Many children end up in foster care or adopted for no more reason than poverty.  A recent suggestion was if stipends that go to foster care could be redirected to parents working hard to keep their children.

Definitely, a single mom can feel stuck in a never-ending cycle of poverty, constantly worried that one financial emergency will send everything tumbling down.

In 2014 there were 46 million poor people in the U.S., and millions more hovering right above the poverty line.  A single mom may live in a cozy two-bedroom apartment and have food, furniture and toys for her child and still be very much at risk.  That apartment may not be located in a very safe place to live.  Yet subsidized housing may be all she can afford.

I was such a single mom at one time in my life.  Most of my paycheck went to rent, food, child care costs so I could work, gas and pediatrician bills.  What drove me to leave my daughter with her paternal grandmother was – so I could try and earn a higher standard of living.  I didn’t have a lot of hope for the future, if I stayed in the situation I was in.

If you’re poor, it may be in every aspect: emotionally, support-wise and family-wise.  And even when there is family support ?  As in grandparents raising several grandchildren as their own of which I do know more than a few.  Heck I turned to a grandparent myself in my own dire time of need.

And the strain on children of living with adults who are overwhelmed by life or who don’t have the skills they need to raise their children because they themselves came from troubled homes only compounds the core problem of poverty.

Poor families today are more isolated from neighbors, work, family – all of the social networks that help people through life.  There has to be a better way than the business as usual way we have now.