by Ruby K Payne
Ibid. p. 164.
Kozol, Jonathan. Amazing Grace. New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 1995. p. 81.
Chapter Four: Characteristics of Generational Poverty
The extended family "makes the dependence of family members on each other into a code of honor." This works by age usually, "the older people having a right to set the standard for the younger."
In describing a factory worker, his wife speaks of his ability related to sports statistics, and he says, "'She shouldn't make anything of it; I mean, I didn't.'" .. . "There is something more here than embarrassment at being praised. The strengths `I' have are not admissible to the arena of ability where they are socially useful; for once admitted, `I'-my real self-would no longer have them."
Low-income parents compared to rich parents:
Are not as likely to be married.
Typically have less education.
Typically have poorer health.
The role-model version of the good-parent theory contends that "because of their position at the bottom of the social hierarchy, low-income parents develop values, norms, and behaviors that are `dysfunctional' for success in the dominant culture."
Men and women from low-income background are less likely to marry when they have a child than those from higher income. When they marry, "they are more likely to separate and divorce."
"Absent any state support, some women and children will be more likely to remain in abusive and destructive relationships with men. Others will turn to `social prostitution,' serial relationships with men willing to pay their bills."
Sennett, Richard, and Cobb, Jonathan. The Hidden Injuries of Class. London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993. First published in U.S.A. in 1972 by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY. p. 106.
Ibid. P. 216.
Mayer, Susan E. What Money Can't Buy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. p. 8.
Ibid. P. 50.
Ibid. pp. 65-66.
Ibid. pp. 151-152.
"Poor parents differ from rich parents in many ways besides income. For instance, low-income parents usually have less education and are less likely to marry, which could also explain disparities in rich and poor children's life chances."
"Clearly, poverty experienced during adolescence negatively affects the educational attainment of children. The role played by education in determining the economic and occupational success of Americans suggests longer-term consequences. The consequences of dropping out of high school are particularly drastic: over the past two decades, individuals with less than a high school degree have suffered an absolute decline in real income and have dropped further behind individuals with more education."
"Our estimates of the determinants of the teen out-ofwedlock birth outcome suggest that parental characteristics (the education of the mother) are important determinants of teens' childbearing choices but that poverty itself is not a significant determinant. However, having income well above the poverty line does appear to reduce teen out-of-wedlock births. A family characteristic frequently associated with povertythe number of years spent living with a single parent -is also a significant determinant of teenage fertility choices, particularly if a child spends the teenage years from twelve to fifteen living in poverty."
"The number of unmarried women having children has risen dramatically, and childbirth outside of marriage is not confined to teenagers."
Mayer, Susan E. Trends in the Economic Well-being and Life Chances of America's Children. Duncan, Greg J., and Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Editors. Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997. P. 51.
Teachman, Jay D., Paasch, Kathleen M., Day, Randal D., and Carver, Karen P. Poverty During Adolescence and Subsequent Educational Attainment. Duncan, Greg J., and Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Editors. Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997. P. 416.
Haveman, Robert, Wolfe, Barbara, and Wilson, Kathryn. Childhood Poverty and Adolescent Schooling and Fertility Outcomes: Reduced-form and Structural Estimates. Duncan, Greg J., and Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Editors. Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997. P. 443.
Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Duncan, Greg J., and Maritato, Nancy. Poor Families, Poor Outcomes: The Well-being of Children and Youth. Duncan, Greg J., and Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Editors. Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997. P. 4.
"Criminality in this country is a class issue. Many of those warehoused in overcrowded prisons can be properly called `criminals of want,' those who've been deprived of the basic necessities of life and therefore forced into so-called criminal acts to survive ... They are members of a social stratum which includes welfare mothers, housing project residents, immigrant families, the homeless and unemployed."
He says his mother "held up the family when almost everything else came apart."
"We changed houses often because of evictions."
The family then moved in with Seni, the author's halfsister, and her family. A grandmother also lived there, making a total of 11 in the apartment. "The adults occupied the only two bedrooms. The children slept on makeshift bedding in the living room." The author and his brother "sought refuge in the street."
"We didn't call ourselves gangs. We called ourselves clubs or clicas ... It was something to belong tosomething that was ours. We weren't in [B]oy [S]couts, in sports teams or camping groups. Thee Impersonations (club name) is how we wove something out of threads of nothing."
"But `family' is a farce among the propertyless and disenfranchised. Too many families are wrenched apart, as even children are forced to supplement meager incomes. Family can only really exist among those who can afford one."
"Even when income is used to define poverty, one finds relatively high ownership of televisions and automobiles among the poor."
Rodriguez, Luis J. Always Running. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1993. p. 10.
Ibid. P. 23.
Ibid. P. 30.
Ibid. P. 32.
Ibid. P. 41.
Ibid. P. 250.
Seligman, Ben B. The Numbers of Poor. Penchef, Esther, Editor. Four Horsemen: Pollution, Poverty, Famine, Violence. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Press, 1971. P. 95.
"Poverty does different things to different people. Walk into the home of a poor family. A stench may offend the nostrils; filth may offend the eyes. Or the home may look immaculate."
An example of Rosita's neighbor is given: She has five children by five different men-she's never had a husband.
Boyd and his wife believe education provides the best chance for his son. He said, " `... [TIhey won't get any place at all without high school education, and most likely college to boot."'
"Some of the social and psychological characteristics include living in crowded quarters, a lack of privacy, gregariousness, a high incidence of alcoholism, frequent resort to violence in the settlement of quarrels, frequent use of physical violence in the training of children, wife beating, early initiation into sex, free unions or consensual marriages, a relatively high incidence of the abandonment of mothers and children, a trend toward mother-centered families and a much greater knowledge of maternal relatives, the predominance of the nuclear family, a strong predisposition to authoritarianism, and a great emphasis upon family solidarity-an ideal only rarely achieved. Other traits include a strong present time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future, a sense of resignation and fatalism based upon the realities of their difficult life situation, a belief in male superiority which reaches its crystallization in machismo or the cult of masculinity, a corresponding martyr complex among women, and finally, a high tolerance for psychological pathology of all sorts."
Family structure of the poor: "more homes without a father, there is less marriage, more early pregnancy and, if Kinsey's statistical finding can be used, markedly different attitudes toward sex. As a result of this, to take but one consequence of the fact, hundreds of thousands, and
perhaps millions, of children in the other America never know stability and `normal' affection."
Dicks, Lee E. The Poor Who Live Among Us. Penchef, Esther, Editor. Four Horsemen: Pollution, Poverty, Famine, Violence. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Press, 1971. p. 118.
Ibid. P. 120.
Ibid. P. 123.
Lewis, Oscar. The Culture of Poverty. Penchef, Esther, Editor. Four Horsemen: Pollution, Poverty, Famine, Violence. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Press, 1971. P. 138.
Harrington, Michael. The Invisible Land. Penchef, Esther, Editor. Four Horsemen: Pollution, Poverty, Famine, Violence. San Francisco, CA: Canfield Press, 1971. P. 153.
"First rule of the streets: don't display weakness, sentimentality."
The author asks an interviewer how she feels about hooking. The response is: "'You just turn off part of your mind. You gotta think, well, a guy goes out, he buys work hoots, and he puts them to work to make money. I put my body to work. It's the same thing, really."'
The author describes the poor in America as being "pessimistic and defeated."
"Poverty in the United States is a culture, an institution, a way of life."
"He (F. Scott Fitzgerald) understood that being rich was not a single fact, like a large hank account, but a way of looking at reality, a series of attitudes, a special type of life. If this is true of the rich, it is ten times truer of the poor. Everything about them, from the condition of their teeth to the way in which they love, is suffused and permeated by the fact of their poverty."
"There is, in short, a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a world view of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates society."
In describing men who worked in coal mines but who were laid off, Swados says, "'it is truly ironic that a substantial portion of these men, who pride themselves on their ability to live with danger, to work hard, to fight hard, drink hard, love hard, are now learning housework and taking over the woman's role in the family."'
"As often happens in the culture of poverty, marriage was somewhat irregular among these folk. The women were not promiscuous-they lived with one man at a time, and for considerable periods. But, after some years and a child or two, the marriage would break up. It was not uncommon to meet two or three sets of halfbrothers and half-sisters living under the same roof."
Capponi, Pat. Dispatches from the Poverty Line. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Penguin Books, 1997. P. 150.
Ibid. p. 153.
Harrington, Michael. The Other America. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1962. P. 2.
Ibid. p. 16.
Ibid.
Ibid. P. 17.
Ibid. P. 28.
Ibid. p. 98.
Ibid. p. 99.
Ibid. P. 127.
"And yet this grim description, like the account of a Negro ghetto, misses the quality of life. As one walked along the streets in the late summer, the air was filled with hillbilly music from a hundred radios. There was a sort of loose, defeated gaiety about the place, the casualness of a people who expected little. These were poor Southern whites."
'But within a slum, violence and disturbance are often norms, everyday facts of life. From the inside of the other America, joining a `bopping' gang may well not seem like deviant behavior. It could be a necessity for dealing with a hostile world. (Once, in a slum school in St. Louis, a teacher stopped a fight between two little girls. `Nice girls don't fight,' she told them. `Yeah,' one of them replied, 'you should have seen my old lady at the tavern last night."')
"Related to this pattern of immediate gratification is a tendency on the part of the poor to 'act out,' to be less inhibited, and sometimes violent."
Ibid. pp. 135-136.
Ibid. P. 136.
"In New Haven, for instance, Hollingshead and Redlich found that in Class V (the poor) some 41% of the children under seventeen lived in homes that had been disrupted by death, desertion, separation, or divorce."
Regarding family structures among the poor, Yale researchers found that "23% grew up in a `generation stem family,' where different generations are thrown together, usually with a broken marriage or two. Under such circumstances there is the possibility of endless domestic conflict [among] the different generations (and this is exacerbated when the old are immigrants with a foreign code). Another 18 % came from broken homes where one or the other parent was absent. And iivo had experienced the death of a parent."
"Another aspect of this family pattern is sexual. In New Haven the researchers found that it was fairly common for young girls in the slums to be pregnant before they were married. I saw a similar pattern in St. Louis. There, children had a sort of sophisticated ignorance about sexual matters at an early age. Jammed together in miserable housing, they knew the facts of sex from firsthand observation (though often what they saw was a brutalized and drunken form of sex)."
Ibid. p. 135.
Ibid.
"Perhaps the most important analytic point to have emerged in this description of the other America is the fact that poverty in America forms a culture, a way of life and feeling, that it makes a whole. It is crucial to generalize this idea, for it profoundly affects how one moves to destroy property."
"On another level, the emotions of the other America are even more profoundly disturbed. Here it is not lack of aspiration and of hope; it is a matter of personal chaos. The drunkenness, the unstable marriages, the violence of the other America are not simply facts about individuals. They are the description of an entire group in the society who react this way because of the conditions under which they live."
Some of the evidence to support the changes in family life includes: "Large numbers of adult males are only loosely attached to the families and households that contain their offspring. Many among these see their children sporadically, if at all, and contribute little or nothing to the financial support of their children."
When walking with five children (two are 7 years old, two are 9 years old, and the other is described as a tiny child), Kozol says: "None of the children can tell me the approximate time that school begins. One says five o'clock. One says six. Another says that school begins at noon." The children then tell him of the rape and murder of one of their sisters.
A 12-year-old boy named Jeremiah tells Kozol that "I white people started moving away from black and Spanish people in New York'" in 1960. Kozol asks him where the white people went. Another boy says he thinks they moved to the country. Jeremiah then says, "'It isn't where people live. It's how they live."' Kozol asks him to repeat what he said. "'It's how they live,' he says again. 'There are different economies in different places."' Kozol asks Jeremiah to explain what he means, and Jeremiah refers to Riverdale, "a mostly white and middle-class community in the northwest section of the Bronx." "'Life in Riverdale is opened up,' he says. `Where we live, it's locked down."' Kozol asks him, "'In what way?"' He responds, "'We can't go out and play.'"
Ibid. pp. 159-160.
Ibid. p. 162.
Zill, Nicholaus. "The Changing Realities of Family Life." Aspen Institute Quarterly. Winter 1993. Volume 5. Number 1. P. 37.
Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1991. pp. 12-13.
Kozol, Jonathan. Arnazing Grace. New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 1995. p. 32.
A 15-year-old student, Isabel, says she thinks Jeremiah's description of feeling "'locked down'" is "too strong." "'It's not like being in a jail,' she says. `It's more like being "hidden." It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it where they don't need to think of it again."'
Ibid. pp. 38-39.
Chapter Five: Role Models and Emotional Resources
Harrington, Michael. The Other America. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1962. pp. 77-78.
"But in a study of the New York State Commission Against Discrimination an even more serious situation
was described: one in which Negro children had more aspiration than whites from the same income level, but less opportunity to fulfill their ambition ... The Negro child, coming from a family in which the father has a miserable job, is forced to reject the life of his parents, and to put forth new goals for himself. In the case of the immigrant young some generations ago, this experience of breaking with the Old Country tradition and identifying with the great society of America was a decisive moment in moving upward. But the Negro does not find society as open as the immigrant did."
Chapter Six: Support Systems
Chronic low income results in "coping strategies and material deprivations that are detrimental to children's behavior."
"Other fruitful strategies might be more indirect programmatic ones, such as helping mothers read more to their children (as well as read more themselves) and teaching mothers about intellectually stimulating learning activities that they can do at home with their children" (Brooks-Gunn, Denner, and Klebanov, 1995; Snow, 1986).
Mayer, Susan E. What Money Can't Buy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. P. 76.
Smith, Judith R., BrooksGunn, Jeanne, and Klebanov, Pamela K. Consequences of Living in Poverty for Young Children's Cognitive and Verbal Ability and Early School Achievement. Duncan, Greg I., and Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Editors. Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997. P. 167.
"Parents' economic resources can influence self-esteem in several ways. Parents' income brings both parents and children social status and respect that can translate into individual self-esteem. Income can also enhance children's self-esteem by providing them with the goods and services that satisfy individual aspirations."
In models by Rand D. Conger, Kathy J. Conger, and Glen Elder, "IL ow income produces economic pressures that can lead to conflict between parents over financial matters, which in turn affects the harshness of the mother's parenting and the adolescent's self-confidence and achievement."