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Barriers to social mobility. Why did my family make it?

Sources

  • What poor child is this? Poverty and American's children. T.N.Mohan (2011). Retrieved August 12, 2014, from http://digital.films.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/PortalPlaylists.aspx?aid=18623&xtid=48031
  • Bourgois, P. (1995). In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Prior HHS Poverty Guidelines and Federal Register References. (n.d.). Retrieved August 13, 2014.
  • Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). (n.d.). Retrieved August 13, 2014.
  • Rose, S. (2002). No more guarantees for economic mobility and career paths in the United States, 1947-95. <i>Looking Ahead,</i> <i>24</i>(2), 8-14.

So why did my family make it when others did not? Well for starters we were poor, but slightly less so than many others. My mother had a free baby sitter, the schools were good, at least considering what they had to work with, and my mother’s own tenacity should not be overlooked either.

Successful Defined

Bootstrapping

A person who was successful was someone who had worked hard and made the “correct” life choices and could now relax, but not too much, and enjoy the fruits of their labor. A successful person was to be admired, and emulated, whereas an unsuccessful person was to be scorned. It wasn’t until I went to college that I encountered people with a very different idea.

My mother is very modest about what she has accomplished. “There is nothing extraordinary about what we did” is a common refrain in conversations I have with her today. The “we” refers to my immediate family, which I consider to be my mother, my maternal grandmother, and my father, though he passed away when I was very young. What “we did” was raise our standard of living from just at what the current poverty line is today, to into what I would consider the upper middle class

My initial response was dismissive. After all wasn’t I living proof that being born poor was no excuse to live poor? Never the less his passion, and my desire to prove him wrong caused me to observe the poor around me with a more empathetic eye.

The Challenge

For a long time it wasn’t really something that I ever gave much thought to. Growing up I did know that there were things which we didn’t have the other families did, but never living anyother way I never thought of our family as poor. Our gradual, but significant rise in wealth was nothing particularly miraculous to me either. We were very much a family steeped in the American dream that anyone could rise from the lowest depths of poverty, to the highest bastions of wealth if they were willing to work hard and spend wisely. The term she, and many other adults in our neighborhood used was “successful”

Corey, one of the friends I made my freshman year, was studying sociology. He was very much a supporter of what I now know to be structuralism. I will not quote him directly as there wasn’t a single statement he made on the issue of class in America that wasn’t profanity laden to an almost absurd degree. Suffice it to say that he was very much of the belief that wealth and prosperity in America were determined by where you were born, and your ethnic background.

It is this question that will be the primary focus of my project.

Early Childhood Development

It seems plausible that the amount of wealth that a person is born into has a great influence on how difficult it will be for that person to attain at least a basic standard of living. However, it wasn’t until doing research for this project that it became clear to me just how important the earliest years of our lives are in giving us the skills we need to earn a living.

The Question

Since that time it has become apparent to me that it isn’t simply a matter of hard work, for I’ve seen plenty of poor people who were working incredibly labor intensive jobs, often for much longer than the standard 40 hour work week. For many of these people it didn’t seem to be about life choices either, in fact, I couldn’t deduce any obvious reason from my casual observations of them as to why they weren’t at least meeting their basic needs. So if there are people out there who are not making enough to meet their basic needs, let alone rise into a higher socioeconomic class, but who were actually working harder in some cases than those in the middle and upper classes, what are the factors that are holding them back?

Additionally after examining the factors that inhibit upward mobility I will compare those factors to the circumstances of my own family during the years in which we were able to move up into the middle class. The goal being to attempt to explain why my family was able to do what so many others have not. I will focus my research entirely on the US as it is my country of origin and thus the place where I feel my own ethnocentric bias will be kept to a minimum.

Diet

Healthcare

Thinking and learning, just like any other biological process requires energy, and if you aren’t getting enough energy from the food you eat it becomes difficult to attain the focus required to learn new skills. Even in cases where there is enough food to eat the diet in poverty tends to be higher in fat and carbohydrates and lower protein, fruits and vegetables which are critical for early brain development. (Mohan 2011)

The health problems stemming from poor diet are exacerbated by a lack of access to quality health care among poor children. In the United States, health insurance is provided primarily by our employers. This means that those families that can’t obtain stable employment, often don’t have access to quality health care because without insurance they can’t afford it. (Mohan 2011)

Mothers who don’t have access to health care often do not receive prenatal care. Thus their children are more likely to be born with birth defects or other serious health problems, and that same lack of access to health care means those problems are not properly treated if at all.

(Mohan 2011)

“Inadequate diets have been linked to infectious diseases, and have been known to affect physical growth, cognitive development, and social behavior.” (Mohan 2011) Simply put all food is not created equal, and just because you can buy enough food to fill you up doesn’t mean that they food contains the nutrients children need, particularly for their developing brains. Inadequate nutrition also reduces your bodies ability to fight off infections. Thus it should be no surprise that poorer children have higher rates of infectious diseases. (Mohan 2011)

However, the troubles with education start long before children set foot inside a classroom. Children from poor families are already developmentally behind by age four in comparison to children from middle class families. (Mohan 2011) Sadly, while there are public policies in the United States that support K through 12 education, post secondary education (community colleges and universities), but there are no federal guidelines for education from birth to five years, when most children enter kindergarten. What this means is that during some of the most critical years for early cognitive development, a child’s education is based solely on their families ability to purchace educational materials and preschool services. There are certain federal programs such as Head Start, but those are limited and not all poor children have access to them. (Mohan 2011)

After birth, this lack of health care continues to put the child at a disadvantage. For poor families preventative health care is a luxury, and even acute health issues, such as ear infections, sometimes go untreated. Overall children in poor families are less likely to receive preventative care such as immunizations, and more likely to suffer from treatable conditions such as asthma. (Mohan 2011)

Cultural Capital

Education

When discussing persistent poverty on important factor to consider is cultural capital. Cultural capital is a term used to described the knowledge and skills that a person can use to raise their status, and often by extension wealth, in a particular group. Because the poorest individuals have become physically separated from the middle class, they often lack the cultural capital to properly interact with them. This is particularly problematic because it is the middle class who often offer the kinds of jobs that can lift people out of poverty.

In the United States, funding for schools comes primarily from tax revenue from the local community. (Mohan 2011) This means that poor neighborhoods tend to have poor schools. This not only affects the kind quality and amount of resources a school can purchase, such as up to date textbooks, but also in the quality of teachers they can hire. Less revenue means lower salaries for teachers. That is not to say that these teachers are any less motivated than those who earn a higher salary, but teaching is a job like any other, and higher income attracts better more experienced workers.

Disproportionate Mobility

One problem which has become increasingly important over the past forty years is the growing difficulty in advancement opportunities for those with less education, or interruptions in their employment. According to a 2002 issue of the journal Looking Ahead workers no longer see a steady increase in wages with on the job experience, as they did between 1947 and 1973. In fact 40% of male workers no or negative real earnings which is income that is available for spending after tax and other contributions have been deducted and adjusted for inflation. (Rose 8)

Some of the best examples of how a lack of middle class cultural capital can be detrimental to poorer individuals can be found in Philippe Bourgois’s In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio Bourgious spent several years living among and interviewing crack dealers in East Harlem.

The value of cultural capital is apparent when Ray, a top level dealer, called Bourgious asking him how he could get a picture I.D. “Despite all his cars, and the wads of cash padding his pockets. Ray did not even have a driver’ license or any other form of legal identification.” (Bourgois 50) Ray needed the ID as part of his attempt to start a legal business, in this case a laundromat. Despite making several attempts, and Ray’s skill in running a large illegal drug dealing operation, he had so little experience operating in the legal business world that ultimately all of attempts failed. “His most successful foray into the legal economy was his purchase of the lease of a former garment factory a few blocks uptown...He converted it into a “legitimate” social club renting the space out for parties and selling beer without a liquor license...New York City closed the social club down in 1992, following the implementation of the Peoples with Disabilities Act, as it was not wheelchair accessible.” (Bourgious 50)

This last attempt further underscores Ray’s lack of cultural capital. Though it is not so much the fact that he didn’t understand that he need a license to sell liquor, or would have been incapable of making the the building ADA compliant, it’s the fact that these thoughts never occurred to him. Speaking as someone who’s pick up some middle class cultural capital later in life I know that there are a lot of permits required to open up any business that interacts with the public. I don’t know what all of those permits are or how to obtain them, but I do know that if I wanted to start a business my first port of call would be my local clerk of the court. That knowledge may seem like common knowledge, but that is only because it is common among other middle class people that you, or someone you know, has attempted to start their own business. Ray’s lack of experience, be it first or second hand, puts him at a disadvantage.

Well my father passed away in 1987, leaving my mother as the sole breadwinner of the family, which at that time consisted of my mother, my grandmother and myself. At that time my mother had a gross income of $13,000, which put us at 139%-140% above the poverty line depending on how you round according to the US Department of Health and Human Services(HHS). By 2014 rules we would have been just above the maximum income allowing us to receive what is now called the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program SNAP. I do know that we received emergency food assistance on at least one occasion in the amount of 90 dollars. I remember because my mother, not knowing how to spend that much money on food and not wanting to be given less should she need to apply again, brought us steaks at the grocery store. These weren’t prime cuts mind you, they were the tough cuts of meat that A1 was made for, but from our perspective they were quite decadent. I can also remember my mother using food stamps to pay for groceries quite frequently.

With regards to health care however, we were still at a disadvantage. Neither my mother, or myself had any kind of health care until I was nine. I suffered from severe mold and dust allergies from birth. Even in 1987, they would have been highly treatable had I had access to even mediocre health care. As it was, aside from vaccinations, the only time I went to the doctor was when my mom could get a day off to take me to the free clinic. I developed chronic bronchitis and ear infections as a result. One infection required an emergency room visit, which is one of my earliest memories of the sensation of pain. Though I have presently virtually eliminated my allergies and the associated infections with immunotherapy my lungs have been permanently scarred and their capacity is 22% below average for a man of my age.

This lack of wage growth was particularly prevalent among men earning less than 25,000 per year in 1999 dollars, with only 37% seeing positive real income growth between 1981 and 1995. (Rose 8) For those that did have positive income growth, that growth was 31% lower for those in the types of low-skilled jobs that poorer people often have. (Rose 13) In short, the amount of wage growth for those in the lowest paying jobs is far less, or nonexistent than those who started in higher paying jobs to begin with. Those that start out poor are much more likely to remain poor.

Where do I fit in?

So now that I have done this research I will compare it to the circumstance of my own family?

In this respect we were in the same situation the poor families in the US today. However, we differed in the fact that we never had to go completely hungry. There were certainly some times where we didn’t have a full meal to eat, or the meal we did have was reliant on cheap fillers such as rice, but we never missed a meal. I suspect that this was due in part to the fact the my grandmother was old enough to collect social security. Unfortunately I cannot say exactly how much it was as she passed away in 2004 and my mother does not remember. My suspision is that it wasn’t much as we were still on food assistance, at that level of income, a few extra dollars can really make the difference month to month.

I did however, have some advantages that others did not. Since my grandmother was retired and live with us, my mother could rely on her for child care, and since she was my grandmother she was personally invested in my development. My grandmother placed a high value on education, and began reading to me at a very early age. Additionally the schools I attended, while underfunded and possessing outdated textbooks, had surprisingly good teachers. I remember when the world reacted in shock when Pluto was “downgraded” from a planet to a planetoid. For me it was old news since in elementary school my science teacher taught us that while we considered pluto a planet there was a growing amount of skepticism as to whether that was the case, citing the difference in its composition, and the fact that it’s orbit was angled different than all of the other planets.

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