Post #8

Urban poverty, according to lecture notes, is a cause of multiple factors including an increase in single mothers, welfare, and concentrated poverty, increase in the amount of crime or concern of crime, especially for children and elderly, middle class and affluence moving out of urban areas, and poor schools and diminished aspects for learning.

This sort of environment is extremely negative for raising children. With more and more fathers in these urban areas being incarcerated, children are left in homes headed by single mothers who are struggling to make ends meet.

Chaudry talks about the life of Traci, a working mother of two, and how she struggles to raise her children in such an environment. The father of her children has been in and out of jail due to drugs, and Traci and her children have lived off drug money from time to time because they did not have enough money to survive.

Traci grapples with the problems of childcare and living on welfare, much like Julia, who was mentioned in a previous post. Welfare was an unreliable system for Traci, not paying her childcare providers on time with money from her childcare subsidies.

Traci found work, but because of the $10/hour wage she received, she did not qualify to receive subsidies from welfare for better childcare and had to result in placing her children in substandard centers. Just as I said in Post #6, the Applied Research Center found that the number of uncertified childcare facilities has risen and surpassed the number of certified facilities in major urban areas which means low-income children put into these facilities are at risk health-wise and safety-wise.

Also as a result of her new job and longer hours, Traci had the burden of finding childcare within her apartment building and the money to pay for it, so that her children could be supervised. She also missed multiple days at work because she couldn’t pay for extra childcare. This is not a unique phenomenon, just as DeNice, in Professor Bravo’s slideshow points to- “If the kids are sick and sent home from school, there’s no place for them to go. The school called and said I had to get my 5-year-old daughter. I was fired.” Half the workforce, and ¾ of low-wage workers, have no paid sick days and many who do have them can’t use them to care for sick family members. This means that low-income workers cannot leave work if a child is sick. If they leave, the are threatened by job termination. Low-wage working women are caught in the catch 22 of “work can’t pay if it doesn’t last, but work can’t last if it jeopardizes kids.”

The problems Traci faces are not unique to a working mother living in urban poverty. Chaudry feels as though there is no way out of living in urban poverty. Even though some families are able to find better job opportunities and make their way out of the urban landscape, what is left for those who cannot get out is not a pretty picture. Urban poverty is a life full of crime and violence, and children are not able to safely play outside.

In the “7 Days at the Minimum Wage” videos, one of the women interviewed, Jessica, talks about how she is fearful of her neighborhood and forces her children to stay indoors when they want to play. She lives in a dangerous neighborhood and although she could move to another housing development that is cheaper, it is less safe than where she is living now. Jessica also pushes her children to do well in school so that hopefully they can succeed enough to find their way out of poverty. According to Professor Romero’s slideshow on poverty, “Research demonstrates a direct link between education level and earning potential, and one’s ability to get out of poverty.”

Post #7

Julia constantly struggled with the childcare arrangements for her daughter Jacqueline. It is a point to note that the hardships she faced are many of the same obstacles that other women face in finding adequate care for their children when their income is low.

Even though Julia was making a concerted effort to return to school so she could hopefully get a better job and support her family, she constantly struggled with finding and affording childcare.

Initially, Julia was able to rely on her children’s father. She then ended her relationship with him and him to leave. She was then faced with having to turn to family to help her care for her children. Julia turned to her sister for help, and her sister moved in to watch the children while Julia went to school. However, this only lasted for a short period until her sister found a job. Julia was forced to drop out of school to find a job to support her family.

Luckily, Julia was able to benefit from the Welfare to Work Program. This program assisted Julia in securing work internships that could possibly translate into full-time jobs, and one of the greatest benefits of this program was a childcare subsidy, which Julia took full advantage of.

Once her daughter Jacqueline was a year old, Julia was able to find consistent family-care for two years with the childcare subsidies from Welfare to Work. But, once Julia found a full time job, she could not afford the continuation of the childcare because her public assistance was cut, and she did not earn enough to afford the difference in cost.

Julia not only faced obstacles when it came to finding care for Jacqueline. She also faced obstacles with employment. Once she found a steady job, she would lose subsidies that provided for Jacqueline’s childcare and would have to work longer hours to afford it. If she couldn’t find affordable care, she would have to quit her job to care for Jacqueline herself, meaning no income and the need to rely on welfare programs.

The series of video clips from “7 Days at the Minimum Wage” showed the difficulty of living and working at, or close to, minimum wage. All of the subjects interviewed talked about having to work long hours or multiple jobs and feeling like they could never get ahead on financial responsibilities. They all felt helpless having to live from paycheck-to-paycheck without benefits like paid leave and healthcare.

Post #6

Many families struggle in providing care for their children while they are at work. The early years of childhood are pertinent in a child’s development and the care they receive plays a major factor as well. Yet, so many barriers have been set before struggling families in getting quality care for their children to ensure their healthy development.

Many parents ask family members or family friends for assistance or look for affordable daycare. However, they struggle to pay for the cost of daycare programs or their family members are too busy or live too far away to be reliable. According to Table 2.1 in Chaudry’s book, 24.2% of children are cared for by family, 12.1% are in family daycare, and 17.8% are in center-based care. According to Chaudry, “many mothers prefer center-based care for their children by the age of two or three to get them ready for school, but many mothers in low-income neighborhoods are unable to find center care…”

The average annual cost of childcare can range from $4,000 to $6,000, and in some instances cost upwards of $10,000. These costs can exceed the cost of a year of college tuition in 49 of the fifty states.

In addition, many states are not using millions of dollars of federal money for helping needy families. There is also a shortage of qualified childcare providers. There are millions of parents in need of childcare. 24 million children need some form of care when they are not in school. Plus, preschools and daycares provide safe havens for children of low-income families. The number of childcare teachers has dropped by 20%, but the number of needy children has risen by 15%. Low salaries, high turnover and an aging workforce are blamed for the decrease in the availability of qualified early childhood teachers.

Not only that, but childcare options for low-income mothers are low quality. Parents would prefer to have their children in safe setting. The health and safety of low-income children at childcare facilities in low-income neighborhoods are not meeting standards. In a recent Applied Research Center study, ARC found that the number of uncertified childcare facilities has risen and surpassed the number of certified facilities in major urban areas. This means that they don’t necessarily follow government standards and practices when dealing with young children. Low-income children put into these facilities are at risk health-wise and safety-wise.

If childcare assistance were increased, workforce participation would increase and then the economy and tax base could be strengthened.

Working single women’s salaries are too low to pay for childcare. The money they have is not enough to provide for adequate services. Single motherhood is difficult, and making ends meet is a huge challenge. Child support, if it comes at all, is sporadic, and cannot be heavily relied upon. Most single mothers are forced to rely on the dangers of their children becoming latchkey children because they are stuck at work and cannot make it home as the children are being released from school.

Post #5

The first video “Living With a Hole in Your Pocket,” really addresses Chaudry’s argument that "we are asking the lest fortunate to strive and work harder, we are deeply discounting our public responsibility for the children born into poor families and disadvantaged communities." The video says that vicious cycles & catch 22s in the system are keeping way too many people in poverty. Systemic barriers have grown worse, preventing the poor from being able to better their situation.

The working poor are the people who go to work and earn a wage but cannot make enough money to subsist at a higher level. The Associated Press article said that in 2006, the most recent year for available data, a family of four earning $41,228 or less qualified as a low-income family. According to the federal government, if a family of four is earning less that $20,614, that family is living in poverty.

However, when you look at annual expenses for that same family, they spend $5756 on housing, $2656 just on utilities and public services, $5330 on transportation, $ 4064 on food, $2329 on health care, and $2600 on child care, leaving that family $2121 in the hole. Families in this situation are forced to let things go, give things up that aren’t necessarily considered vital to live.

Somewhere around 37 million people live below the poverty line, and 12 million of them are children. 1 in 5 children live in poverty in the US.

Living poor is like living with a permanent hole in your pocket, living payday to payday, barely making ends meet. Families cannot overcome the problems in the system. “The ‘oops’ in life should not be able to put you in the gutter.”

There is a shortage of higher paying jobs that will help the working poor stay ahead. According to the Associated Press article, the number of U.S. jobs paying a poverty-level wage increased by 4.7 million between 2002 and 2006. The number of jobs with pay below the poverty threshold increased to 29.4 million, or 22 percent of all jobs, in 2006 from 24.7 million, or 19 percent of all jobs, in 2002.

People struggle in the job market even with job training programs. Most times, job training gets people into the workforce, but most of these jobs are low-paying jobs, or don’t exist because they have been taken already. These people are in debt due to relying on credit to live. They work long hours at work but have bills to pay.

These people are uninsured, somewhere around 33 million Americans are without health insurance. They earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, but don’t work for employers who offer health insurance.

Educational opportunities are limited for these people. Public higher education is not highly available for them.

Another great problem with poverty is that it has become an inter-generational phenomenon. This has occurred from a lack of motivation, education, resources and support systems in poor communities. Poverty begets more poverty. People who grow up in poverty are more likely to remain in poverty and raise families in poverty.

Only 5% of Americans think that poverty is an important problem to remedy. Americans don’t feel like they need to help the poor because of the belief that the poor are lazy, do not work at all, and don’t deserve help. So the poor are ignored by public policy because they aren’t seen as important.

Post #4

The characteristics of good family life are variable. It depends on the family, and knowing this one cannot make empirical observations in characterizing what good family life is for all.

For me, good family life would be living in a supportive environment. If a family has goals, and enforces good values in all its members, in my opinion, everyone is better off. I think good family life can also be characterized by cooperation. Yes, not all people in every family get along, but if they are all working together to accomplish goals, it is all the better. I think that cooperation in raising children and supporting them is what works best. When care in a family is weighted to one side of the parental unit, it creates tension and stress. Making sure everyone is happy and content is a hard thing to do, but striving for that speaks volumes.

I think it is very important for parents to balance life and divide their careers and family lives. However, it is a very difficult task to undertake.

“Juggling Work” addressed many issues families face when trying to balance work and childcare. The female lawyers showed how difficult the balance is between these two things. Many female lawyers are not able to work full time because of children. They are forced to give up their career goals and the possibilities of making partner for their children. In my personal opinion, this is unjust. Just because a woman has the goals of both having a family and a career should not mean that she must choose one over the other.

Why is it only women who must make this choice while men are able to keep their fulltime jobs?

I honestly believe that it is because our society has become so accustomed to gender stereotypes, the social constructs that we adhere to, that this injustice is engrained into the structural components of our society. Women are forced to stay at home with children because society has deemed them the primary caregiver. Men are told they must provide for their family, so they become the breadwinner. We teach this to our children in everyday life. What kinds of toys do little girls play with? Babies and dolls. Girls play house, have tea parties and pretend to be caregivers. They are told to be nurses and teachers, not engineers, politicians and policemen.

There are many problems with our society. One is that the idea of the man being the provider for a family is outdated. There are more women in the workforce than ever before and they provide just as much to families as their husbands. But, they are still forced into the care-giving role as well, forced to work that second shift preparing dinner and rushing children everywhere after their nine hours at work.

Another problem is that employers have not made the effort to adapt to this fact and become flexible with women, and also men.

I think what it boils down to is that in order to make it so that women are not forced to choose between work and family, employers need to be more flexible.

Like we saw in the video from the UK, many companies are adopting programs that allow employees who need to care for family members the ability to do so. An employer would gain so much in allowing someone to work from home when a child is sick. This doesn’t just have to do with raising children, it concerns care for elderly family members as well. It can kind of be explained with the good old Golden Rule—do unto other as they would do unto you. If an employer shows flexibility, an employee will work harder to show their gratitude for said flexibility.

I know that when I was young, my mom would work days while my father worked nights to make sure that I never had to be left in daycare. Once I grew older and my sister was born and grew, my mother turned to family such as my grandmother for childcare. She would also leave us in the care of neighbors. My mother’s employer has grown to become much more flexible now that my mother has seniority with the company and has a mother to care for.

The point is that it is not only women who can care for family. What happens to the single father who can’t make it to his child’s educational planning meeting because his employer doesn’t think he deserves time off? He suffers and his child suffers. What happens when a single mother cannot take off work to care for her children when they are not in school and cannot afford childcare? She suffers and her children suffer.

Society tells women that they need to take maternity leave when they give birth, but do men get paternity leave? No. I think that because the roles of men and women in society have changed, but the socially constructed stereotypes associated with each sex have not, it has made the situation much more complex than it should.

Post #3

Carework is a subject that hits close to home.

My mother cares for my grandmother, and has for the past few years. It has been a sticky situation at times, and my mother has had to take a lot of time off work mostly for my grandmother with her doctor’s appointments. She also has taken weeks off at a time when my grandmother has been hospitalized. It is a stressful situation for my mom because her other siblings live far away, so she pretty much does it all on her own. My mother, luckily, works for an amazing company that has been very flexible with her needs to care for her mother.

When I was younger, my mother was the parent who drove me and my sister to workout for gymnastics, and every single one of our competitions. She would come to almost every volleyball game and softball game, and she was always there for other school functions. If my sister or I had an appointment with the doctor or dentist, she was the one to take us. She cooked and cleaned and did everything for us. Now that both my sister and I live here in Arizona, she only really physically needs to care for my grandmother.

I think that my mom was always pretty stressed out with everything she had to do. Seeing as she is the parent who has worked full time my whole time, I can understand the stress she endured with everything.

With so many women in the workforce now, it is easy to see the added stress on women, and the stigma associated with men who engage in carework.

Over the summer when I was interning in Washington, DC there was a man who would come into work right at starting time, and left as soon as her was able to. I came to find that the reason he was always quick to leave was that his wife had cancer, and he was the one caring for her. However, the employer would not let him take off time from work to care for his wife, forcing him to deplete his vacation time. My boss had two children, one with special needs, and he was divorced. It was very hard for him to care for his children 100% because of the inflexibility of the employer. He would have to have family take care of the kids because he was a single father and had already received all of his vacation days.

I think the problem that is being faced now is that society has changed in regards to carework and who performs it. Women are no longer the only stay-at-home caregivers. Men have come to be caregivers as well. Another problem is that employers are refusing to be flexible for people who need to care for family members, no matter their sex, making it near impossible sometimes.

The biggest problem is the social construction of gender, and what jobs women and men are supposed to perform. If society continues to adhere to the idea that women are supposed to be the primary caregivers for the world, when a family structure works against the “norm” it is seen as wrong.

Post #2

For the purposes of this post, the term sex segregation will be defined as the segregation of jobs by sex. In their piece, “Gender Inequality in Paid Employment”, England and McCreary say, “Men and women generally hold different jobs requiring different kinds of skills. This segregation is attended by a sex gap in pay.”

Sex segregation is definitely apparent at Arizona State University. What stands out most is the high number of women engaged in performing clerical work throughout the university. In the Political Science Department, two of the three academic advisors are women, and all of the clerical staff is female. A male dean heads practically every college within Arizona State, and the President of the university is a man. In the Athletic Department, women fill the building performing the clerical work needed to keep our program going, and there is only one male academic coach, and he works for part of the football team and the wrestlers, more men.

Over the summer while contemplating my academic future, I looked into salary for political science professors at Arizona State, and not to my surprise, at all levels of employment, no matter if a woman was a full professor or associate professor, they made less than a man holding the same position.

Of course the wage gap persists as men loose their jobs in this economic time. It isn’t about who is working, it is about what type of job they are working. According to an NPR report, men in manufacturing and construction jobs have been the hardest hit, and as these sectors have shrunk, the health sector, three quarters of which is composed of women, has grown. That doesn’t mean that nurses’ wages have grown. No matter what, women still make less money than men, about seventy cents on the dollar that men hold. Women are being forced to work more, taking second jobs, yet still earning less than men.

My home life definitely reproduced stereotypical gender roles. Although both of my parents worked full time jobs most of my life, my father, until last year, made more per year than my mother. My father is a heavy equipment operator (manual labor) and my mother does accounting and payroll for a huge engineering corporation (clerical work). Both my parents played into the gender roles set forth by our society, my mother performing most of the cooking, cleaning, and laundry, and my father mowing the lawn, fixing the cars, and being the all-around “fix-it man.” My mother is the one who handles the finances in the house, and she was the only one of my parents who attended college and received a degree. My father barely made it out of high school.

My mother would like to think that she has broken away from the patriarchy our society teaches, and she has done a great job in teaching my sister and myself that women do not need to rely on men for anything. However, in her actions as we grew up, constantly cooking and cleaning while my father sat around, did not enforce her teachings. Now that my parents relationship is pretty much over, they act as roommates and never talk, my mother is much more independent and refuses to do anything for my father.