Sustained unemployment not only denies parents the opportunity to meet the food, clothing, and shelter needs of their children but... also denies them the sense of adequacy, belonging, and worth which being able to do so provides. This increases the likelihood of family problems and decreases the chances of many children to be adequately prepared for school.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we wou...ld not let "born again" patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ultra-right would have us believe that families are in trouble because of humanism, feminism, secular education, or sexual lib...eration, but the consensus of Americans is that what tears families apart is unemployment, inflation, and financial worries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor ...daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner's job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parents who are stressed or disturbed will have more difficulty in meeting their children's needs. Parents who have little support...--from friends, relatives, neighbors, or the community--are more likely to be overburdened by the demands of their babies and to be unable to respond to them adequately. Parents who experience severe poverty or economic insecurity, who cannot satisfy their own basic needs, are likely to have difficulty in responding to their children's needs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poor children live in a particularly dangerous world--an urban world of broken stair railings, of busy streets serving as playgrou...nds, of lead paint, rats and rat poisons, or a rural world where families do not enjoy the minimal levels of public health accepted as standard for nearly a century. Whether in city or country, this is a world where cavities go unfilled and ear infections threatening permanent deafness go untreated. It is world where even a small child learns to be ashamed of the way he or she lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The psychological pain--and the ethical shame--of American poverty are made greater by the fact that this country possesses the we...alth and the energy to raise all children to a minimally decent standard of living.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »