I remember 'those' women from my years with the Dept.of Welfare in WV, Sins. But I also think it is important to note that such women (or men) do not make up the bulk of people living in poverty. You do a good job illustrating how poverty can breed poverty through the lack of opportunity and support to learn the life skills needed to get and keep a job.

I also wonder, realisticly, how many of those women would ever have real opportunity to improve the quality of the lives of themselves and their children, even if they stuck with it long enough to acquire the life skills. They would mostly likely experience improved self-esteem by successfully keeping a job, but they are still likely to be poor and struggling without medical benefits, no on-going quality day care, still having transportation problems, still struggling to pay the rent and the utilities once the short-term supportive benefits that continue for a brief period of time after a person goes from welfare to work ran out. Most of them would still be largely without realistic hope of a noticably better life.

I think you are describing the effects of lack of hope that Barry has talked about. It is dangerous to have dreams when the your own life experience, and that of your parents demonstrate that dreams only make it harder to tolerate the present. So many of the poor people I work with simply can not invision a future different from the present and the past. Depending on the circumstances of one's life, one may wait as in delayed gratification, or one may wait for the other shoe to drop. I would agree that one of the flaws of the programs of the 60's and 70's was the potential to foster 'welfare dependency.' However, I think the behaviors and attitudes you observed were at least as much caused by the conditions of multigenerational poverty as by programs that bred dependency.

Social programs for children and youth are more abundant and better funded than for adults out of recognition of the need for early intervention. However, we consistently miss the mark when we don't support the parents, when we design programs that give up on the parents too soon. It is, after all, the parents who will ultimately have the most influence one the children. Social programs for adults are more coercive and adversarial than not. They tend to contain many more elements of negative consequences for lack of compliance than rewards for success. Fear does not lead to growth or to progress.

There is no possible homeostasis at the point of intersection of the individual and the social group. There is mutuality and interdependence, but no fixed fulcrum point where personal rights, responsibilities, freedom of choice, and the experience of the positive and negative consequences of those choices balance perfectly with those of other individuals and of the social group. It is forever dynamic, forever dialectical and forever paradoxical.

Janie