Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality by Linda M. Blum

Author:Linda M. Blum [Blum, Linda M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC026000 Social Science / Sociology / General
ISBN: 9781479871544
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2015-03-12T23:00:00+00:00

I’m trying to look for a job . . . there’s an outreach worker [at Isabel’s school] that said to me the other day when I had to correct her [on how to access community-based therapists], she said, “You’re unusual because you know everything to do and all the resources.” I said . . . “Well . . . I do need help in other areas.” Then I quickly said, “I need help in finding a job!”

Privatizing Dependence

Like Vivian, many of the single mothers I spoke with found it difficult to find or keep paying work while also caring for a disordered child—as Bev Peterson put it, “I couldn’t hold a job and take care of Natalie. She was a full-time job.” Without the income of a spouse or partner, each faced a dilemma: seek state support, despite its inadequacy and the bureaucratic hurdles and petty surveillance it entails, or try to rely instead on private support from family, friends, or boyfriends. In our neoliberal era with its drive to cut welfare rolls and demonize mothers seeking public help, our society conveys a clear preference for the private approach, but it, too, has its costs.

Kay Raso represents arguably the best-case scenario. She was able to keep her “good position” directing a large nonprofit agency serving at-risk children. Because her only child, David, was kicked out of successive schools and after-care programs for disruptive, aggressive behavior, Kay was often frantically scrambling to find care for him. Even as her home life, as she put it, made “a mockery” of her professional role as a “champion for children’s rights,” her employers accommodated her needs, allowing her to work late each night at home so she could leave work to meet David’s school bus. Nevertheless, Kay averred that she was always “exhausted” and doing a “half-assed” job, adding that “being a single mother is, you know . . . difficult!”

A few others were able to maintain good-paying full-time work by enlisting kin to provide caregiving. Cara Withers, in medical supply sales, relied on her mother to live in the household and share care for a high-need son and typically developing daughter. Similarly, social worker Brooke Donnelley had a devoted sister serve as her vulnerable son’s nanny in his first year. Other educated single mothers like May Royce and Dory Buchanan with decent earnings in similar “feminine” professions, reported struggling at times to piece together care for challenging kids even with close, supportive friends nearby—in May’s case, just upstairs.

Susan Atkinson, like Vivian and Bev, did not have a paying job, but unlike them, relied entirely on private sources of support. Susan had become completely dependent on her aging middle-class parents and an ex-husband with “a very difficult relationship” with his daughters. College-educated Susan had initially worked part-time after her divorce, moving with two toddlers into her parents’ garage apartment only to “regroup.” But ten years later—the latter five spent in full-time vigilante mothering for her troubled younger daughter—Susan remained in the same apartment with sharply dwindling resources.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.