Blog #10

I think the most important adaptive survival strategy that Chaudry’s poor working mothers showed was their ability to preserve through all of their setbacks and obstacles. The example that stood out the most to me was Sara and Christina’s story. Sara went from living in the US to moving to Ecuador, back to the US where she unsuccessfully lived with her mother, to living in a homeless shelter and then finally having public housing of her own. Throughout all of these transitions, her main priority was to keep Christina in the day care center she had fought so hard to get her into because it was able to provide her daughter with a stable environment and care which she could not at the time. She did not allow her economic situation to fully control her daughter’s care thus she made sure to keep the child care arrangement she wanted for her daughter despite all of the forces acting against her. She did not give up once she was rejected for public housing or for a different homeless shelter rather she continued to fight for the conditions she wanted and needed. Many of the other mothers discussed their ability to effectively use the bus system in order to get to their jobs and thus keep their jobs despite them lacking their own transportation or the unpredictability of bus schedule changes. Some mothers would take multiple buses and thus it would cause their commute to work to be hours long instead of the mere minutes if they had had their own car. When the mothers got something right in their life, such as a job or a child care arrangement, they would fight against all odds to keep this right in their life especially since welfare reform made it harder for them to get aid in times of need and forced them to work no matter what.

Welfare reform also caused the mothers to be more inventive in piecing together their child care arrangements and open to many different possible arrangements that they might not have initially chosen. Many mothers once again relied on kin care to help care for their children this time as more of a supplement and on an emergency basis. When the mothers work schedule went over the hours that their children could be in their primary care arrangement they would lean on kin to help them out so that they could keep their required job. The mothers did not want to burden their kin or did not feel like their kin was in the best condition to take care of their children yet they knew that they had to accept the help in order for them to hopefully advance their economic future. One mother, Kari allowed for her child to say overnight and sometimes even for a month at a time with her child care provider due to the quality of the care she provided and late hours that Kari worked which made it hard to even find a provider to accommodate such a schedule. When Kari found one she was willing to do anything to keep her child in that care even when her provider went on vacation.

The mothers needed to work but they also needed child care which caused them to chose one as being the central aspect to which all other decisions were made. Some mothers chose work because they had a good job they liked, the pay was good or they could receive lots of hours which caused them to work their child care arrangements around their work. This lead to many switches in arrangements and settling for non-preferred arrangements yet it allowed the mother to have peace of mind that she would be able to provide for her family. Other mothers chose child care as the central part of their life thus they had to find work that was able to fit into their preferred child care arrangements. This lead to mothers having multiple jobs and switching jobs frequently but it allowed for them to have peace of mind that their child was receiving the kind of care that they wanted them to receive.

Throughout the course material, it really depends on how you talk to and what research you believe as to whether welfare reform was successful. In some people’s eyes and research they point to, statistics show how welfare recipients has decreased since the reform was enacted yet there is also evidence that enrollment in other social resources such as food stamps has increased which leads one to believe that more poor people may be off welfare but they are still not able to fully provide for their family. In the eye’s of former welfare recipients, they are able to see how just having a job is not enough to get oneself out of poverty because of the low wages that such jobs offer. They realize that in order for welfare reform to be truly successful it needs to address the other issues to that play into the working poor’s plight such as child care and education. The only real way for the working poor to advance in the job market is to get an education which they cannot achieve without the help of the government by means of scholarship. Chaudry’s women that he interviews prove that working a job is not enough to get oneself out of poverty as there expenses are too great due to their economic status and the resources that are there to help them are too complicated to truly aid them. Welfare reform needs to come in the form of true reform of all the aspects that play into poverty and not just more work at low wage jobs.