Dear Stavros, It has been challenging to think about what might make a difference to the levels of poverty, particularly child poverty, in this country, and wondering whether anything that works here is likely to have any bearing on poverty in the US. I’ve thought about it a great deal over the last few days. I am not sure I have any solutions at all, nor that I am well-placed to make even tentative suggestions. And I doubt that I am about to say anything that you have not already thought of. The fact that some people escape poverty and succeed in education shows that there is no necessary causative link between poverty and poor educational achievement. Since poverty and poor educational achievement are often found together, it would be fair to conclude that there is, however, some kind of association or relationship between the two. I began to write two comments in response to yours, but neither got me very far.
The first was a complicated explanation of the welfare benefits system here in an attempt to show to you that the benefits are not overly generous and do not encourage reliance on the state except to the permissible extent of providing for essential needs in a civilised Western democracy. I had calculated the amount that an uncomplicated family of two adults and two children would receive (about £10,500 plus rent), and had tried to show how their income would almost double if between them the parents found work of 30 hours a week or more at only just above the minimum wage, thereby demonstrating that the present system already encouraged people to find work. The figures I calculated were only interesting, however, to those in the UK. It is their relative purchasing power that might be interesting to you, and I cannot make comparisons with income and prices in the US.
I would say, however, that the welfare system provides benefits for all that are adequate (but no more) for a no-frills life style that would not include the ability to buy “white” electrical goods without a loan or to own a car or to go on holiday, or to eat out in restaurants or even enjoy a coffee in a café except very occasionally, or to buy clothes except at thrift stores, or to own and run a computer, or a dog, or smoke much. There is enough to pay utility charges (electricity, gas, water), basic food and cleaning materials, basic clothes, and a small amount left over for discretionary spending. A system of government loans is available for the purchase of washing machines, cookers, beds and so forth repaid by deductions from the welfare benefits, and – of course – we have comprehensive healthcare free at the point of delivery. There are free libraries for books, and welfare benefits operate as a passport to other benefits such as free school meals, free medicine prescriptions, free dental care. Accommodation is met separately by local councils benefits as are local taxes. Any family rendered unintentionally homeless will be entitled to be housed. In short, there is an adequate safety net, but few people would voluntarily enjoy life in the safety net for long.
Working Tax Credit, the “carrot” benefit to get people back to work, is actually a redistributive tax that concentrates money on families (but discriminates against two parent families, sadly – another bee in my bonnet). It is fairly generous and includes a large amount for childcare so that women are not prevented from working. A single parent only has to work 16 hours a week in order to qualify for the benefit.
My second attempt at a reply was made up of a list of the issues that seemed to me to be relevant to a family’s poverty. These were issues such as disability (mental or physical), debt, parents’s own level of education, lack of aspiration, envy, a desire to keep up with the Joneses manifested by a national obsession with cars and labels or marques, and so on. Just as you can peel away layer after layer of an onion, it seemed as if these issues were, by and large, only superficial manifestations of something else going on underneath. People get into debt because they spend more money than they have. They spend more money than they have often not because they need to (though this is occasionally the case). They overspend because they need – for some other psychological purpose – the things that they are purchasing with that money: the lady who had been caring for her husband dying from cancer for the last seventeen years … let it all get her down and bought some new clothes to cheer herself up. Often it is symbols of the next social class (or our more successful peers) that we aspire to acquire in order to feel better about ourselves – it is true for all of us. As if a few more possessions will make us a little happier.
In relation to depression, another issue which needs addressing, I think that a large part of it is reactive depression, that is, the depression comes upon someone because of the powerlessness they feel in relation to their circumstances. These circumstances of their life are not as they would wish them to be; they would wish them to be better. Of all those issues that I could think of, that present themselves with sad repetition at the advice centre, it seemed that most (with the exception of physical disability) related in some way or another to a self defined in relation to The Other. I think comparisons are generally unhelpful and have a tendency to leave you feeling bad.
The Other has a great interest in keeping the poor poor, for in doing so he hopefully ensures that he does not become one of them. He knows that the border that separates the Haves from the Have-nots is porous and people percolate through it in both directions. The Other hates the idea of being poor and those who are themselves poor must know this. There seem to be two possible responses to this knowledge that poverty and the poor are despised – passive acceptance (which we might also call hopelessness) and rebellion.
Rebellion, in turn, may take two forms which I shall call “positive” and “negative”. In the positive form, rebellion refuses the label that The Other wishes to attach to the poor, and the poor determine that they shall cease to be poor by working as hard as they can, saving as much as they can and generally living a good life for themselves but they do not seek to define themselves in relation to The Other. In the negative or nihilist form, rebellion takes rather the form of the spittle flinging angry troll whose aim is to defeat the Other and who defines himself specifically in relation to what the Other is not. Both may result in social mobility of the poor out of their poverty, but one is likely to produce happy, productive, loving people whilst the other produces sad men and women whose success is only ever defiant,not satisfying, and who will never be happy until the Other has been completely conquered.
Then there are those who can never move out of their poverty. Principally there are those who have a disability which prevents them from working. I think the majority fall into this category. They will always be poor because they cannot work and it is not their fault. But that does not necessarily prevent them from encouraging and supporting their children in education. Benefits are increased for this group of people, although children often find themselves losing their childhood caring for their parents.
Others stuck in poverty have lives so chaotic and so scarred by abuse, addiction and excess that their survival at all is miraculous. If they have children, those children will almost certainly be taken into the care of the authorities and placed with foster families. Currently a local group of women entrenched in this position – all drug addicts and working street prostitutes – have been “engaged” by an intensive multi-agency programme. So far the news is good – some of the most hardened street prostitutes are actively working to improve their lives and those of their children, to combat their drug addictions and related criminal behaviour, and to move towards a more stable existence with a panoply of support from specialised agencies. It took the most devastating events to produce this level of combined action by the police, social services, housing providers and drug charities, but it is encouraging that their determined work is paying off for the time being. Others are not so lucky. This is a very powerful account of one person’s attempt to help one such chaotic man: Stuart, A Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters which describes some of the people who find their way to our advice centre when it’s winter and cold outside.
So, if some people escape poverty, but others don’t, what is it that makes the difference? I toyed with the idea that it was love. A loving, supportive family is a much nicer springboard than a background of abusive familial relationships. Yet some people escape poverty exactly because those very abusive relationships have motivated them to leave it all behind. I have been fascinated by the myth of Pandora’s box for a long time. Depending on who you talk to, there are two very different versions of the myth – both of which are explained in the Wikipedia link. In one version, all the evils contained in Pandora’s jar are unleashed on the world. Hope, the only thing left in the jar, remains locked away inside forever, and we are condemned to a hopeless existence surrounded by demons trying to trip us up at every turn. In the second version – the one I grew up with – the same evils are unleashed but hope is there too as the antidote to evil. Both versions of the myth have their supporters but I believe that we choose which version we support, not generally on an intellectual interpretation of the original texts, but based on our instinctive inclination towards the world. I wonder whether this Hellenic antidote of hope might not equally be renamed faith. It is not hope or faith that makes the difference when you are poor?
Can something as basic as an inclination towards the world be encouraged by the state? It seems unlikely. The role of the state is to provide the safety net of essential provisions – a good education, adequate welfare benefits, protection from criminal harm, public transport, adequate essential health care including non-medical care for mental health problems – but individuals provide the essential difference, I think. Whilst the state may provide the school, it is the inspirational teacher who will make the difference. Whilst the state may provide the mental health services, it is the caring counsellor who will make the difference. Whilst the state may provide the welfare benefits, it is the next-door neighbour or the friend that drops round every day that makes the world seem less lonely.
Almost twenty years ago I read a book, the memory of which has stayed with me. It was written by Bob Holman, a professor of social work, who chose to live on one of the most deprived housing estates outside Glasgow. It was his belief that every mother wants the best for her child, that every mother has hope in relation to her child, but that circumstances in the first five years of the child’s life in the family could make or break the future of that child and determine whether or not hope prevailed. Working with non-governmental organisations such as Home-Start and New Pin and motivated by his Christian faith, he pioneered early interventions in struggling families – these organisations provide practical help with washing clothes, cleaning, shopping, respite child care, and a kind person to listen and support vulnerable families. The emphasis has to be on a “bottom-up” approach that involves the very people that need the help, but the Other being kind makes an enormous difference. Much, much later this sort of work was adopted by a Labour government as government policy under the name Sure Start.
So that’s what I think it comes down to. Hope and Love, or Faith and Love, and in default of that, caring support for vulnerable families through charities and volunteers – but you need to get in early. Oh, and in school teaching girls to respect themselves and their bodies, and teaching boys that there are things that matter more than how much money you have. Tracy Chapman gets it right, I think.
I’ve ducked the subject of why children of some ethnic backgrounds do better than others for now. Briefly, I think the economic and social origins of different ethnicities are probably important in determining the value those parents give to education and the aspirations they have for their children. It would not, for example, be accurate to group together all Asian children since their educational outcomes are very different depending on the nationality of their parents. I would hate to be a policy maker. If I’ve learnt nothing else from my work at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, it is that it is very difficult to generalise about people. I wondered if you agreed, or if you had other suggestions…
There’s a profile of Bob Holman here: http://www.childrenuk.co.uk/choct2002/choct2002/bob%20holman%20a%20profile.html
And an interview with him and an ex-resident of the Glasgow estate here: http://www.variant.randomstate.org/13texts/Bob_Holman.html
Home-start: http://www.home-start.org.uk/
New Pin, now Family Welfare Association: http://www.fwa.org.uk/
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December 5, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Stavros
I apologize for being caught up in my own little world at MGO and have not been around to pay a visit lately. Imagine my surprise when I found this well thought out post addressed to me. I am unable to comment right now but promise to do so as soon as I can.
December 5, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Margaret
No need to apologise, Stavros. It was good to have an excuse to work out what I thought, which was not exactly what I thought I thought, if you get my drift. Please don’t feel you have to reply.
December 7, 2007 at 3:00 am
Stavros
Margaret,
Reading my first comment perhaps I came across as someone who couldn’t be bothered to respond to a post that you have obviously thought about extensively. The quality of what you had written was impressive. I was overwhelmed by the task before me and by the time I needed to write an adequate reply which I didn’t have. I wanted to respond in kind, i.e. with something that helps the discussion. Anna is shaking her head as I write this, at my poor choice of words and extraordinary lack of judgment.
Your rendition of welfare benefits in the UK gave me an opportunity to compare those benefits with those here in the state of Maine where I live.
Here in the US each state has different levels of benefits in the US so I’ll stick with the one I am most familiar with. Maine has a population of about 1,325,000 people. The median income (I’ve taken the liberty of changing dollars to pounds) is 20,300. The poverty level is 8625. The welfare benefit for a family of three is 5500 plus free medical care.
More information here: http://www.mejp.org/PDF/tanf_facts.pdf
On the face of it seems that the level of benefits in the UK, although not overly generous, is much higher.
I am not sure what that says for either society’s commitment to helping the poor but it is an interesting comparison. It seems to me that welfare benefits here are less than adequate but part of the reason they are less than adequate is to encourage those on the welfare rolls to improve their situation.
I would like to say up front that most of my views are based on anecdotal evidence, a result of my own experiences. I don’t profess expertise on the subject, maybe an occasional insight.
1) I believe that there is a high correlation between poverty and lack of education. In the US if you don’t have at least a high school education you are automatically relegated to mostly minimum wage jobs. Even if there are two people working full time it is difficult to make ends meet. If one parent stays home a family is living on the edge.
2) Another major factor in poverty is that most of these families lack a father. Families where fathers are not present suffer financially but more importantly they are vulnerable in more important ways. I would recommend the following study:
http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/usermanuals/fatherhood/chapterthree.cfm
3) Teenage pregnancy breeds poverty. Many of these young girls lack adequate supervision and support to begin with and once they get pregnant they are ill equipped to raise and support their child singlehandedly. Unable to continue their education, usually abandoned by the father of their child, they lack the essential support of an extended family. As a result they seem to wander from boyfriend to boyfriend and pregnancy to pregnancy.
4) I find that substance abuse is also a major predictor of poverty and that such abuse is often a method of self medicating in order to deal with things like depression and hopelessness.
5) I see a high level of dysfunction in more than a few poor families. Dysfunctional families create dysfunctional children who grow up to be dysfunctional adults who only continue the cycle. The psychopathology in some of these families is astounding and it runs from generation to generation. Even when kids are taken out of this environment and put in foster or adoptive homes the damage is already complete and lasting.
I am not sure if these are the same types of things that you see in the Advice Bureau. These patterns don’t apply to everyone that is poor, generalizations are indeed perilous but I think they do apply to many. Of course we are talking about affluent industrialized societies, not Third World countries.
I am not quite sure who you are referring to when you blame “The Other” for trying to keep the poor, poor. Surely there are some who look down upon the poor, shake their heads and wonder why they can’t just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Then there are some in our societies that enable irresponsible behavior. In this dichotomy, we may find the ultimate solution to a vexing problem.
That solution requires that society and the individual fulfill their obligations. Society must keep working on effective methods to provide adequate temporary relief to the poor. I use the term society because often this task is relegated only to the state instead of to society as a whole. Forgotten in all of this sometimes is the importance of individual responsibility and instilling a sense in people that it’s all still up to them. One of the things every nurse learns is the importance of not doing everything for a patient, i.e. encouraging them to do as much for themselves as possible. It is a difficult balance to achieve.
In reading your thoughts about Pandora’s Box I started to think about kids/patients that I have watched growing up in the same troubled family who followed different paths and ended up in different places. What led them towards these different outcomes? I rather think that and agree with you that it was someone in their life who made a difference. Part of the reason that early Christianity spread so quickly in the urban areas of the Empire was that fact that Christian love and charity took the place of the nonexistent safety net for the poor. Churches peopled by middle class folks like myself nowadays are conspicuously absent from the task of providing a support network to those that need it most or do not have a family that they can depend on.
I would recommend the following, it seems to me to be a good approach:
http://www.brookings.edu/testimony/2007/0426poverty_sawhill.aspxwing:
In the US, despite its social and economic mobility we seem to have developed a permanent underclass. I feel that the discussion about these issues is absent for a variety of reasons until things boil over and we are forced to address them in a haphazard fashion once again.
December 7, 2007 at 9:51 am
adifferentvoice
I am sorry that you must have felt pressurised by my post addressed to you. Your blog is a great deal more active than mine and I did not intend to take you away from it or for you to spend time writing about something that you had not exactly chosen to write about, nor can it have been exciting for Anna. I am still relatively new to blogging and shall learn from this experience.
Thank you ,however, for bothering to reply. I know it must have taken a long time to compose such a thoughtful reply. It sounds as if you have much more experience of poverty professionally than I do (not that it’s a competition) and I agree that the factors you identify are key. I’m a bit wary about saying anything when it’s clear that your experience as a pediatric nurse practitioner gives you a great deal more expertise. My comments are also only based on anecdotal observations and are quite possibly very wrong. It’s hard, though, to avoid the conclusion that at whatever remove the issues you enumerate nearly all reduce to poor parenting. You identify absent fathers as a problem and your link in that regard was very interesting. I am sure that there are many reasons why a man would not be an adequate father to his children, but I’m equally sure that a lot of the difficulty could be traced back to the way in which they were parented themselves. I do agree that people have to help themselves and that “rescuing” people doesn’t work, though I hate the notion that for some children the damage is complete and lasting. I suppose that is what thinking about personality disorders would have us think, but I am a ridiculous optimist. Optimists, as my uncle reminded me a couple of days ago, are always disappointed.
I have a particular frustration about what I see as a relatively common problem – mothers hanging on to their (often younger) sons as a substitute for the affection and respect they would hope to receive from their husband or partner. This happens not only when the father is physically absent from the family, but equally when he is emotionally absent, I think, or the woman is treated as an inferior and not given the equality and affection that are her due. Part of me does not blame the woman for getting love where she can. But part of me wants to scream at her “Grow up, and look at what you are doing to your child!”. I think it ultimately produces a son who remains emotionally stunted, often a perpetual narcissistic child inside, who has been over indulged and probably indulges in his own adoration of his mother to the exclusion of all other women. He is often lacking a sufficiently competent adult self to be a good partner and father, and so the cycle persists. The absent or emotionally absent father affects daughters too, rather more directly, than indirectly through the mother perhaps. They call it Father Hunger, and I know a lot about that but won’t bore you. Somebody, somewhere, has to break the cycle, which is easier said that done.
So, returning to the onion analogy, I would take another layer off your set of key factors. Unless the parents can make their own relationship work, they will find it difficult to be good enough parents. If they cannot be good enough parents, all the sorts of issues you raise become more difficult to avoid. I wish there were more visible role models to aspire to: couples are often reluctant to share their struggles although others might learn from them, and it’s quite difficult to find a description of what a happy couple is like, but I think that is what needs concentrating on. Again I have my own ideas and may share them on this blog at some point. Reading on a bit from another one of your interesting links – relating to the role of fathers – I came across a section in a subsequent chapter which happily agrees with me about the primary importance of the quality of the marriage relationship, so I shall link to that separately.
I spent a cold, wet, miserable morning yesterday calculating benefits for a man contemplating moving in with his girlfriend. He has long term depression and has been signed off work by his doctor, and two children he no longer sees. His girlfriend is bi-polar and has never been able to work. She already has three children from two previous relationships and is pregnant with his child. She lives in a four bedroom council-owned property. Between them they qualified for nine separate benefits and several enhancements totally about £23,000 plus paid-for accommodation. My second client was also unemployed, homeless, and had two young children whom he only saw under supervised access. My job requires me to remain non-judgemental and impartial and to help clients explore options but not to provide solutions. On a day like yesterday, I just feel like throwing my hands in the air. I don’t know how to solve it all.
Or rather my solutions begin to sound a bit extreme. Brain scans at birth to identify the make up of every child’s brain so that the systematising left-brainers can be given help to relate to their right brain friends, and so that right-brainers can be taught a vocabulary that left-brainers can process. Social workers attached to every school. Emotional audits and a Transactional Analysis 101 course for all school children at the end of primary school and again at fourteen. Compulsory counselling for all couples before they marry and again as soon as their youngest child is three and a half including drawing genograms so they can see how dysfunctional their own families were before they start. Compulsory parenting courses. Electro-convulsive therapy for men who think it is manly not to talk about their feelings. Similar for women who think saying “yes” is the answer to everything.
I digress. Thank you again for taking the time to write down your thoughts. I shall make sure that I do not make you feel so obligated again. Perhaps you and Anna should write a book with your solutions – you seem to have everything pretty well sorted.
We’re going away this weekend to Brussels to celebrate in the place where we met twenty years ago with another twenty or so of our former colleagues. I shall think more on the super speedy train from the ultra cool new London terminal at St Pancras and write up any more thoughts that are worth recording when I get back.
December 7, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Stavros
“you seem to have everything pretty well sorted”
Not quite. We struggle along just like everybody else. Just when you think you have all the answers, something happens which makes you realize that you don’t. ALL families and couples are dysfunctional to a degree, it’s referred to as “being human.” Anna and I have made our share of mistakes. No use beating ourselves up about it.
Brain scans aside, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that love and faith are essential. Sometimes it’s tough love but love nevertheless that we all require it to help us cope with life’s tribulations. I think that we all feel a sense of isolation sometimes, that we are alone. Once we realize that is not the case we invariably overcome.
Enjoy Brussels and above all, enjoy each other. Have a good trip.
December 7, 2007 at 6:24 pm
adifferentvoice
Thank you! I’m hoping that Christmas Tree Decorations will continue to appear in my absence :). And that you both have a good weekend in the snow too. I thought you could always rename your “Snow” post: “Snonow” …
June 26, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Fact or Fiction; A Life Backwards « A Different Voice
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