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This chapter examines how mothers and fathers coped with the crises and destitution of severe poverty. Whereas the previous chapter discussed how ordinary labouring people brought up their children in a state of chronic poverty, this focuses on parents' strategies for managing long-term economic change, as well as immediate crises such as poor harvests and fires, and problems caused by personal misfortunes, including sickness and deaths. It first discusses how parents were affected by the local administration of the Poor Laws. It then considers the resources of poor parents, and whether they had a ‘family’ economy to help tide them over tough times.

The formulation and implementation of Poor Laws from the late Elizabethan period brought public fatherhood into poor families. ‘Civic fathers’ are men who undertook public roles as fathers of poor children, substituting adequate fathers for inadequate or absent ones. This chapter examines the rhetoric and practices of civic fathers, who, in exercising their paternal authority and granting or withholding relief, reduced all the poor including adults to the state of childhood. Furthermore, the authority of these public fathers was applied not only to the poor in England, but to the indigenous inhabitants of Britain's empire.

This concluding chapter draws together some of the themes discussed in the preceding chapters, reflecting upon the experiences of mothers and fathers who were poor in contrast to those of higher social status. Despite the bleak picture which poverty always presents, it argues that many poor parents derived social status and personal satisfaction from their struggles to do their best for their offspring.

This chapter examines the experiences of families raising children from birth through preschool in Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America. It reports findings from in-depth studies of more than 1,000 parents, childcare providers, and employers. When parents of preschool children used informal care provided by children and youths, their young children were more likely to experience accidents or emergencies while the parents worked. Parents who were unable to find or afford adequate childcare often brought their children to work—even when they were aware that their work environments were perilous—because they lacked any other alternative. When families used formal childcare, their children were less likely to develop behavioral or academic difficulties than when they used informal childcare. While in theory, care provided by adults in informal care settings could be of equal quality to formal settings, this was not the common experience of most parents, especially low-income families.

This chapter shares some of the stories of families’ frustration and suffering and puts them in the context of national and local studies of the impact of welfare reform. A central goal of welfare reform is to increase employment among low income mothers. Many are unable to obtain employment because they lack education and training. After leaving the welfare system, mothers frequently experience even greater problems obtaining support services, making it difficult for them to make ends meet and remain off welfare. When mothers leave welfare for work, they incur added expenses. While welfare reform proponents claim that they want to help welfare recipients get out of poverty, the tough regulations they advocate create tremendous hardship and obstacles for poor families. Some poor families who lose access to welfare are left homeless and hungry.

This chapter examines ways to improve economic well-being and tax policies targeted to working families, particularly the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and child care tax policies. The EITC is successful at lifting families out of poverty but is less effective at enabling the near-poor to move forward. The phasing out of credits reduces the income gains to these families when their income grows, especially if near-poor families are gaining benefits from other means-tested programs such as public housing and food stamps. The chapter also illustrates how child care tax policies are particularly important for near-poor families who have incomes too high to receive substantial subsidies from government-funded programs, in addition to exploring ways to improve the coordination between federal and state programs to further aid them.

Prior to the establishment of the Charleston Orphan House, orphaned and destitute children in the city of Charleston in South Carolina were supported through two Anglican parishes, St. Philip's, founded in 1683, and daughter congregation St. Michael's, whose history dates back to 1761. Both agencies collected poor rates and distributed them as relief. The City Council, convinced that centralized care of orphans would reduce costs, passed an ordinance in 1790 that led to the opening of the Charleston Orphan House. A Board of Commissioners was formed to exercise authority over the orphanage, which became a destination for children of poor families with no immediate or extended family members. This chapter examines how the city of Charleston managed care of orphaned, abandoned, and poor children and provides the context that led to the establishment of the Charleston Orphan House.

This chapter explores the work histories and work experience of parents, their ambitions and the role of training in helping mothers in particular back into work. It summarises the evidence from the 200 families about their work experience, the evolution of jobs in their families and the links between parents’s work ambitions and training opportunities. It then explores the parents’ direct accounts of work, studying and training, using parents’ own words to convey their experiences, including work history and the prospects of ‘work-poor’ families. It notes that the work background of the families clearly influences why some parents do not work, including inter-generational worklessness. It further notes the impact of working tax credits, childcare worries, the knock-on effects on benefits and associated problems in relation to jobs, and suggests what might help.

Situated in the city of Charleston, South Carolina, the Charleston Orphan House is the first public orphanage in the United States. It offered protection to Charleston's white poor population by acting as an early social safety net and bringing abandoned and distressed children of poor families under one roof. Established by an ordinance in 1790, the orphanage became a symbol of generosity and fear, love and violence, learning and ignorance. It attracted not only the poor, but also the artisanal and mercantile classes who wanted the children living in the orphanage to work as apprentices, as well as the wealthy elite who oversaw those efforts to care for young people. It performed both political and social welfare functions. This book documents the stories of the poor whites of Charleston based on letters and oral testimonies delivered by parents, their relatives and neighbors, their employers, and occasionally their children. It describes the place of the Orphan House and the mechanics of its operations, but is more about the experiences of the families that relied on the Orphan House.

Free-market family policy puts most American families in a difficult position when it comes to the trade-off between earning income to support a family and making sure young children get the caretaking that suits them best, but it clearly puts poor and low-income families in the toughest positions. This chapter considers the extent to which poor and low-income US families can privately provide the conditions that help young children thrive: adequate material support, a parent at home for up to the first year, good daycare and prekindergarten after that, and time with a nurturing parent. It also compares the likelihood that young children will receive this support in the United States under free-market family policy and in countries with pro-family policy.

This chapter evaluates the Dundee Families Project, which was established to help families who are homeless or at a severe risk of homelessness as a result of ASB. The Dundee Families Project was developed in response to a number of factors. One of these was the pressure faced by the local authorities in Dundee to take action against those who caused problems for their neighbours. It shows that the Project gained 126 referrals during its first four years of operation, and that the referred families were all poor and many of the households were headed by a lone parent. It determines that the nature of the ASB was varied, but was almost always serious and prolonged.

This chapter analyzes how poor families' own demands helped shape the institutional landscape of child welfare in turn-of-the century Pittsburgh, as they made choices based on religious preferences as well as location and reputation. Significantly, racial prejudice limited African American families' choices and led the black community to found its own child care institutions in this period. A demographic analysis of these families who chose orphanage care for their children reveals the often multiple, overlapping crises they faced—from the loss of a spouse to disrupted support networks and inadequate housing. As parents attempted to combine wage labor and child care responsibilities, they used orphanages as a strategy for family survival.

This chapter analyses Prime Minister David Cameron's claim, when he launched the Troubled Families Programme (TFP), that his mission in politics was fixing the responsibility deficit. Turning this mission on its head, the chapter focuses on the ways in which the coalition and Conservative governments have abdicated their responsibilities to poor, disadvantaged, and marginalised families. The chapter locates TFP as a central plank of attempts to craft a neoliberal state in the UK. Drawing on the work of Loïc Wacquant and his call for neoliberalism to be understood sociologically rather than economically, the chapter shows how the TFP has been expanded at the same time that traditional welfare services have been rolled back.

This concluding chapter demonstrates how James Caldwell's experience highlights the way in which orphanages served as “community institutions,” serving the needs of the local people who used them. But institutional child care was contested terrain. Both the United Presbyterian Orphan's Home (UPOH) and the HCC illustrate how many different stakeholders negotiated the development of child care institutions, each with sometimes competing agendas and expectations. Similarly, the managers displayed motives of social control, wishing to not only assist poor children, but to reform poor families themselves. These managing women were the most powerful stakeholders in the orphanages, but they were never alone; their control of the institutions was mediated by constant interaction with working-class families, reformers, staff, and the broader community.

This chapter looks at Peter's landmark contribution to the sociological understanding of disability and, through his campaigning, to the acceptance of disability rights as a focus for social policy and grass-roots campaigning. It examines the paradox of why someone who shared so many of its values and influenced many of its ideas is not celebrated in the academic discipline of disability studies. It assesses the extent to which the campaign for disability rights has been successful (not least through equality legislation and improved benefits). It observes that however, the Disability Studies movement feels that this has been at the expense of the cause itself, which has been usurped by the professionalisation of disability rights. It finally considers recent research that confirms the messages behind the Disability Alliance campaign for a disability income, that, in the 21st century, families who experience disability are more likely to be poor and disability is more often found in poor families.

Between 1790 and 1860, the Charleston Orphan House offered protection, care, and education to some 2,000 children of poor families. The institution bound together all strata of white society in Charleston, its charity sought by distressed parents and guardians. It provided an avenue for commissioners from the wealthy elite to show their magnanimity and supplied the necessary labor for masters from the artisanal classes. Most importantly, it offered some degree of compassion for the destitute children who hardly appear anywhere else in Charleston's rich history. The orphanage celebrated its twentieth anniversary on October 18, 1810, with the Rev. Christopher E. Gadsden, the prominent Episcopal clergyman, delivering a peroration. In his speech, Gadsden acknowledged the Orphan House's role in making the city of Charleston a moral example to the nation. After April 1861, the institution remained a destination for abandoned, orphaned, and impoverished children into the twentieth century.