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Growing Up in Poverty
Timothy M. Smeeding – Syracuse University – Interdisciplinary model of child well-being
• Physical/Social Environment
• Family characteristics: the child’s
family’s structure (members, roles and
family’s well being (income/housing).
• Community environment: Services
offered by public and private agencies
• Social attitudes context: (attitudes
about race, ethnicity, gender, socialclass status)
• Parent/Family Processes:
• Adult health condition: physical and mental health
of the child’s caregivers
• Parenting behavior: Ways caregivers treat child; time
spent
• Other relatives’ roles: Which other relatives interact
with child – type of interaction, frequency, emotional
quality
• Resource sharing: Ways parents’/other relatives’
money, time, goods are shared with child
A Macro-Micro Model of Child Development
macro variables
Physical/Social Environment
•Family characteristics
•Community environment
•Social-policy environment
•Social attitudes context
micro variables
Parents/Family Processes
•Adult health condition
•Parenting behavior
•Parent aspirations
•Other relatives’ roles
•Resource sharing
Community/Life Processes
•Medical care
•Day care
•Preschool
•Schooling
•Adolescence
•Job Training
•Penal/state institutions
•Community activities
Results of macro-micro interactions
Children’s Developmental Outcomes
•Genetic endowment
•Health
•Self-image
•Adaptability
•Cognitive Achievement
•Interpersonal skills
Environmental Stressors’ Effects on Children Raised in
Poverty
Stressors are Life conditions and Events
•Inadequate housing
•Inadequate nutrition &Hearth care
•Shortages of funds
•Dangerous neighborhoods
Threaten the wellbeing of :
Parents’/Family’s
•Health
•Work performance
•Social relations
•Caregiving practices
Acquaintences’
•Health
•Work performance
•Social relations
The Child’s
•Health
•School performance
•Social relations
•Dependency
Child’s Developmental Outcomes:
• Genetic endowment: Inherited physical/cognitive potentials
effect child’s health, energy level, physical/mental activities
• Health: Physical/mental health
• Self image: child’s impression of “what I look like, what I can
do well; what I can’t do well
• Adaptability: How quickly and successfully the child adjusts to
changing conditions
• Cognitive achievement: How well child succeeds in school/
solves problems outside of school
• Interpersonal skills: How amicable the child’s relationships
are with various kinds of people – parents, other relatives, age
mates, school personnel, members of community
Cynthia Garcia Coll
The route of Influences on Minority Children’s Development
Racism
•Prejudice
•Discrimination
•Oppression
Social-Position Variables
Race
Social Class
Ethnicity
Gender
Segregation
•Residential
•Economic
•Social and
Psychological
Promoting/Inhibiting Environments
•Schools
•Neighborhoods
•Health Care
Child Characteristics
•Age
•Temperament
•Health status
•Biological Factors
•Physical Traits
Adaptive Cultures
•Traditions and Cultural Legacies
•Economic/Political Histories
•Migration and acculturation
•Current Contextual Demands
Developmental Competencies
•Cognitive
•Social
•Emotional
•Linguistic
Family
•Structure, Roles
•Values, Beliefs, Goals
•Racial Socialization
•Socioeconomic Status
Smeeding proposed that
gathering the forgoing
sort of evidence about a
child in a poverty family
provides a profile of
information unique to
that child’s life
Helms’s Racial-Identity Hierarchies
Black Identity Stages
White Identity Stages
5. Integrative Awareness
4. Internalization
3. Immersion/Emersion
2. Encounter
1. Pre-encounter
6. Autonomy
5. Immersion/Emersion
4. Pseudo- Independent
3. Reintegration
2. Disintegration
1. Contact
Black Racial Identity Development:
1st stage: Pre-encounter
Two sub-stages: Active and Passive
Active = idealize Whiteness and subscribe to the unrealistic belief
that adopting characteristics of White-European culture earns
them an established White identity in the dominant WhiteEuropean society.
Passive = typically denigrate Blackness and ten to believe that
they have no recognizable racial identity - only personal that they
have earned through skill and effort.
Encounter Stage:
Early:
Individual shifts between newly abandoned pre-encounter
identity and deeply envisioned potential Black identity.
Late:
Encountering the reality of their social status, individuals
recognize the possibility of a positive Black racial identity and
enter a state of optimism and euphoria as they emotionally
adopt Black society as their reference group.
Immersion Stage /Emersion Stage:
Immersion
The Black person withdraws psychologically and often physically into
Blackness and a Black world behaving and thinking in ways that
“authentic Blacks” supposedly act and think. In this stage, individuals
typically include high levels of hostility and anger toward Whites
along with idealizing Blackness and African heritage.
Emersion
Retreat into the Black community – express their confusion and
distress within a supportive environment. Individuals adopt a nonstereotypical Afro-American worldview that permits their anger to
subside and their modes of thought to become more flexible.
Internalization Stage:
Helm’s fourth stage of racial identity
consists of Black persons transcending
race, displaying a positive personal
identity. This stage involves integrating
one’s unique sense of self with one’s
acceptance of how Blackness influences
one’s life/racial identity. One no longer
rejects all Whites. Instead, they continue
to oppose racism and oppression, but
“reestablish relationships with individual
White associates who merit such
relationships.
http://www.understandingrace.org
http://www.racewire.org/archives/2009/04/fif
ty_years_later_black_girls.html
“I decided I would reconduct the ‘doll test’ initially
conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark, which was used in
the historic desegregation case, Brown vs.
Board of Education.”
- Kiri Davis, Teen Filmmaker
Educators / Doctor Kenneth
Clark and wife
Mamie Phillips Clark
“…Exclusion, rejection, and a stigmatized
status are not desired and are not voluntary
states. Segregation is neither sought nor
imposed by healthy or potentially healthy
human beings (Clark 1965).”
Brown vs. Board of Education
Cultural Doll Experiment
“The conclusion which I was forced to
reach was that these children in
Clarendon County, like other human
beings who are subjected to an obviously
inferior status in the society in which they
live, have been definitely harmed in the
development of their personalities; that
the signs of instability in their
personalities are clear, and I think that
every psychologist would accept and
interpret these signs as such (Clark 1954).”
Integrative awareness Stage:
According to Helms, a person who arrives at this
fifth level of Black identity formation has the
“capacity to value one’s own collective identities
as well as empathize and collaborate with
members of other oppressed groups (Helms,
1995). At this “most sophisticated” level, a
person is able “to express a positive racial self
and to recognize and resist the wealth of
practices that exist in one’s environment to
discourage positive racial self-conceptions and
group expression” (Helms, 1995).
White Racial Identity
Development
In Helms’s six-level White model, acquiring racial identity is
“a linear process of attitudinal development in which the
White person potentially progresses through a series of
stages differing in extent to which they involve
acknowledgement of racism and consciousness of
Whiteness…” (Helms, 1990).
Contact Stage:
This is the earliest stage entered when
a White person first encounters the
idea of Black people, either through
direct experience or through such a
medium as a parent speaking about
Blacks or a storybook or television
program that includes Black
characters…. may include naïve
curiosity, uneasiness, or fear of
Blacks... gradually begins judging
Blacks as individuals and not as
symbols of a racial stereotype.
Disintegration Stage:
• This stage is characterized by people’s conscious awareness of their
Whiteness, and awareness accompanied by a disturbing recognition of
moral dilemmas, such as those described by Dennis (1981, p.78) as:
• The desire to be a religious or moral person versus the recognition that
to be accepted by Whites one must treat Blacks immorally;
• The belief in freedom and democracy versus the belief in racial
inequality;
• The desire to show love and compassion versus the desire to keep Blacks
in their place at all costs;
• The belief in treating others with dignity and respect versus the belief
that Blacks are not worthy of dignity or respect;
• The belief that each person should be treated according to his/her individual
merits versus the belief that Blacks should be evaluated as a group without
regard to individual merits and talents.
Reintegration Stage:
White’s lingering feelings of guilt and anxiety
from the previous disintegration period are
now recast as fear and anger toward Black
people… may be expressed passively by
avoiding contact with Blacks and by seriously
discussing race relations only with people who
also hold Blacks in low regard. As soon as
Whites begin to question their idealized
definitions of Whiteness and the justness of
racism in any of its forms, they are ready for
the next stage.
Pseudo-Independent or liberal
stage:
Whites begin to doubt that Blacks
are innately inferior to
Whites/admit that they themselves
have been contributing to racism by
their attitude of White superiority/
redefine their own racial identity.
Whites who gain sufficient
satisfaction and a reduction of guilt
during this stage are prepared to
rise the immersion/emersion level.
Immersion/Emersion stage:
In search for racial identity, Whites often
immerse themselves in accounts of
other Whites who have progressed from
a White-superiority racial identity to a
belief system that judges people’s social
status and worth on individuals’
personal qualities rather than on their
racial category. “Changing Black people
is no longer the focus of Whites’
activities, but rather the goal of
changing White people becomes salient
(significant) (Helms, 1990).
Autonomy Stage:
A pinnacle of Helms’s racial-identity is
reached. Whites no longer feel
compelled to exploit, idealize, or
disparage other people on the basis
of their race, national origin, gender,
religion, or social class. The
autonomous White wishes learn from
other cultural groups, seeks out
instances of racial and other types of
oppression, and takes action to
combat prejudice and exploitation.
Racial-Identity Development of
Other Nonwhites:
• By 1995, Helms had updated her theory by extending it to include
“people of color.”
•
…in the United States, the term people of color refers to those
people whose ancestry is at least in part African, Asian, Indigenous,
and/or combinations of these groups and/or White or European
ancestry. Even a cursory overview of the history of race (rather than
ethnic) relations in the United States…reveals that peoples of the so
designated groups have been subjected to similar deplorable political
and economic conditions because they were not perceived to be “pure”
White (Helms, 1995, p. 189).
• Helms generalized her five-level model of Black-identity development to
encompass a diversity of other non-White-European cultural groups.
Critics have questioned whether such an extension of her Black-identity
theory is warranted.
A Pacific Islander’s Experience
Tupuai Lolotai, 16 - Family moved to California
5 years ago from American Samoa
Social position Variables:
Social-class status changed when family immigrated.
In Samoa, family was considered middle class, owned land, father
worked for government.
In California, social status declined- father now loading cargo onto ships,
mother pt. time Housekeeper. Rent “moderately run down” three
rooms in apartment building in local Samoan community.
Racism
Outside Samoan neighborhood, Tupauai family often regarded with suspicion leading
to:
a) In parents receiving credit/bank loans
b) Child not being invited to homes of classmates
c) Child being considered likely perpetrator of scuffles with classmates, vandalism,
petty
theft.
bro'Town chronicles the misadventures of five
teenagers (2004)
Segregation and promoting/inhibiting
environments
A. When family came to California, wished to live near friends /relatives.
B. People outside Samoan community, by bringing negative prejudicial attitudes
to their contacts with newcomers, tended to alienate Lolotai family
C. Only settings which family encounters non-Samoans is parents’ workplace and
child’s school.
Adaptive Culture
Differences between Samoan and Californian customs
influenced Tupuai’s School career
1.
2.
3.
4.
Authority
Language skills
Musu
Cooperative ventures
Samoan culture is multi-level – extended family (aiga), the patriarch (chieftain),
the village chieftain and his talking chief, the district chieftain and his talking chief.
Samoan children are taught to obey those in authority
At home, (California) Tupuai’s family members speak Samoan. When at school,
Tupuai speaks, writes, reads only English (expected to master two difficult languages)
Samoan society is a communal type (a notion of group ownership). This attitude causes
Tupuai problems in California. North American custom strongly emphasizes sanctity of
Personal private property. (Don’t borrow anyone’s stuff without asking).
Tupuai borrows a notebook or pen without asking… he is accused of stealing and
considered a suspect when something goes missing.
Musu
The meaning of the Samoan word musu is approximated in English using
such words as bored, irritable, not up to it, kind of sick, distressed,
fed up, and dissatisfied.
In islander’s tradition, feeling musu is an acceptable reason for getting up late,
being absent from school, not going to work, avoiding routine responsibilities.
So – when Tupuai neglects to hand in a homework assignment, misses class –
Musu is not an option. Here it would be viewed as nonsense.