Student reacts to the Poor Kids documentary from FRONTLINE

One of our assignments in the first few weeks of class was to watch an online documentary. The video was a Frontline documentary called, “Poor Kids”. The documentary has changed my outlook forever on how children are especially affected by poverty. This video was the second part of a documentary that follows children in poverty from a young age to young adulthood. The documentary was broken in two halves. The first half gives a recap from the 2012 documentary of when of Brittany, Kaylie, and Johnny were small children facing the struggles of poverty in America. The second half updates the audience on where the families of these three poor kids are in 2017. The ability to watch Brittany, Kaylie, and Johnny grow into young adults and to hear their stories of struggle, was fascinating to me. All of these families were the victims of unfortunate circumstance that lead them down the path of poverty.

Brittany is a young girl from Illinois whose family struggled to make ends meet. Her parents had another baby on the way in the first film and were worried about how they were going to support another child. Brittany was aware of the fact her family was poor and that her father had just lost his job. Necessities such as a hot water in the winter was not available to Brittany’s family. The hot water heater was shut off due to failure to pay the bill on time. Examples like this are so common for families living in poverty, they often go without one necessity to keep something else running. Brittany seemed to be aware at a very young age of the financial struggles her family faced. She knew that they had to move from their old house because her father lost his job. She knew that most of her belongings in storage were thrown away due to failure to pay the bill. She knew that the cable and internet would be next to shut off. A conversation between Brittany and the camera man stood out to me. She tells him, “you have money now but, in a few months, you could be poor, you never know”. It amazed me how this little girl’s comment put so much in perspective for me. What we have today is not promised tomorrow. Most of what Brittany says in the video is negative and its probably because she is constantly surrounded by a cloud of negativity looming over her every day. It is not shocking that as Brittany becomes a young adult, she battles depression and anxiety. When the film picks back up, Brittany is now fifteen-years-old. She says that middle school was a rough time for her because she got picked on for being poor. She was expelled and held back, she states that was the lowest point. Her highest point was completing middle school, something she was very proud of herself for. Graduating from middle-school is an accomplishment that many take for granted. Instead of seeing it as an accomplishment, other students see it as just the next phase in life. Brittany’s stress has remained a constant battle in her life because of poverty.

Kaylie Hegwood lives in Stockton, Iowa and in 2012 she was ten-years-old living with her mother and brother. She starts her segment of the video by complaining how hungry she is and how this hunger affects her throughout the day. Kaylie lives in poor town that has been run down with little job opportunities and little resources. Kaylie and her friends go “canning” to make money. Five cents for non-squished cans and two cents for squished cans. Her family moved to a motel room where their sink was filled with ice and used as a refrigerator. The one bed room was home to Kaylie, her brother Jordan, and their mother, Barbara. Fast-forward to 2017 and Kaylie’s family is still struggling. She is almost sixteen-years-old and has moved around a lot in the past several years. Her family has lived at their current house for two years with the help of their Grandmother who also provided Barbara with a car and a phone for Kaylie. Her Grandmother has battled cancer along with her mother who is currently battling ovarian cancer. Kaylie admits that she is not sad about things that happen to her and her family any longer, she has gotten so used to it. This realization is hard to swallow for a girl that thinks she only has a 50/50 shot of making something of herself in the future.

The documentary shows a boy named Johnny and his family. In 2012 Johnny was thirteen-years-old with high hopes of becoming a football star. His family went from living in a 3-bedroom house to living in the Salvation Army Shelter after his father, who repaired houses, couldn’t find work while in the recession. Johnny is a bright young boy and blew me away with his mature thoughts. He says that he is a realist and knows that if he doesn’t make good grades, he won’t go to college and have a career to provide for himself and future family. He also wants to play professional football and knows that playing his favorite sport will be over in four years if he doesn’t try hard to achieve his goals. Johnny has both optimistic and realistic plans for his life and its admirable. His mother and father try to work hard but can barely provide for Johnny and his siblings.  As the years go on however, Johnny does find himself hanging out with the wrong crowd and eventually ending up in jail. He chooses to move in with his Grandmother in Chicago and is now trying to get back into playing football in college. The second half of the documentary focuses on his sister, Jasmine and his mother and father who are currently living in a hotel until her mom and dad can find somewhere to live. Jasmine is wise and grateful for the family she has. I couldn’t help but shed a few tears at her statement, “I wouldn’t choose this life but it’s kind of showing me what can happen. I will take this experience and use it to make myself a better person by learning from it and knowing what not to do. My hope for the future would be to have a house with my own room and my own space but you can’t really have everything you want.” This tore my heart that the simple pleasure of having your own room was something I took for granted growing up.

I grew up in a single mother household. We struggled and sometimes did not have enough to eat, or my siblings and I had to wear clothing that was too small for us. My mother held a steady job and she kept the same roof over our heads for 18 years. My experiences are nothing compared to these three children and the overwhelming number of poverty-stricken families in America. I struggle to fathom the number of kids that I went to school with that were living a life of poverty. From elementary school through high school I don’t think I ever took the time and noticed my fellow students who may be struggling at home. Kids I rode the bus with, kids I was partnered with in a group, kids that I sat by in the auditorium or lunch table, could have been homeless. I believe that this documentary and more like it should be shown in middle schools around the United States. This will allow other students to relate more to other students and to show compassion and understanding to those who have different home lives.

Student supports Foster Care Children's rights

February 8^th, 2018. [for the sake of the assignment, pretend it is March 10th, 2017]

Avery Borne 

227-N Stratton Office Building Springfield, Il. 62706

Dear Avery Borne:

Hello, I am a junior at University of Illinois Springfield and I am currently studying policies in the Social Work program. I am writing you to inform you about the 2017 IL H 3542 bill. This is a bill concerning the Foster Care Bill of Rights, on the topic of Foster Care. I know that this is not one of your issues that you work with, but I would like to tell you about it, in hopes you will support this. This bill was passed out of the Human Services Committee on March 8th (of 2017), and as it is coming to the floor of the House of Representatives soon for a vote. I hope you pass this bill.  

Children that are placed in foster care deserve proper care from a loving and resourceful home. I believe our country has a responsibility to children to improve the placement and the condition of these children’s lives.  Children who have experienced many transitions between families may be facing worse developmental outcomes than children raised in stable two-parent families. Moving from house to house or family to family is damaging to all children. 

I know that what I am going to tell you is not an anecdote about foster care, but my story illustrates a situation that acts upon the children involved in the same way. My nieces, age five and nine, have been moving back and forth between parents as part of the marital agreement set by the state. My nieces go from dad’s house one week to mom’s house the next week. They have been doing this for about two years now. I know that both houses have different rules. When going from one to the other the transition is very hard. The first couple days when they first go back they have to be constantly reminding themselves how they are required to act. Going back and forth or moving from house to house is hard on children, as it sets back their development. Focusing more on whose house they are at as to how they must act rather than how to be themselves. 

Again this is an issue regarding this amendment to be added to the Foster Children's Bill of Rights Act Section 5:

“to be placed in the least restrictive and most family-like setting available and in close proximity to his or her parent’s home consistent with his or her health, safety, best interests, and special needs.”

By reading this letter I have hopes that you will read more about this and when it comes to the House, you will vote yes on the issue and pass the 2017 IL H 3542 Bill, as well. 

Thank you for taking your time to read this letter. If you could reply back with your position on the issue and how you may address the issue it would be much appreciated.

Sincerely, 

[SWK-355 Student]

Student suggests that we need subsidized around-the-clock child care services

This student reaction paper points out that we have a need for child care facilities that are open 24-hours, and such child care services ought to be made affordable for the low-income workers who have greatest need of them.

Reflection Paper

            In this reflection paper I will consider the provision of child care programs. I aspire to get involved with implementing a policy for more flexible child care programs.

            Child care is very vital in a family’s life. Both parents may work and if it is a single parent home, I am sure the sole parent will need to work. Some of the jobs offered to them may not be a regular 9-5 jobs, so they would need a different type of child care, the standard morning to late afternoon child care providers won’t be of much help if the parent is working from mid-afternoon until midnight. You have second shift and the graveyard shift. This means, the parent would need someone available to care for the baby until they get home.

            Normally childcare usually opens at about 6 or 7 a.m. and then closes at about 6 p.m. and parents are not getting any leeway. Parents pay extra if they pick their child up late, and some parents cannot afford any extra child care costs. So, they probably have to find alternatives to standard child care, like having a relative or close friend watching the children. But, then again, this is your child and not everyone trusts everyone around their children, especially without the proper training.

            This brings me to my next point. Not everyone can afford childcare. Childcare costs have been skyrocketing lately. My sister has two kids in child care and she pays about $150 per week. Multiply that by about 40 weeks (not 52 because of breaks, sudden sicknesses, etc.) makes the cost about $6,000 per year. My sister only works at the daycare and this is her rate. So basically my sister is spending about one-third of her income on daycare fees. That’s an obscene amount of money for child care. There may be a home daycare that costs way less than an actual daycare center, but how trained is the worker and what’s the ratio of staff to children? These things matter, because again, you want to be able to trust who you’re leaving your child with.

            There needs to be trained workers in CPR and all the other skills needed to care for children. I almost say a teacher should be at these child care centers because they are trained in these manners, well maybe not CPR but still. So, anyways, you’d need trained workers who are willing to work 3 different shifts to make up for all three shifts in the workforce. I say centers should be open for 24 hours in a day. This would compensate for everyone’s work hours and increase the chances of low-wage workers getting the same child care service as everyone else.

            I wanted to focus on this issue because of research done by Marcia Stoll, David Alexander, and Christine Nicpon titled “Chicago Mothers on Finding and Using Child Care during Nonstandard Work Hours.” This paper mentioned that 61% of all single women with household incomes below $24,000 and 56% among all single mothers worked nonstandard schedules. So lowering the costs of child care while also extending the hours centers are open to 24 hours in a day will cure the issue of child care. Let’s call it child care reform!

            That paper by Stoll, Alexander, and Nicpon also discusses informal child care options like the ones I previously mentioned: a relative or close friend watching you child while you go to work. This option sometimes still has a cost because no one watches a child for free. So the parent or guardian could use child care. According to the paper, the CCAP, or Illinois Child Care Assistance Program, helps subsidize child care, but the parent would still have a co-pay. It also states that the copayment could be as high as 10% of the family’s income. In a single family home, this a lot! The parent may have other kids and definitely other bills and expenses to pay and then have to spend 10% of their income on one child to be in child care. This doesn’t even include costs getting to and from daycare either.

            I just want all parents to be ensured that their child is in safe hands when they drop them off at child care and also to not be stressed about costs. Maybe even the CCAP can be reinvented. I would like to further research what exactly makes a person identify as being eligible for CCAP and what happens if they are a few hundred dollars above low-income. They still may need child care funding but won’t get it. I would also like to find out what qualifications do child care workers need. I want to one day open a child care center in inner city Chicago, so I need to know these things. I am extremely excited about one day reforming child care.

If we insist that mothers of young children ought to be working in the capitalist system selling their labor and time for wages and then purchasing "reproduction of labor costs" from some other person (child care workers), then the logical conclusion is that we need one of a few options:
1) Payment for labor set at such high levels that mothers of young children will be able to hire child care workers to come to their homes and provide services.

2) Subsidies for parents so they will be paid to stay with their children and take care of them, and jobs provided for parents so they will be able to work while their children are in school when the children are school-aged.

3) Subsidies for parents so they will be able to put their children into child care facilities such as you have recommended, open at all hours, staffed with qualified child care providers, and affordable to parents with low incomes, 

4) A government service providing in-home child care by qualified workers for parents of young children.  Parents may go off to work a job for $10 per hour, and the government will pay to have a qualified child care worker go into the parent's home to watch their children for $10 per hour.  

5) No policy to help parents find qualified child care, forcing parents of young children to rely on informal care-giving arrangements or exchanges with friends and neighbors and family members. If parents cannot find adequate child care, they must decline to work, or they must work while their children have inadequate child care. 

It seems to me that some combination of the five options would be ideal. Cities offer more options because of population densities, but rural areas also have young parents facing this problem.  I do not see how one policy can fit all circumstances.  The reproduction of labor (the work of rearing children into responsible adults who will work and contribute to society) is valuable, and since it is not usually a thing that capitalism puts a value on and pays for, we haven't really worked out what to do about it.  

Student would be more lenient with TANF

In this reaction paper, the student describes the basics about Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and points out that sanctions against families where parents have failed to make progress toward independence and self-reliance may harm blameless children.

Temporary Assistance for needy families (TANF) is a program that provides temporary assistance for families with one or more children, and pregnant women. It provides families with financial assistance to help pay for everyday living such as, food, housing, and any other expenses other than medical expenses. For poor families with children, TANF would be one of three or four basic welfare provisions to help the family: Medicaid would help cover medical costs and medical insurance, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program funding, as well as free school lunches, would help with food expenses, and the family could get cash through TANF and the Earned Income Tax Credit (if they were earning some money). There are only certain people who qualify for TANF: In Illinois, in order to qualify you must live in Illinois, you can still qualify even if you are homeless. You must be a US citizen or meet certain immigration requirements, so undocumented residents from other countries don’t qualify.  TANF is for families with children, so you must be pregnant or have children under 19 years of age that still live at home. Some women who are pregnant and have no prior children can still sometimes receive TANF, along with their husbands that live with them. In order for families to keep TANF they must create goals to become self-relient and follow steps working toward those goals. In the TANF programs there are additional transitional services offered to help the families stay on task to reach their goals. A few examples of this would be: 1) GED preparation if the TANF recipient is not a high school graduate, 2) vocational training, and 3) help with childcare. There are more transition services that are offered to help. A person that qualifies for TANF for their family may qualify for medical services through Medicaid, and SNAP benefits, and if they are pregnant or have young children, WIC might also offer help with food and nutritional counseling.  

               I personally believe that TANF is a wonderful way to help out families in need . There are a few things that TANF needs to work on though. There are certain requirements that parents have to meet in order to keep TANF and its benefits, but if these certain requirements are not met—and they must be continuously met—the family is in some way “punished.” I do believe that the parents should keep up on all their goals and requirements all the time to keep TANF, but it’s not fair to the kids if their parents get “punished” and they lose out on meals, and since TANF may help with rent, cutting TANF because of a parent’s failure could mean that children would become homeless. TANF is a great way to get families off of welfare and to get them back on the right track, but there are some unrealistic requirements for families. The parents should be allowed to keep their benefits for the sake of their children so long as they are making a good and honest effort, and have met most of their goals, if not all of them.

You point out an essential issue in all programs of welfare for children.  Children are generally not held accountable for their own behavior, let alone the behavior of their parents.  Children have a right to housing, medical care, and food, and society would like to ensure that all children have these things.  And yet, welfare benefits for children must go through their parents. And, parents can be held responsible for their behaviors. So, what are we to do as a society when a family with children is in a desperate financial situation because of parental behaviors that do not conform to society's expectations?  If we punish or sanction the parents for their failures or transgressions, we are punishing also their innocent children.  If we give the children enough welfare to keep them secure in their housing, well-fed, and maintain their access to medical care, then by extension we must be providing at least housing and adequate food for their parents as well.

In the past we gave an assurance that we as a society would give poor families with children something, and we had a program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) that provided cash benefits to poor families.  In most states those cash benefits were very meager, and insufficient to provide decent housing and a good diet, let along recreational opportunities enjoyed by other children.  Some people claimed that AFDC was creating an incentive for poor young women to have children so they could get the AFDC benefits.  There was some evidence that there was a very, very slight increase in births to young unwed mothers in states where AFDC benefits were the most generous compared to those in states where AFDC benefits were stingy, and of course there was anecdotal evidence of persons who had children without fear of economic consequences because they expected their lives to improve with the ADFC cash benefits and perhaps housing benefits and food assistance they would get by having children. The vast majority of women were not interested in having children and then struggling along with welfare benefits, but for a very few of the very poorest young women, the welfare system was helpful, and this made some people angry.  

So, there was talk of changing AFDC. Some very radical "family values" politicians suggested that we could take poor children away from their poor parents if those parents were reliant on welfare, and in this way we could give benefits to the children (and their foster parents or adoptive parents) while cutting off benefits to their unworthy poor parents.  There was even talk of using orphanages as an alternative to the welfare system, based on the idea that we needed to remove the welfare incentive that encouraged a few poor women to have children (good research showed that this number of women encouraged to have children because of welfare benefits was miniscule, but that didn't matter, the moral problems with providing welfare that encouraged dependence rather than independence were judged to be of primary importance.

In the end, people pointed out that there was a greater moral problem with taking away children as punishment for poverty, so talk of removing poor children from their parents diminished. However, with TANF we did get rid of the idea that the public would always support poor children with some cash assistance.  Now, with TANF, we still assure children that they will have food (through SNAP) and medical care (through Medicaid), but we do not ensure that their families will have cash.  If their parents are chronically ill or in some way incapable of finding and holding a job, and if the parents then use up their TANF benefits or fail to keep on pace toward independence, then we will cut the family off from cash assistance, and the family won't get TANF any more. Thus, poor American children today face a real risk that their parents will not qualify for TANF, and during job loss, poor health, or sudden loss of income when parents break-up, their families will have little or no cash income.  We are now a society that is willing to allow children to live in desperate poverty if their parents are sufficiently poor.  This may only be a problem for the very poorest American children, but for perhaps a million of such children, homelessness is a real risk, and living in a household where cash incomes are below $2 per day per person is what they face.