Unit B Blog #10

The women in Chaudry's study had to adapt to many forms of survival tactics after welfare did not always come through. When these women did not have enough money to pay for overpriced childcare many times they had to turn to kin care. Kin care works better for some than others, because some families are more willing to help out their "kin" than others. In the book we heard stories about women on welfare providing kin care for other women struggling to get by and in some cases this worked out for the working mothers, but in other cases the kin care providers wanted money to provide the babysitting jobs that these mothers already could not afford. This put these women in a terrible situation, and often a situation in which they had to turn to taking time off work to drive their children from one place to another, perhaps from one cousins house to an elderly grandma in order to keep their children supervised for the length of an entire day.

In many cases the welfare that these working mothers, often single, were obtaining was very unstable to say the least. This forced the mothers to adapt in ways which would often result in putting stress on their work life. The welfare system failed more than a few mothers, as some would obtain jobs that the system would consider to have enough income to no longer require government assistance. As we saw in some of the child care videos however, this did not always mean, in fact it almost never meant that these mothers no longer needed the assistance. The welfare system also had a way of providing about half the time, ironically when the mothers seemed to need it least, and would fail to come through with a payment when the working mothers needed the money most, to pay for child care and other services.

Our current system of government assistance and the poverty line does not take into account many challenges that single mothers or even lower income earning families face. This inconsistency has forced many of these working people to adapt to life without assistance, and while many of these families would not need a handout, our social system has a way of keeping the poor poor, and the rich even richer. It is kind of like the opposite of the American Dream, where hard work pays off in wealth, because for these working class individuals, their strenuous manual labor translated to minimum wage earnings and more struggles for families attempting to raise their kids and put food on the table. Our welfare system could do a lot more in ensuring that these people, and most importantly the children have an equal and fair opportunity to food and shelter. The videos for the Unit as well as various other videos on YouTube and other video streaming websites show effectively how a halfway home or a homeless shelter is almost more dangerous and hard to survive then life on the streets.

We have a serious problem in this country. That problem is our inability to help out the less fortunate and get them off the streets. No person would wish for a life like this and for the land of "freedom and opportunity" to be unable to provide such things as help with rent, childcare, and other amenities is unfair. Not everybody is lucky enough to receive help from family and friends, and a lot of mothers are left stranded with no father to help them with the raising of a child or children every day. This sets the children up for a life of poverty to, as many teens in inner cities and heavy populated areas are forced to drop out of school to obtain minimum wage jobs to help out with bills. This does not even take into consideration ridiculously high health care bills that working class families with no insurance have to deal with.

Chaudry suggests more ways in which our system can help these working class mothers with drop in child care programs, government run child care facilities that women in the working class could utilize, and other options for these mothers. All of these suggestions would go a long way in transforming our system from one that has seemed to lose focus on the poor and struggling individuals and give them a chance to provide for their families in the best way they can. We all need a little help sometimes, and as long as their is even the slight chance that I may require assistance as well one day, I do not mind putting my tax dollars towards programs to help out the less fortunate individuals in this country.