Sublime

In the 1960s and 1970s, destitute families often relied on extended kin networks to get by. Poor black families were “immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,” wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did lit

Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that.

an unmarried, low-income, undereducated teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself.

A study of eighteen rich democracies found that single mothers outside the United States were not poorer than the general population.

Many of our welfare policies, too, have an antifamily design. Supplemental Security Income checks are docked if recipients live with relatives. A mother can lose her rental assistance or public housing unit if she allows the father of her children to live with her in violation of her lease. Households receive a higher total allotment of food stamps

Wouldn’t we prefer a country where all family types were protected from want, where single parenthood didn’t so often come with a poverty sentence?[42]

Another study has shown that low maternal education is the single most powerful factor leading to criminality.