The Working Poor by David K. Shipler

Author:David K. Shipler [Shipler, David K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-49340-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-11-12T05:00:00+00:00

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

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