Rethinking Childhood

Chapter 9: Children’s Lives in and out of Poverty

154 KAREN A. GRAY 154 IN 1997, ALMOST 20 percent of children in the United States lived below the poverty level; 10 percent of children in two-parent families and 49 percent of children in female-headed families were poor. Proportionally, more of these children were of color (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics 2001), and children of female-headed families were more likely to have longer periods of being poor (Kennedy, Jung, and Orland 1986). Most of the research on childhood poverty is quantitative, and of the few qualitative studies almost none examine poverty from the perspective of the children themselves. Even when children are asked about living in poverty, they may be asked to deal with it as if it were a hypothetical condition. For example, one researcher asked children from low-income families to speculate on what poverty might be like by asking them to comment on fictional situations rather than asking them directly about their own experiences (Weinger 2000). Although “there is growing evidence that children’s perceptions of work and familyrelated experiences exert considerable influence on their behavior” (McLoyd et al. 1994, 567), little in the literature examines how children say they experience poverty or what they think about it (Toomey and Christie 1990). The emphasis on quantitative analyses is related to the fact that funding sources emphasize gathering reliable statistics that bear on the outcomes of living in or out of poverty. Quantitative research continues to be important. However, this approach Children’s Lives in and out of Poverty Chapter 9 KAREN A. GRAY Children’s Lives in and out of Poverty 155 runs the risk of leaving unanalyzed the assumption that living in poverty entails a certain kind of childhood, usually one of deficits. Therefore, interviews with children probing their experience of living in poverty are equally important . We need research that goes “beyond conventional reviews of the research linking poverty to negative child outcomes” and looks “at the meaning of poverty in the life of a child” (Garbarino 1998, 110). Interviews with children and their families help us to explore the meaning of being poor. Asking children to talk about their experiences within their family and their perceptions of deficits and strengths allows us to test our attributing to them a life of deficits. The purpose of this chapter is to briefly review child-development research that is germane to children’s experiences of self and poverty. More important, my research explores the views of children who have experienced poverty but who no longer live in poverty. The chapter begins with three brief literature reviews that sketch the framework within which the current research was carried out. Results from a qualitative study examining children’s views of their lives in poverty are then presented. I conclude with policy and program recommendations . Research Reviews The first review describes the development of children’s self-esteem, social status , and social acceptance. The second sets out the possible effects of poverty on children’s esteem and social status. The last review looks at childhood from a social-constructionist perspective and challenges the assumption that childhoods spent in poverty are of a single kind. SOCIAL STATUS, SOCIAL ACCEPTANCE, AND SELF-ESTEEM The research reviewed here provides a framework within which to pose questions about the potential effects of poverty. In these studies, income was not an explicit variable; therefore, the questions raised have to be accepted as speculations about the impact of poverty on social acceptance and social status as well as on self-esteem. Social status, as it is expressed in measures of popularity, is “associated with sociability and low levels of aggression and withdrawal” (Newcomb, Bukowski, and Pattee 1993, cited in Underwood and Hurley 1999, 240). Social acceptance sustains psychological adjustment. By contrast, peer rejection may be related to problems such as dropping out of school and delinquency (as shown, for example, in Parker and Asher 1993). Although literature on the role that physical attractiveness plays in gaining peer status is limited (see Hartup 1983 for a review ), these studies have invariably demonstrated that facial and general physical attractiveness are important in peer acceptance (Evans and Eder 1993; Kennedy 156 KAREN A. GRAY 1990). As one would expect within U.S. society, fashionable clothes or at least good clothes also contribute to children’s popularity (Coleman 1980). The children in these studies were most likely not poor; for instance, the...