Rosanna Hertz The Welfare Trap

The Welfare Trap

Women, namely single mothers, on welfare are trapped in the system by children, job mobility, and lack of funds to create a better life for themselves and their children, which ultimately leads to years of struggle to break free from a system that neither benefits nor supports the women they were created to help. The welfare system has been infamously labeled as a "free money system" for unmotivated women with children they no longer wish to care to raise. This social stigma has burdened those who truly need government support to survive and get back on their feet. Ironically, welfare does very little to help woman move up the social latter, forcing women to seek alternative sources of income, housing, child-care,
Yet single mothers struggle to juggle either working or finding a job and care for a child. In Rosanna Hertz's Working to Place Family at the Center of Life: Dual-Earner and Single-Parent Strategies, she talks about single mothers and what they have to go through in order to take care of their children. Women who work are extremely dedicated to family because they work around caring for a family and the primary source of income for the family is through their job. Because these women have no second person or partner to help them raise the child/ children then they must work twice as hard in order to provide their child with daycare or look for other outside sources to help care for the child while at work. "Unlike the dual-earner couples, these single mothers have fewer resources internal to the family to call on in trying to cultivate external resources- in broader kin and friendship networks- to help them put family first" (254, Hertz, FF). Women also work multiple jobs in order to provide for their children and keep family at the center of their lives. Most women who work multiple jobs or extremely long hours hardly get to see their children. "Her child spent four days a week being cared for at her mother's home and three days a week at her own home. Without her mother's help, the cost would have made it impossible to remain employed" (255, Hertz, FF). Long hours or no benefits, women must rely on other people to care for their children and end up losing quality time with their child because of work demands. Because women do not have that second person or partner to help share in the child rearing, they must create external relationships to help fill in that gap left behind by being a single mother. They must create "support networks" to raise a