Born Poor : Single Mothers Earn Less Than 50 Cents for Every Dollar a Man Makes. Their Children Pay the Price.

The group most vulnerable to poverty in the United States is children. They are poor largely because their mothers are poor. Single mothers and their children, in fact, constitute 93% of the AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) population but, contrary to popular belief, the majority of poor people in this country live in waged poverty. Most bounce back and forth between jobs with low wages, unemployment and sometimes welfare. The bulk of their experience, however, is low-waged employment--in jobs like those in sweatshops, where 90% of the employees are female, usually minority and earn less than minimum wage; or jobs at McDonald’s, where the midnight shift is called the mothers’ shift and the challenge is all in the feet; or in jobs as home-health aides, where upward mobility is restricted to the flights of tenement stairs the workers climb to get to the indigent elderly they care for. What happens to the children during their mothers’ employment? I can tell you one thing: They don’t go to quality day-care centers. They are more likely left at home as latchkey children.

In 1977, when women constituted only 33% of the labor force, they accounted for 53% of the minimum-wage workers. Currently, female heads of households employed full time outside the home earn 47 cents to the dollar earned by men. Though 60% of them are “fully” employed, the majority are still poor or near-poor.

Employment for lower-class women with children by no means guarantees they can bootstrap their way out of poverty. Quite the contrary! What employment sometimes does achieve is at least temporary respite from the insidious welfare monster that pokes and probes into their lives, defiles and degrades them and otherwise commits them to an indeterminate sentence in a hell of red tape.

Had many of the children in poverty (whose only crime is having been born) been the children of fathers who died instead of abandoning them, they and their mothers might have become Social Security recipients. But for a quirk of fate they would have been vastly more income secure, as well as free of the stigma of living on the dole. What’s the intrinsic difference between the children of Social Security recipients and those of welfare recipients? Nothing. Yet a family of four on welfare receives, on the average, less income than a single individual on Social Security.

For most, poverty is merely an ugly survival struggle. For some, it’s an early grave: children who die of lead-paint poisoning or “failure to thrive” (the only medicine for which is food); children charred to death in the firetraps that they were forced to call home. . . .

A study done in 1980 by the state of Maine (which is 98% white) concluded that poor children died in fires at 12 times the rate of non-poor children, of disease at eight times the rate, and so on. The bloodcurdling reality is that poverty is the No. 1 killer of children in the United States today--and until we deal with the tragedy of those quiet, private, almost secret deaths and the agony of the mothers who often can’t even afford to bury them, we will never sort out the proper course.

One Christmas not too long ago, a welfare mother I knew returned home with an infant who had been hospitalized with pneumonia. Her apartment had no heat, no hot water, no electricity. She put the baby and her other two children in bed with her that night in the hope of keeping them warm. In the morning two of her children woke up next to a dead baby.

We have ceased to feel with our hearts and in our guts, and as a result we have been unsuccessful in thinking with our heads. We are facing a demographic day of reckoning, the likes of which none of us can afford to be complacent about.

The Greeks had a saying: There will be no justice in Athens until the uninjured parties are as indignant as the injured parties.