Unit B - Blog 11

There was a recent report released on the human development in Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina. In the report, three researchers looked at whites and African Americans, male and females, and parish the participants lived in. In the male and female section they found that white males in Louisiana were on pace with other white males across the United States. However they found that white women make a shocking $16,000 less a year than their male counterparts. This is a 3% decrease from white women across America. What we can determine in here is that women in Louisiana are struggling because wages are clearly not being matched for what a male is making. This will leave working mothers highly disadvantaged. This report is interesting because it shows the progression or lack thereof that Louisiana is experiencing since the disaster. As mentioned before, working poor women have much more to worry about and less help to improve their situation. With stagnant wages and no hope to make more money they are stuck in a helpless situation. Louisiana is just a small portion of what is going on across America. With women making less money in general, $.70 to every man's dollar, they are already a step behind half the population. Taking care of children should not have to be a burden though and that is the stress that lies on the working poor women more than their concern for money. No mother wants to subject her children to a life where they feel like a burden for their parents. The source for the Louisiana Project can be found at www.measureofamerica.org.

Unit B - Blog 9

Working poor women face the same obstacles that middle class mothers face such as childcare, food, bills, and all the little extras that children require. However, working poor women are constantly faced with the worry about money. Day in and out they are concerned about where the next meal is going to come from or the next pair of shoes after the last ones wear out. In one of the videos, a mother is taking her 4 kids to the park where the Red Cross hands out free lunches for the community. The mother lost her job a couple months ago and the father lost his job 8 months ago and took a job that pays much less. Their family car does not run so they have no vehicle and no money to fix it. No matter how old the kids are, they can understand that something has changed in their family dynamic. They will recognize that they don't have a car anymore and that they are getting lunches from other people outside their family and school. Kids are also very receptive to stress within their families. They will react to their mothers being more tired and less focused on normal activities. Working poor women are humans too; they don't have super human powers to live above the stresses of being a mother and being an employee. It is for this reason that wages have to start matching the rising costs of food. Poverty levels in the U.S. reflect an outdated system where food, housing, and clothing are given a proportionate amount in a families' budget. However, today housing and food far outweigh the costs of clothing and therefore budgets are skewed and inflation is unaccounted for.

Unit B -Blog 8

Urban working mothers have more issues to deal with that working mothers who live in mixed neighborhoods because there are more factors to deal with. One would be that there are many more single mothers in urban areas due to the fact that more and more men are winding up in jails, leaving families to fend for themselves with one parent. Even if they leave jail, it is hard for them to then get hired and get a job to help support the family. Another reason would be the drive to investigate the using and selling of drugs because they are more abundant in urban areas. Women may see this as an escape to the stress they experience everyday and as a quick way to make nontaxable income. And once drugs are introduced into the family, it is likely the child will accept that as a family trait and become involved themselves. There is also the concern for the way children grow up in urban areas. There are more gangs which leads to violence and early pregnancy. This will only increase the stress on the mother and force the child to stay at a poverty level if they decide to join a gang or become pregnant. Urban areas also have worse living options. Areas that are affordable are usually apartments that are run down, tiny, and cramped with people. One video in a previous section mentioned that many people live in a studio apartment with seven to eight others. The apartments are usually not inspected and have poor heating and cooling systems. Urban areas also do no include front or back yards for the children to play, leaving them to roam the streets or hang out in parks that are unsafe. The last thing I would like to mention is aside the fact from the gangs, in mixed income neighborhoods there would be more of an opportunity for poor children to see different types of people who are successful. Mothers feel like the influences they see will have a more positive effect. If a child in poverty lives in an urban area with heavy poverty levels, they will know no other way of life and they will only be interacting with other poor people. Parents want the best for their kids so it is only natural that they would want them to see a potential for a better life rather than seeing the same struggles in every family they know.

Unit B - Blog 6

The range of childcare varies for poor working mothers. It can be a friend of a friend to a sister to a day care program. Some women are lucky to have family around but as one woman points out, they are not always the best types of people to look after young children. In chapter to of the book it mentions the many constraints that working mothers have on their child care situation. Using friends and family members may still cost money and actually cause a sense of guilt. It also forces that person to be available a minimum of 40 hours a week which many people cannot sacrifice because they have other jobs or responsibilities as well. Some family may also live far away causing a strain on transportation. Day care is not always reliable. In one report they mentioned in California that day cares get inspected only every 5 years. In some states, child care centers are not even required to have licenses. So the woman may be paying a lot of money for childcare that is actually not healthy for the child.

I would say many women prefer child care centers that are consistently close to a preschool set up where there is a structured setting. Women that are in that area of "near poor" who have experienced day cares that are certified prefer those ones because it teaches the children what they need to experience before going to real school. I would say that what happens is they start relying on hodge-podge child care from relatives and friends. Whoever is most available is who they use and they have a few back up people who they really do not want to use but might have to in emergencies. As mentioned before, in California child care centers are only inspected every 5 years. This is not a place that most mothers would want to send their children to. Dog kennels actually get inspected more which shows the widening gap of American concern for the children of the poor and nearly poor. The problem may lie in the fact that there is not a lot of media attention on this crisis. I said it in my last blog, but I really feel it should be the responsibility of the media to report on concerns that truly affect us as human beings. How can a nation survive if we don't protect our next generations?

Unit B - Blog 5

Chaudry states that the public feels less of an obligation for the working poor because people do not really think about the children who are automatically born into it. It is easy to understand that there are adults who do not have money because you see them working in your everyday life, at grocery stores, gas stations, janitorial staff, etc. However, most people forget to look at that person and think about how they have to support a family and they have children that they love and want to support through school with everything that the other children have. We also need to keep in mind that children have no control over what parents they have and the lifestyle they will lead growing up. They cannot get jobs legally even if they wanted to help their families.

In the videos on YouTube, I really felt like the majority of Americans actually do understand the "working poor" situation. No one was demeaning them or passing judgments on them, they simply stated the truth: people cannot afford basic rent and bills and raise themselves out of their situation because they simply do not get paid wages that are good enough. It is stated over and over again that minimum wage is not high enough to meet the ever increasing demands for living expenses. The videos suggest to me that it is the policy makers who fail to care about our children of America. This goes back to the responsibility of the media not focusing on issues that really matter. It is time we started tackling these problems because the elephant in the room is gigantic and stomping all over us-not hiding in the corner.

Unit A - Blog 4

A good family life, for me, would entail spending time with your family and enjoying that time. I do not even think that a good family life has to be rich, but not being in poverty would be essential. It is much more difficult to support a family and enjoy them if you have to be at work all the time or when you are home, you are too stressed about bills, etc to take care of your family. A good family life would be having at least one parent around who cares about you all the time. Ideally you would want both your mother and father around but there are many people who live happy family lives with just one parent.

Balancing a career and family life means that you must take on many responsibilities as a human being. You are responsible for creating wealth at your business and being attentive to your company and bosses' needs. You also must be able to think about your families' needs and what they expect from you. What this essentially boils down to is that there is no time at the end of the day to ever be on your own and do something for your personal needs. Balancing a career and family also needs to include balancing personal time which I feel is the reason many working mothers are upset and feel inadequate. We expect so much from mothers and fathers who work and have a family but no one ever talks about the need to maintain your individualism as a person as well.

There are many factors that make this balance difficult. If you have a sick child, husband, or other person you are taking care of, you are required to spend much more time on them. If you are at a high level within your company you are required to work more hours and be more dedicated to your business than the average worker. If you are the "average worker" you are expected to never ask for time off. You get your two weeks vacation and that should be sufficient in the mind of employers. This never takes in account the problems that arise in family life. Balancing also becomes difficult in economic crises. Your family feels the pinch of money and therefore the money earners in the family need to work more hours, forcing you to choose work over family.

Traditional family roles used to designate moms as nurturers who had time to stay home and make their family dinner and do all the cleaning and the laundry. Dads went to work and came home to play with the children so the mom could clean up. Now that women are going to work and raising families-which is almost expected in this day and age, there is less time to nurture but the emphasis is still there. We still want moms to clean and cook and be there all the time but when they have jobs they are exhausted and worn out. It leads to men having to step up in family chores but they are generally just as tired after working all day too. This is why there needs to be a sense of community within a family. Like I have mentioned before, a family needs to work together and forget about the "gender" roles. When a couple has a baby they are both responsible for raising that family. The only way to do that with both parents working is to help each other.

Employers are generally family people themselves. If they are they should place themselves in the shoes of their employees and understand when you need to leave 2 hours early to make it to Billy's championship soccer game. If employers are not family oriented, they were once part of a family so they should know what it is like to have a mom and dad around or to not have a mom or dad around. If employers stopped looking at the bottom line so much and started looking more at the faces of their employees and understanding that humans needs to care about each other instead of working to death, then maybe this world can stop itself from destroying each other. It is sad how companies only care about profit. People buy products or use services and in the end if you don't take care of people, there is no point to money.

Having a supportive friend, family, or neighbor would be immensely helpful to balancing priorities. It seems like now many people feel that they have to do everything themselves. If they don't do it themselves, then they feel like they failed somehow. When we ask for help, it is like we feel guilty for doing so because we should be able to do it ourselves. Instead, we should all be there for each other, helping without feeling guilty because that friend or family member WANTS to help. That's why people that have a loving family member, friend, or neighbor are so much happier. They don't feel guilty asking for help and therefore can actually accomplish a lot more and feel okay doing it. In the end, if we all acted like a community we might actually do some good in the world.

Unit A - Blog 3

The care work I have experienced in my life has been through both of my parents and from outside help from cousins, grandparents and hired babysitters. For the first ten years of my life, my parents worked opposite hours, my dad during the day and my mom at night. The overlapping hours of their jobs, between 2 and 5 is when my brother and I would be home from school and need dinner and looking after. I know that we were lucky because my mom has a huge family so she had nieces and nephews that were old enough to watch us. Of course not many 16 year old teenagers want to watch their young cousins five times a week so they split the time between my grandma as well. Even with all my cousins, some lived too far away and eventually they got older and were too busy so every once in awhile my parents had to search for hired babysitters to take on the task. My brother and I never went to a day care but we were always taken care of a few hours each working day by outside help.

Now that women are working a lot more in the public sector, society needs to accommodate the working caretakers. In the UK, they experienced a large influx of female workers so they are trying to make it easier for them to still take care of their children or elderly. Society should be more like Canada where they allow women to take six months off after the birth of their child with 60-90% of their pay intact. There also should be childcare offered at places of business. If companies want to work their employers 9-5, they have to understand that school gets out around three in the afternoon. How can they expect mothers and fathers to take care of children when they are forced to work restricting hours? Society needs to also accept that mothers need to work to support their families because the cost of living has continuously been increasing around the globe. People cannot afford to have a family unless both parents are working and to suggest stopping the creation of families would be telling the human race to force extinction upon itself. If everyone just works together to help each other out and realize that an employee is more than a profit but a mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a caretaker, a sister, a brother, then all of us could benefit in more than just monetary gain.

Unit A - Blog 2

Sex segregation is the concept of paying women less money for the same job a man might perform. It also refers to the idea that there are "female jobs" and "male jobs." Within our socialization process in the United States, there is an assumed notion that males become the doctors and females, the nurse. Teachers in elementary school are thought of as female while professors in college are depicted as men. You can see this example in the faculty of ASU. In areas like biology, mathematics, and economics there appear to be many more male professors and male TA's. In social science such as political science or English classes I have seen more women professors. I know there are always exceptions to the rules, but from personal experience these are the trends I have observed.

Personal socialization in my life has led to many gender specific roles but because I grew up fascinated by academic works and ideas I have always maintained an awareness for how women and men are expected to play certain roles. My family is a prototypical four person household with a mom and dad that have been married for 30 years and met in high school. They have two children, one boy and one girl, and we always had dinner together with mom being the cook 90% of the time. However my mom and dad made about the same amount of money for the first 10 years of our family life. My dad worked during the day and my mom worked at night forcing my parents to share the household work. So what may seem like an idealized situation where the man and woman had to share chores, I notice looking back that the chores they chose to do were still gender biased. My mom still did the cleaning of the house while my dad would do the yard work. My mom still did the grocery shopping and cooked while my dad would do the maintenance on the cars. I think still that seeing them share the work helped me realize that women should not be expected to do everything and if my mom had to work overtime my dad would cook dinner showing us that a family always works together regardless of your gender roles.

With the current economic situation it is not a shock that more men are being unemployed than women. With men assuming the position as the "bread winners" they are in more jobs that are blue collar and stereo-typical of men. Construction sites have very, very few women at them and that field has been one of the hardest hit in the crisis. However, it is easier to keep women underpaid because they are willing to take the lower pay just so they can keep the job. Many women will say they just "feel thankful to have a job at all" and therefore they do not feel they are in a position to demand a higher wage. Plus, with so much unemployment people are desperate for jobs, so if a woman demands more pay a company will fire her and replace her with someone willing to take the position. This is the reason there needs to be a lobby for women in Congress that can actually make a difference for all of us. This should be a national issue, not something that every woman has to fight on her own.