Raising Children Research Paper

Raising Children: From Private Responsibilities to Public Goods

Social policies are significant in terms of providing families with economic stability and the means to subsist. In our current global economy, few families can afford to be supported by male breadwinners alone. While other developed nations have adopted a variety of social policies to ease the responsibilities of parents and help balance work and family life, the United States has implemented very few family-oriented social policies, many of which do not work effectively. Given that the United States also “holds the noteworthy position of being the country with the greatest gap between rich and poor” (Hays 2003: 121), the concentration of wealth at the top has a negative trickle-down effect on the wider economy as well as on individual family lives. Although middle-class families face multiple challenges when raising children, the situation is far worse for lower-class families. There seems to be a misunderstanding and a policy disconnect between the ideological conceptions of what poor families need and their actual needs based on their living conditions. (Hays 2003)
So why does the United States do less than other developed countries to assist families? One possible
The reason why plans such as TANF do not work is because they do not provide nearly enough support in the workforce or directly aid in helping mothers take care of children. Most social policies actually hinder rather than improve the conditions for working class mothers and their children even when they seem to be providing some type of financial support. And consequently, because of these faulty welfare policies, there is a rise in women and children living in poverty. (Crittenden