Blog #5

Chaudry’s main argument throughout the book is that by promoting more work as the only answer to how to get families off poverty is absurd when you look at all of the expenses and politics that are involved in their life in order to work. All of the families that he interviews and chronicles throughout the book have nothing against working hard and would prefer to work due to the feelings of self-worth and accomplishment that it gives them yet they are discouraged from working by lack of child care and the red tape of the very government programs that are supposed to help them not hinder them. The reasons that the mothers chose not to work center around the lack of quality, affordable child care which is important to them because they want their children to be safe and in a positive environment followed by the added stress and paperwork mess that getting off welfare causes them as they are striped of most of their financial aid. These are not reasons that focus on them being lazy or not willing to work hard, in fact the mothers work very hard at various different jobs and job trainings in order to provide all that they can for their families, but they are hampered by forces that not only cause negative effects on them but their children too.

The children born into these families are hindered by their poor economic situations in many different ways such as medical, educational and relational. Medically theses children are hindered because of the poor health conditions some of them live in leading to illnesses that cannot readily be cured and also due to some of their special conditions that do not receive the proper care such as asthma. Educationally these children suffer due to the lack of attention that their cognitive development receives which makes it very hard for these children to receive timely diagnose and treatment in order for them to fully develop and thus be able to have a successful school career. Relationally many of these children miss out on developing a proper and early attachment to their own mother since she is working so many hours away from them and also the constant moving from care arrangement to care arrangement does not allow them to form a proper attachment to anyone who can be stable in their lives. All of these effects of their economic situations have such negative outcomes in the lives of these children who will grow up and be a part of the public and that is why it is important for the public at large to have a sense of responsibility to them in order to break the cycle of such negative effects. Most of the public do have this sense of responsibility to the working poor as can be seen in the videos where most of the people’s answers to the working poor are not that they need to work harder but center around raising minimum wage and providing more jobs for them. They do not play a blame game onto the working poor because for the most part they understand that they are working very hard but that there are other reasons that keep them in poverty, reasons that the public is aware of but that they do not know how to fix or do not care enough to demand change so they let the government handle the problems in any way they see fit. Working harder is not going to help the working poor near as much as the public coming to their aid by advocating for them and creating an environment where they can effectively work their way out of poverty without having to sacrifice their lives or their children’s lives.