Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children

Chapter 6: Children

Chapter 6 Children W hen Inez enrolled in New Hope, her oldest child, Jorge, was not yet two years old. He started life with a number of strikes against him. His mother was an unmarried teenager who conceived him with a man who was dealing drugs and ended up in prison. She was soon receiving welfare and living with Marco, who fathered Jorge’s younger brother, Martı́n. When we first met Jorge in 1998, Inez was in her third year of New Hope. Jorge was a small, dark-haired, lively four-year-old with big brown eyes, who, according to his mother, acted like a seven-year-old. Marco and Inez had split up before Martı́n’s birth, and she was living with a new boyfriend, Vito, whom she planned to marry sometime in the next year. Jorge attended a pre-kindergarten program with the support of Milwaukee’s Choice program. He was a good student. “His teacher has been real proud of him,” Inez boasted. Sometimes he was a little too talkative, she said, but otherwise he seemed to be handling school well. At a later visit, Inez bragged that Jorge was the best student in his class. Our assessments when he was in first grade supported her view: his performance was well above the national average. Inez retained a bond with Marco’s family even though Marco had told her he did not want to see the boys anymore. Jorge and Martı́n spent every other weekend with Marco’s mother for their regularly scheduled visitation but rarely saw Marco. Inez believed that Jorge felt Marco’s rejection strongly. He sometimes cried that he missed his father. She told the children that their dad needed to work a lot of hours and that he “loved them very much.” It was difficult to maintain this fiction, however , when Marco refused to buy anything for either boy and had recently forgotten Martı́n’s birthday entirely. Inez encouraged the children to think of her live-in boyfriend, Vito, as part of their family. When Jorge said that he missed Marco, she told him he was lucky because he had “Papi” (which was what they called Vito) as well as Marco and his girlfriend to love them, that they “had four parents” . . . “a special family [to] have.” Jorge was not quite so sure. CHILDREN Later in the same year, when they were planning to move, Jorge asked, “Mama, when we move, can we leave Papi behind?” When she asked why, Jorge said that Vito was mean. Inez was fairly confident that Vito had never hurt the boys. She wondered if Jorge was just pushing everyone away because so many people in his life had already left him. Marco no longer wanted to see him, and his maternal grandmother had recently moved back to Puerto Rico. A year later, when Jorge was five, Inez and Vito separated. Researchers and the public alike worry about the negative effects on children of living with a single mother, but we now know that children in a stable family headed by a single mother are less likely to have problems than those in single-mother families where things keep changing and “churning ” as people move in and out.1 Although the instability in his family appeared to be unsettling to Jorge, he also worried when Inez was without a boyfriend. At age five, he constantly told her, “You need to get a boyfriend.” At one point he approached a stranger in the grocery store and asked him if he would be his mommy’s boyfriend. By the time Jorge was six, a new partner, Matt, had become a central part of Inez’s life and that of her children, but he too would soon be gone. New Hope was not designed to address Inez’s episodic relationships with men. It was, however, intended to help provide the resources to stabilize other important parts of family life. For Inez, New Hope made a big difference in the quality and reliability of child care for Jorge and Martı́n during their early years. When Inez entered New Hope, Jorge was not yet two and already with his third child-care provider. With the New Hope child-care subsidy, Inez could afford to place the children in a child-care center that she liked. It was not just a place where children go and play, but a “learning center.” In one of our visits, she noted proudly...