Too Poor To Parent?

A child accidentally falls off his top bunk. His mother worries. The child says his knee hurts, and it looks like a bruise is forming on his arm. His mother wants a doctor to see the child, but hesitates for a moment about taking her son to the hospital emergency room.

She is afraid that her child's treating physician will not believe her when she says that her child was hurt in an accident. She knows that a social worker will call child-welfare authorities. She knows that she will be subject to an investigation. She is fearful that those child-welfare authorities may remove her child from her care and charge her with neglect. She knows that it may take several months before her child is returned to her care, and she also knows that during that time she may only be able to see her child once or twice a week. Even then, those visits may be supervised by an agency caseworker.

Perhaps this mother is afraid because she has been the subject of a child-welfare investigation before. Maybe she knows someone in her community who has lost her children. Or maybe she was once the child that was taken away.

She may decide not to take the child to the hospital. But then the bruise on her son's arm may seem suspicious to the child's teacher. The teacher may have other concerns. The child wears the same two or three outfits to school every day; he tells the teacher that sometimes he doesn't eat enough at dinner. The teacher may suspect neglect and call child-welfare authorities.

Parenting while poor almost always leads to suspicion. At least 60 percent of child-welfare cases in the United States involve solely allegations of neglect, usually for inadequate food, clothing, shelter or inadequate supervision or guardianship. Not surprisingly, poor families are up to 22 times more likely to be involved in the child-welfare system than wealthier families.

The consequences of contact with the child-welfare system can be devastating for certain classes of people. In particular, African-American parents are more likely to lose their children to foster care than other any other ethnic group. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Blacks make up 34 percent of the foster-care population, but only 15 percent of U.S. children. Studies have also shown that Blacks, unlike other minority groups, are overrepresented within the foster care system in every state of the nation. Part of this disparity may be explained by poverty itself: Blacks are four times more likely than other groups to live in poverty.

But, poverty cannot explain everything. In 2004, Black children were more than twice as likely to enter foster care as White children. This disparity remains evident even when African-American families and White families share relevant characteristics: White children are less likely to be removed from their homes after a child-welfare case is opened than Black children. It is not clear why Black families are more likely to experience the trauma of child removal; certainly, however, racial bias plays a role.

The law surrounding child neglect is full of vague standards that invite the use of broad judicial discretion. Our legal system asks family court judges to make far-reaching decisions concerning the safety and welfare of children based on information presented in fifteen- to twenty-minute court appearances. Incompetent evidence is routinely admitted in child protective proceedings, and judges must often rely on the testimony of caseworkers who may be poorly trained or culturally uninformed, or who have had only limited contact with the families in question. It is not surprising, then, that judges' own biases may, intentionally or not, creep into their decision-making.

Studies also show that Black families, both parents and children, involved in the child-welfare system receive fewer services than White families. For example, the Alliance for Racial Equity in Child Welfare reported in 2007 that some Black children in foster care were less likely to receive mental health services than children of other races. The Alliance also found that Black caregivers were less likely to receive mental health services than those of other races. In addition, state child-welfare workers have identified difficulties with accessing substance-abuse programs and obtaining housing assistance as factors contributing to the overrepresentation of Black children in foster care. Lack of available family rehabilitation services that cater to African-Americans may help to explain why Black children remain in foster care an average of nine months longer than White children.

The effect of such large numbers of African-American children in foster care - 162,722 children according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data from 2006 - is not limited to individual families. The current child-welfare system, when considered against the backdrop of our anti-poverty policies and need for social service resources, threatens to destabilize Black communities more generally. What happens to communities in which parents are not allowed to raise their own children? What happens to those children adopted out of their communities? And what about the children who will age-out of foster care? Or the pregnant or parenting teenagers who are still in foster care themselves? This latter population remains extremely vulnerable. Even as these mothers are under the care of the state, they often acquire child-neglect cases of their own.

The language that we use to talk about child welfare focuses heavily upon personal responsibility and choice. This language, however, masks the larger problems within the child-welfare system, a system that, unfortunately, is largely classist and racist.

Comments

[jeannie35]

I agree with Tacroy80. I would go even further, though. As a society that claims to be caring, I believe that we have a responsibility to encourage conditions that make family planning and expansion open to everyone. Being poor is treated as a crime and I believe that RobinSeattle clearly views being poor as such. I ask that why in a society that prides itself on "having it all" do we have so many families, especially single mothers, who struggle just to put food on the table. Why is childcare not provided? Why does a single parent household have seemingly insurmountable struggles to merely exist. Why do two-parent families also have struggles? Some believe this falls under personal responsibility, which is hard to argue with, but where are all these jobs that allow for parents to earn enough to be concerned about their children's needs beyond sustenance. Society is failing families.

[Tacroy80]

(previous post cont'd.)

I, however, grew up being abused in an extremely wealthy household. There were plenty of signs for neighbors and teachers if they had wanted to pay attention, but nobody did a thing because my parents were so "respectable," and because my environment seemed to be so "privileged."

[RobinSeattle]

Don't get caught up in the false dichotomy here. It isn't that being wealthy automaticaly makes you a better parent than a poor person. However, being middle class or well of does give you more access to the tools of success, especially a college education, and you are less apt to have to deal with gangs and gun violence in your neighborhood. Plus you are more likely to have role models around you for stability and success.

We are talking probabilities here. Poor parents can be molesters, abusers and criminals just like rich people can. However, crime in more middle class or wealthy neighborhoods is far less than what you find in inner city urban America. It is just a fact and reasonable people have to be rational and contemplate what is fitting for their circumstances. A poor person having a child is not a rational choice. Sorry, that is just a fact.

By the way, my mom was 16 when she gave birth to me and my dad was 18. They each came from middle class homes. It was a struggle financially for them, but they made goals for how to get out of the predicament thry were in (wht some help from their parents, btw) and accomplished them. But when you have more single parent households nowadays, that is harder to pull off. I consider myself and my siblings lucky.

[Tacroy80]

Precisely - we're talking about probabilities. You cannot make life decisions based solely upon probabilities. They can factor into one's decisions, yes, but ultimately everybody has to make the decision that's right for them. If everybody made decisions based on mere probabilities, we would have no writers, actors, filmmakers, painters, or artists of any kind because all of them would have made the decision based on the probability of success that it would be better to become an accountant. Not to mention that when we try to control our lives according to probability, we're really pretty likely to end up getting bitten in the ass. For example, I used to be absolutely scrupulous about my health. Worked out several times a week, and was incredibly careful to eat only natural, organic, blah blah blah foods. I ended up with a tumor in my jaw at the age of 26. One of the things the experience taught me was that there's no way to control everything in my life, everything in my environment. Based on probabilities, I should have been keeping myself in perfect health. Since then, while I still try to be reasonably aware of what goes into my body, I've stopped obsessing about it. I've decided that it's more important to live a lifestyle that makes sense for who I am than to try to control every aspect of the vagaries of fate.

[Tacroy80]

(cont'd)

If my tumor ends up coming back, at least I'll have lived in a fulfilling way, and not tried to rigidly control my life based on statistics.

There are endless variables that contribute to successfully raising a child, some of which are controllable to varying degrees, and some of which are not. Socioeconomic status is simply one of them. (Actually, I was reading an article yesterday that said that statistically, children from more well-off backgrounds are just as likely to have mental and emotional problems as children from poorer backgrounds. Every environment has its own specific pathologies.) To say that a loving, caring parent who happens to be low-SES is worthy of persecution by state agencies because they dared to make choices that were right and fulfilling to them on a personal level is simply inhumane. Placing sanctions on who has the right to breed is a dangerous slippery slope. Yes, I do think that parents should do their best to create the most positive environments for their children they can, and sometimes that means waiting until their lifestyles are most compatible with the task of childrearing. But no matter what your situation in life is, you can't be assured of keeping a child safe, physically, emotionally, or even genetically. We can't create perfect environments. All any of us can do is try and make our own messy go of it, doing the best with whatever we've got.

[Tacroy80]

Poverty has nothing, NOTHING at all to do with someone's ability to parent! It's about a million (to the millionth power) better to grow up in a home that's struggling to make ends meet but is filled with love, and instills children with the character and psychological tools needed to thrive in adulthood, than one which is wealthy but abusive.

I speak from experience.

And yet, the poor are much too often penalized for their own poverty. Recently, some good friends of mine, who are pretty low-income and live in section 8 housing, had their children taken away from them. For nothing. It was completely trumped-up bullshit - and not only that, DSS bungled the case over and over again, massively drawing out the time these children were away from their parents (who, by the way, are without a doubt the absolute best parents I've ever met). Meanwhile, the foster parents with whom the children were staying neglected them - their mother had to repeatedly entreaty their caseworker over the course of several weeks to have her son taken to a doctor. When they finally had their day in court, both their parenting class teacher and the independent evaluator told the judge that they were enraged about what had happened to these people, because it was so obvious to them that they are stellar, salt-of-the-earth, albeit unlucky, human beings.

[RobinSeattle]

Having a child while poor is one of the most selfish, shortsighted things any woman can do. Why bring another human being into your day to day death struggle to survive? Why bring a child into an environment in which he/she will more often that not be set up for failure and exposed to a socially toxic milieu that will include gangs, drugs and a lack of access to timely healthcare?

Really, mothers do this because it makes them feel good on some level to the total disregard to the consequences: throwing another obstacle n front of you to get out of poverty and adding to the stress of being poor.

So please, if you're poor, don't have kids. You are only enlarging the circle of poverty and perpetuating the cycle of it. Stop being so selfish and shortsighted.

[tinah1963]

It's not a crime to be poor, even though that is a popular idea, and in fact, many parents who are poor love their children and make many sacrifices for them. You seem to have bought into the idea that being poor makes you inaedquate--it does not, nor does it mean that you're necessarily set up for failure. Many people are one paycheck away from the poorhouse. In your world, only the affluent would have children. What about the people who work 2 or 3 jobs to support their families? In my book, they're heroes, and shouldn't be scorned. These decisions are not really as cut and dried as you apparently think they are, nor do you have any special insight into the motivation or lives of other people.

[Donkslayer]

Tinah, no one said it was a crime to be poor, including the poster you responded to. Yes, being poor to the point that you cannot adequately afford to support a child does mean that you're set up for failure, whether you do fail or not. Those people that have to work 2-3 jobs to support their families? They wouldn't have to if they didn't have a family.

Robin is right and her advice is good solid common-sense.

[Jude2004]

Doesn't she hesitate to take him because she can't afford the emergency room fee? My kids have health insurance for the first time in two years effective July 1st, so I immediately made them dental, eye doctor, and doctor appointments, but since I'm still fairly poor, I'm worried about the copays, not to mention the cost of the insurance.