationally poor. As she notes, when her close relationship with her grandfather ended with his death, she felt she had “nothing left”—an expression of the specter of social poverty in her life. Her otherwise close relationship with her mother is strained by her mother’s ailing marriage to Jessica’s stepfather. If she can’t make things work with Will, she’ll lose her mother-daughter relationship with Will’s child and her ability to lean on Will in times of stress—in some ways he’s been a rock for Jessica, supporting her in her grief after her grandfather’s passing and helping take care of her mother and younger siblings when her stepfather has flaked out on them. If her relationship with Will fails, she will feel the full weight of social poverty.

As Jessica and Will’s story indicates, there are multiple factors at work simultaneously shaping their union, their parenting, and their satisfaction with their lives. In this chapter, I introduce in more detail what we know about social poverty and how it relates to the lives of young couples like Jessica and Will. I explain how the instability of multiple major life transitions (to adulthood, parenthood, and partnership) coupled with looser norms dictating family life—such as nonmarital cohabitation no longer being stigmatized—make it challenging for young parents to cultivate trust in their relationships; together, this puts them at a great risk for social poverty. Fundamentally, it is this risk of social deprivation that drives them to the door of Family Expectations.

The Contours of Social Poverty in America

Reexamining Social Capital and Social Support

Social capital is the set of ties people have to others through which they accrue resources. A large and growing literature on social capital, examining everything from neighborhood crime rates to morbidity rates for cancer patients, argues for the importance of our social ties to our health, finances, job opportunities, and more. Yet, many have critiqued this area of study for defining “social capital” in so many different ways that its meaning risks getting lost.1 And so, many scholars have been more deliberate in distinguishing different types of social capital theoretically, boosted by empirical findings that its distinct forms having varying impacts on people’s lives.

It is useful to distinguish, first, between social capital as a collective versus an individual characteristic.2 In the former case, a neighborhood can be characterized by the presence or absence of a dense web of ties that breeds familiarity and trust, promotes collective efficacy, and preserves neighborhood safety. In the latter case, individuals may be part of social networks that provide connections to others who will give gifts, offer introductions to potential employers, or feed the cat while they’re on vacation.3 Whether they are characteristic of the collective or individuals, these ties can arise on their own or through the orchestrated efforts of organizations.4

Within the realm of individuals’ social capital, we can differentiate between bridging versus bonding ties. Bridging ties are those to others outside one’s own immediate context or set of relationships, like the friend of a friend, who can offer new information or opportunities not available in one’s close social circle.5 Bonding ties are more immediate, more intimate relationships, as with friends, romantic partners, and kin; such ties can provide various types of social support, discussed later.6 An alternative approach to classifying bridging versus bonding ties is to distinguish between those that provide social leverage (help that promotes future upward socioeconomic mobility) versus social support (assistance with “getting by” in the present).7 Social support itself can be broken down into distinct types, including emotional, informational, and instrumental;8 some scholars add a fourth category of companionship or shared activities.9

Whether studying social capital as a whole or distinct aspects of it, researchers across fields have often treated these social ties as transactional goods, useful insofar as they allow their holders to accumulate other, often financial, resources, such as a better-paying job, child care that facilitates one’s pursuit of employment or education, or a needed loan.10 This means the social capital literature, despite taking human relationships as its object of study, largely neglects a fundamental element of them: these relationships are an intrinsic good.11 While some scholars do include measures of emotional support in their studies, its intrinsic utility is not theoretically distinguished from the transactional value of informational or instrumental support;12 an exception occurs among health researchers, who posit emotional support to have unique consequences for health outcomes through its psychological effects and, via the mind-body connection, its physiological impacts.13 Lacking close, trusting relationships is not problematic just because it blocks access to other resources such ties could offer; it means that basic human needs for companionship, compassion, and understanding are not being met.14

Identifying the inherent value of emotionally supportive relationships raises some questions about the definition of social capital itself. Some scholars argue that forms of capital, by definition, can be turned into other resources; sociologist Ivan Light, for example, describes this as “mutual metamorphosis,” stating, “Social capital is valuable to individuals and to collectivities because it is potentially convertible into [human, financial, physical, and cultural capital] forms.”15 I emphasize the innate value of high-quality, trusting social ties to human welfare, which belies these transactional notions of social capital. In the end, I suggest, scholars should develop a more encompassing notion of social capital, recognizing its potential for innate, rather than solely “convertible,” value.

Feeling safe in revealing one’s fears and trusting that the emotional vulnerability of expressing love is wise, for example, are valuable to individuals because they feel good, they affirm one’s sense of self, and they help one to feel understood and accepted. Being more financially stable or gainfully employed is not the point of that emotional safety. Likewise, the social integration offered by bonding with others, as through a shared experience such as a group for new parents or a knitting circle, can affirm one’s social identities (e.g., as a father or a creative person) and offer fellowship. These, again, contribute to one’s well-being even if they never help a person to balance the checkbook or secure an internship. As with food and shelter, these are core human needs.16

What Is Social Poverty?

To recognize that the emotional texture of relationships contributes deeply to well-being requires that we account for people’s perceptions of their own relationship resources, whether they are adequate to meet their needs or are evidence of “relational poverty.”17 The concept of social poverty I develop here is subjective, a product of the interaction between personality (e.g., introvert versus extrovert); number, type (e.g., friend versus romantic partner), and quality of social ties; and current personal events (e.g., celebrating college graduation versus mourning a family member’s death). Social poverty, then, can be marked by a perceived inadequate number of close, trusting relationships or feelings of social disconnection.18 This isolation does not have to do with being alone but rather with feeling lonely; interacting with others, even family and friends, is not a guarantee of avoiding social poverty. If these relationships are riddled with mistrust, are a site of criticism or hostility, or are undependable, they may create social poverty. Likewise, feeling like an outsider across one’s social groups can contribute to a sense of social poverty.

The risk of social poverty, then, will change over the course of an individual’s life, as needs change developmentally (with romantic relationships catching up in importance to peer relationships during the transition to adulthood, for instance) and with life circumstances (relational needs may be distinct during times of role transitions, as into parenthood).19 For example, research has shown that the transition to college can be an especially fraught time, with young people at high risk for feelings of social isolation.20 Social poverty, therefore, is not simply an individual failure. Rather, it arises due to the complex interplay of personal expectations, opportunities for building social ties, facility with social interactions, and current life events, both in and out of one’s control. These, in turn, are shaped by childhood experiences and larger institutional structures,21 such as educational and employment opportunities or governmental and private organizations’ efforts to, among other factors, facilitate financial security, build social ties, and create a manageable balance between work and care obligations.22 And, as discussed later in the chapter, broader cultural changes can create conditions in which developing trusting relationships is more or less difficult, underlining the role of macro-level factors in shaping an individual’s risk for experiencing social poverty.

Sociologist Kristin Seefeldt details the ways in which structural factors—from urban housing policy to practices among low-wage employers—leave families abandoned and isolated from opportunities for economic stability or upward mobility.23 While she occasionally mentions that there may be social repercussions to this isolation, she focuses on how the lack of social ties may prevent women from accessing financial opportunities (such as job referrals or labor organizing). This focus is undoubtedly important, but it neglects the ways in which this social isolation is meaningful in and of itself. We can see this in the stories Seefeldt details. Shunted into dilapidated and dangerous neighborhoods with many abandoned homes, the low-income women she interviewed found it difficult to make friends and build social connections with neighbors. Jobs on the night shift or with no coworkers, like cleaning an office building or working as a home health aide, and remote or temp work prevented women from developing friendships on the job; this is a real loss, given that research shows that workplace friendships are a key site of socializing for many Americans.24 By applying the social poverty lens to the insights of Seefeldt’s work, we can see a further social cost borne by the women she interviews of the structural abandonment of low-income families.

In elucidating the concept of social poverty, a few distinctions are key. First, receipt of emotional support should not be conflated with having adequate social resources. Having someone offer a hug or an attentive ear in a moment of crisis is not the same as escaping social poverty. As a parallel, consider the difference between a person suffering from hunger being given a meal versus having his or her food insecurity adequately addressed. Exchanging emotional support with a friend or family member, therefore, may be part of one’s social resources, but its value is limited unless this exchange is part of an ongoing, high-quality relationship.25

Second, the feeling experienced by the individual (loneliness or isolation) is related to but distinguishable from the social problem (social poverty) that government and community groups may choose to target via interventions. By way of analogy, consider the example of the feeling of being hungry and its companion social problem of food insecurity; being hungry becomes food insecurity when it is an ongoing problem that cannot be addressed with current resources. Therefore, I choose to use the term “social poverty” to denote the phenomenon of interest here, rather than “loneliness,” due to my focus on drawing out implications for policy and programs.

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