Blog 8

The problems working/poor mothers in Urban poor areas face are different and similar to the mothers in mixed income areas. Their safety, health, and oppurtunites and the oppurtunities for their children and greatly different. Schools, after school programs, pre schools, housing, food, and crime rates in general lean towards a more positive aspect in mixed income areas. Many mothers do not have the ability to house their children in clean and well built homes/apartments or supply them with good food or send them to a good school in urban areas because there are simply none around.

Jessica’s video was heart breaking because she tells of how she sacrifices, she tells us how she’s scared that her children will get hurt because of her area, she talks about how hard her life is and how she wakes up every morning to find herself working for minimum wage and being surrounded by poverty. The women who introduced the videos says it immoral to expect low wage workers to raise a family. The responsibility from what I see fall almost solely on the mother, this is harsh and women who are already facing sexism in any job market have to fight to keep their jobs and to raise their children. Most of the working poor are mothers, and a lot of them are single mothers even more of these families live in low income housing. Its hard to find any relief from poverty and minimum wage when you have to surround yourself with it to survive. Its unfair to the children who go to poor schools and have to eat low quality food and do not have access to computers, to better part time jobs and do not see their mother because she has to work forty plus hours a week to scrape by.

The government’s answers to poverty fall very short of actual help that is needed. I understand we tax low income workers more because they use governmental service more often. To me this seems backwards and unhelpful that isn’t assistance that’s just sanctioning their funds to give back to them with food stamps which is extremely unhelpful. They need to stop throwing heavy taxes they need to improve the spending value of minimum wage and they need to wake up and realize that taking care of low wage workers takes care of our economy and our country as a whole.