Parenting in Public

Family Shelter and Public Assistance

Donna Haig Friedman

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780231528672
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Sozialarbeit

When parents must rely on public assistance and family shelters to provide for their children's most basic needs, they lose autonomy. Within a system of public assistance that already stigmatizes and isolates its beneficiaries, their family lives become subject to public scrutiny and criticism. They are parenting in public.

This book is an in-depth examination of the realities of life for parents and their children in family shelters. The author uses the Massachusetts family shelter system to explore the impact of asset and deficit-oriented help-giving approaches as they are experienced by mothers and service providers.

The format of the book is unique. Following each chapter are the "reflections" of a mother who has parented in a shelter, a front-line worker, and a shelter director. The author and contributors propose a "Power With" policy and practice framework that runs counter to the prevailing "Power Over" cultural policy trends.

Contributors include Rosa Clark, Brenda Farrell, Deborah Gray, Michele Kahan, Margaret A. Leonard, Mary T. Lewis, Nancy Schwoyer, and Elizabeth Ward.

1	Parenting and Public Assistance
	The scream started again today a slow silent scream of frustrated anger Today, I wailed at the wall of officialdom. Smug, smiling, filing-cabinet face, closed to my unspoken entreaty, social justice is my right Don’t dole it out like charity. Robbed of independence, dignity in danger I stood dead locked, mind locked. Helpless in his sightless one-dimension world I walked away My mind screamed a long sad chaoin (cry) for the us and damned their “social welfare.” —Cathleen O’Neill in M. Daly

The most fundamental parenting task is to provide for children’s basic needs: safety, shelter, food, clothing, and medical care. When government intervention is needed to assist parents in fulfilling these most basic tasks, parents lose autonomy. Their family lives become subject to public scrutiny and criticism. The public stigmatizes these families for being poor, linking their poverty to personal deficits. They are parenting in public. Families who are homeless are desperate for public assistance and ostracized for their dire circumstances. With my eight coauthors I was motivated to write this book to counter these pejorative views of poor people, particularly impoverished families. We believe that poverty is the predictable result of imbalances in our society’s economic structures and arrangements, not a result of parents’ personal deficits.

We use the Massachusetts family shelter system as a microcosm to explore the impact of help-giving approaches as they are experienced by mothers and service providers. This book explores what happens to mothers and staff in settings that adopt and resist a prescriptive and deficit-oriented ideology. The book is based upon my research and policy work with the family shelter network over the past six years. The study, in which I put family shelter staff and environments in Massachusetts under a microscope, took place between 1993 and 1996, at a time when welfare reform was center stage on the public agenda.

I became interested in doing this study after working as a consultant with an agency in the Boston area that operated several family shelter programs. The agency hired me to assist staff in designing an early intervention program for the homeless families they served. Having previously worked in the early intervention field, in which strength-based, consumer-driven practices were considered the standard for effectiveness, I was shocked by the level of oversight that seemed to be the modus operandi of this agency. For example, case managers regularly told parents when their children were to be in bed and meted out punishments when parents did not follow their rules. Often, the staff members were younger than the parents they were chastising; many were not parents themselves.

Curious to understand how common such practices were and, if they were common, how they got to be that way, I began to reach out to others in the state’s family shelter network to learn about the system. Through a series of interviews with key informants, including some of this book’s coauthors, I learned that, while rules and regulations of the sort I had seen in this one agency were common, state officials and leaders in the field thought that helping practices and program approaches varied considerably among the programs in the state.

The foundation upon which the Massachusetts family shelter system was built is reflected in a 1986 document, written by fourteen family shelter program directors, articulating the principles that guided their programs’ helping practices with families. They emphasized family strengths, access to resources, community building, and advocacy for changing the conditions in society that caused families to become homeless.¹ When I began the study in 1993, little was known about the extent to which programs continued to operate from these guiding principles. My initial experiences working with a family shelter agency suggested that these principles had been abandoned. I wanted to find out if that was true and to learn about shelter programs’ help-giving approaches, especially as they affected parents’ roles with their children when they were living in a shelter. I wanted to understand why at least some programs had reverted to a deficit-oriented, noncollaborative, paternalistic approach or were unable to implement the principles articulated in the 1986 document.

I was transformed by what I saw and heard from mothers, staff, and program directors. I witnessed courage in action. I witnessed mothers and staff members struggling to rise above and overcome obstacles not of their making. I listened to stories from mothers who were grateful for the sensitive interventions of shelter staff in their families’ lives. I also heard from mothers who felt humiliated by demeaning program practices and interactions with staff. I learned about the difficult dilemmas staff members and program managers struggled with as they attempted to balance the sometimes competing needs of all those who resided in their shelters. Their stories were compelling and eye-opening.

My coauthors are a gifted group of experienced colleagues. Some are mothers who have lived in family shelters, and some are frontline staff members and program directors who work in and manage these shelters. Each of the women who joined me in writing this book brings considerable expertise to the table. Using the research as a foundation, the substance of this book reflects our combined experience in addressing family homelessness in Massachusetts. We propose an alternative policy and practice framework that runs counter to the prevailing punishing and stigmatizing cultural trends.

Six key principles characterize the emerging family support approach that we promote in this book. This approach builds upon other family support movements² but focuses to a greater extent on families who do not have a home of their own, have few resources and social support networks, and have been stigmatized and marginalized as a result of their reliance upon public assistance. The principles we promote here inform the broad context of human service work, including the quality of relationships between families and service providers, the design of program policies and services, the quality of service environments, and the public policies affecting human services. The model we propose is based upon the assumptions that all families must have the economic means to meet their basic needs; that all families have strengths and aspirations; and that when parents are supported in realizing their hopes, children benefit. Using this framework, human service workers act to ensure that families receive individualized support, have maximum control and choices, have avenues for becoming collaborators in the decision making process, and have opportunities to move successfully toward their unique aspirations.

The key principles of the emerging family support approach are:

• Poverty and its effects are best understood by viewing the world through the eyes of those who are poor, those who are most directly affected. Macrolevel analyses of poverty, while valuable, fail to take into account the practical realities of poor families’ lives, the impact of unrelenting stress on families’ lives, and the devastating impacts of stigmatizing and demeaning human service practices and policies.

• Human service work is most effective when consumers have a significant role in decision making and governance. With this approach, not only do parents have a role in determining which services they will use, they also have a role in determining program and public policies that have a direct impact on their lives.

• Strengths are the starting point for relationship building and service planning. Every parent has capacities and aspirations that, when tapped, sustain resilience, energy, and hope. These strengths, along with realistic options for securing a steady and adequate income, are the family’s avenue out of poverty.

• Mutuality characterizes effective relationships between human service workers and the people they serve. Respect is at the core of the relationship. These parties treat each other as equals, and hold each other accountable.

• Respect for the centrality of the parenting role is essential in all interactions between human service workers and parents, even when human service providers must step in to ensure children’s safety.

• A belief in our common bonds as humans, helper and help-receiver alike, is essential for breaking down class, racial, and gender barriers that perpetuate poverty and the marginalization of people who are poor.

Creating policy and providing services according to these principles is exceedingly difficult. The principles fly in the face of the prevailing attitudes and ways of working in many human service arenas in the United States, in which the corporation’s or institution’s interests hold sway over the best instincts of workers and clients.³ Demeaning, paternalistic⁴ attitudes have been codified in federal and state legislation, and in government contracts with the nonprofit organizations who carry out the state’s work with families in need of public assistance and emergency assistance. With my coauthors I take issue with the negative assumptions upon which these laws and policies are based.

Local welfare and other human service workers, like family shelter staff and managers, are caught in the middle of the debate. They may find ways to counteract the paternalistic stipulations in their contracts with the government or fall prey to an insidious process of control and power that, in the end, serves to disempower both them and those they serve. I learned through my research that, while agencies must deal with these requirements and embedded ideologies, they can actively resist the pulls to become deficit-oriented and prescriptive in their relationships with parents. Many do resist.

The structure of the book itself provides a clear example of this model. We collaborated in a way that honors the unique experiences and insights each of us brings to the table, without regard to rank or station in life. Three reflections, one written by a mother, one by a frontline staff member, and one by a program director, follow each chapter. Half of the women who contributed their reflections to this book have been homeless with their children, have lived in a family shelter, and have had to rely upon public assistance to help them when their families ran into difficult times. Several of these women have also worked as shelter staff members or program directors. The other women have managed or worked in family shelter programs. All the contributors are visionary leaders in the onerous work to end family homelessness in Massachusetts. All are insiders in the struggle to eliminate poverty and its effects. Their views of the causes and effects of poverty are grounded in their lived experience and the knowledge they have gained in their work with hundreds of families struggling to make ends meet. Readers may decide to read the reflections as they complete each chapter or to read them after completing the rest of the book. Chapter 7 is written in the form of a conversation and is the product of a tape-recorded group reflection in which we pondered the meaning and significance of what we have learned from our work together on this book.

The research grounds these reflections and our experiences. The study I conducted with family shelters in Massachusetts included phone interviews with fifty-five directors, representing 95 percent of the state’s publicly funded programs. Over 80 percent of the directors also completed a mailed survey. I also conducted face-to-face interviews with ten frontline staff members and thirty-nine mothers. Half of the mothers were former and half were current residents of family shelters. In conjunction with the face-to-face interviews, I immersed myself in five programs whose directors differed in their beliefs about help giving. Two were led by directors who espoused paternalistic beliefs and three were led by directors who espoused family support beliefs. The influence of these belief systems is evident in the ways shelter programs in Massachusetts set up the physical environment; handle privacy in shelter environments; deal with shared responsibility for the care of children; involve parents in the creation and review of shelter rules; standardize or individualize services; and manage ties among families and staff. We explore these themes throughout the book.

Why a Focus on Parenting?

Parenting is a perfect lens through which to explore help giving with families who use public assistance. Parents and their children are the primary recipients of welfare public assistance in the United States.

Welfare policies across the country focus on the need for recipients to join the paid workforce as a means of ending their economic reliance on the government. The presence of children in these families is what complicates the policy making. Our policies need to provide realistic avenues for parents to both work well and parent well. As public assistance policies are implemented by welfare workers, shelter staff, and other human service workers, both parents and children feel the effects, beneficial or not.

Support for parenting is extremely complex and critically important for the growth and development of the next generation. Children’s sense of self and sense of competence is directly tied to that of their parents. When parents are stressed, children feel the effects and are less able to develop a sense of security and curiosity about themselves and the world around them. Supporting parents in their roles as parents is exceedingly difficult for human service workers under the best of circumstances. When parents are dealing with the devastation of being without a home for their children, their sense of inadequacy, shame, and fear is heightened. Family shelter staff and program managers face enormous challenges in their efforts to find effective ways of enabling parents’ sense of themselves to be healed and restored. Not only are parents and children extremely stressed in these settings, but the residential physical environment itself demands that the needs of all children and parents be balanced with the needs and preferences of individual family members. If, under these circumstances, shelter staff and program managers can find effective ways of supporting parents and children, then surely welfare workers and other human service workers can be empowered to do so as well.

Much has been written about family homelessness in the United States. The literature includes macrolevel and microlevel analyses of this social problem. However, as a country we have little information about the ways in which our public assistance practices and policies have an impact on mothers’ care for their young children. This book attempts to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive portrayal of one state’s system of congregate family shelter, as well as detailed, in-depth observational and narrative accounts of family life and parenting dilemmas in shelters as experienced by mothers, staff, and managers in diverse programs. In addition, by design, the book reflects a dynamic collaboration among those most directly affected by homelessness, those who provide service, and those who conduct applied public policy research.

What we have learned is instructive for other human service arenas along four dimensions. In particular, we highlight:

• effective ways for human service workers and their clients to relate to each other;

• the organizational features and program policies conducive to positive assistance for parents and their children;

• community and neighborhood-level underpinnings needed ...

Índice

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1. Parenting and Public Assistance
• 2. Family Shelter Environments
• 3. Parental Rights and the Protection of Children
• 4. Shelter Rules
• 5. Individualized and Standardized Service
• 6. The Paradox of Self-Sufficiency: Building Community and Interdependence
• 7. Final Group Reflection
• 8. We Need a Revolution
• Notes: Text
• Notes: Reflections
• Bibliography
• About the Authors
• Index