Poverty Puzzle: Here's why both sides of the culture war are right

The long shadow
The long shadow

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Communities shape families and families shape children, but in the fight to bring economic mobility to poor and middle-class children in Chattanooga, the first step is the hardest.

BY JOAN GARRETT MCCLANE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MAURA FRIEDMAN

TONYA ROOKS TUGGED AT THE BOTTOM HEM of her red sweater dress and carefully covered her bouncing right knee as she waited in the lobby of a homeless shelter in Highland Park.

It was just before Christmas, and she expected a tough crowd that night. As she dabbed at the sweat on the back of her neck with a tissue, she prayed - in Jesus' name - for help.

In Hamilton County 43 percent of children were born to unwed mothers in 2013, and, nationally the share was roughly the same. The trend was driving poverty in places like Chattanooga, and Rooks was just one of many people working on the front lines to reverse it.

Her tack was different than most, though.

While nonprofits worried about fliers, food boxes, classes, health insurance, housing, education, birth control and the money to fund it all, Rooks worried about the ground game. Boots on the ground, she often said, was how the War on Poverty would be won.

THE MARRIAGE-POVERTY LINK

As marriage rates in America have declined, poverty has risen, and experts believe it is because children from single-parent, low-income homes are experiencing the compounding effects of multiple disadvantages.

For U.S. children, there is a strong link between parents' marital status and the likelihood of living in poverty.

Note: Based on children under 18. Data regarding cohabitation not available prior to 1990; in earlier years, cohabiting parents are included in "one parent." Source: Pew Research Center analysis of 1960-2000 decennial census, 2010 and 2014 American Community Survey and 2014 Current Population Survey

It took elbow grease and a willingness to enter into the constellation of lower-income neighborhoods that were scattered throughout the city - the places most middle-class people were scared to go.

For some local nonprofits, Rooks stepped in to do the heavy lifting. Thanks to lessons learned from her own years living below the poverty line, she had a way with struggling people, many realized. So organizations paid her to deliver their messages and hand out their fliers. That night in December she had come to the Room at the Inn shelter to talk about a local nonprofit called A Step Ahead that was offering free long-term, reversible birth control.

But she rarely stuck to the script she was paid to deliver. Those who sat on the city's nonprofit boards couldn't understand why some services went unused, but Rooks did. A lot of people in the inner city didn't think nonprofits helped at all, she said. Most who enrolled in classes to improve their employability left without the social connections to make their new skills worth the trouble, the poor explained to Rooks. Single, expectant mothers were offered free birth control, free prenatal care and free parenting classes, but received little support from nonprofits once their babies were born.

Chattanooga offered the poor a lot, but it almost never offered what the poor really needed, Rooks said.

Tonya Rooks talks to clients at Chattanooga Room in the Inn, a homeless shelter for women and children, about the benefits of family planning and the services offered by A Step Ahead, which provides long-term birth control for women who cannot afford it otherwise.

As Rooks waited to speak to the women that night, she listened to a shelter staff member wind through a list of stern reminders: Too many women were going braless in dirty sweats for prolonged periods of time at the shelter, and that had to end, the staff member warned, talking over the sound of screaming children down the hall. Languishing in bed and asking children to complete adult chores was also a no-no, the shelter staffer reminded them.

"Don't smoke in the front (of the shelter)," the staff member added before explaining how some donors might object to helping single mothers who buy cigarettes when they can't afford diapers.

When the poor seemed immovable, tough love was often the knee-jerk reaction, Rooks had come to learn.

The poor needed to make amends and prove themselves, many seemed to say. To Rooks, though, the poor were the ones who deserved a show of good faith, as well as a real hand up. Life wasn't always fair, Rooks agreed, and choices had consequences. But tough love, she had discovered, rarely generated much momentum once despair had set in.

"I know what you are thinking," she told the women after giving a talk about community services. "I remember sitting at a shelter, listening to people tell me I needed to do this and that, and thinking, 'I don't need this.'"

She knew what it was like to feel paralyzed, she explained. She knew what it was like to lose hope.

Chaotic and lonely childhoods cast long shadows and decades of isolation eroded community, families and trust, she said; and help, if it came at all, often arrived too late to do much good.

But even if their hard work had yet to translate to success, and even if the judgment poured out on the poor and their children felt cruel and seeded bitterness they couldn't ignore, they had to keep rolling the dice, she told them.

"I rent a house now. I have a car. I have a job."

Hope can come unexpectedly, she said, if eyes are open to see.

Before leaving the First Things First offices in Chattanooga, Tonya Rooks calls to get directions to the house of the family receiving donated gifts and food for Christmas.

Beginnings Matter

THE PROMISE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM  is upheld by a belief that there are no odds a good-hearted and hard-working child can't overcome.

Presidents rose from one-bedroom cabins, history teaches. High school dropouts, who began with nothing, sometimes died billionaires. Orphans and homeless people climbed to the top of industry.

"Luck is the dividend of sweat," said Ray Kroc, the son of Czech immigrants who bought the first McDonald's restaurant franchise and made it into a global fast-food company. "The more you sweat, the luckier you get."

But circumstances do matter, academics now know.

Parenting matters. Segregation matters. School quality matters. Community bonds matter. ZIP codes matter.

Children are shaped by families, but families are shaped by environments, research has proven.

THE LOSING GAME

The average level of household income at age 26 is $26,000. This table shows the percentage loss in income for children in low-income families growing up in these Southern counties.

Children born in Hamilton County fare worse than most other counties in the country, including most of the counties used for comparison by the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce.

Source: Equality of Opportunity Project by Harvard University, a data analysis by the Times Free Press.

Middle and upper-class parents believe in the brain's plasticity, and that genes, like clay, can be molded during early childhood and beyond. That is why so many pay for expensive day care, private schooling, tutoring and other things they deem enriching. That is why so many move their families into suburban neighborhoods with good schools. They want their children to be influenced by high achievers and leverage relationships. They also want their children to feel safe.

The big problem for Chattanooga, though, is that too many local children aren't growing up to feel safe, nurtured, supported and connected, and their isolation is causing poverty to snowball, research showed.

Many frustrated with the poor want struggling parents to wise up, make better choices and whip their kids into shape, but it isn't that simple,research explained. Of course, strong parentingwas one of the most powerful ways to right the course of a child's life, but strong parenting skills didn't materialize out of thin air, experts said.

Strong parents and strong families are the results of strong communities, according to a groundbreaking study published in 2015 by Harvard University. And, according to the study, Hamilton County doesn't really have a culture of supporting struggling families or bolstering disadvantaged children. In fact, poor children in Chattanooga would be better off financially as adults if they had been born in almost any other county in America, according to the study, which used decades' worth of anonymous tax data to show how a child's hometown can hurt or help their chances of making decent wages or getting married.

For example, if a poor child were to grow up in Hamilton County, instead of an average place, he or she would make $2,444.09 less than their peers elsewhere in America at age 26. The loss for children in average-income families is around $1,000. The average level of household income for Americans at that age is $26,000.

Yet, the children of the rich gain $364 by growing up in Hamilton County, compared with their peer in the average American county. A New York Times analysis of the data shows, as well, that Hamilton County is one of the best places in the country for the sons of top 1 percent to grow up. By age 26, they earn $2,740 more than the children of the very wealthy in the average place.

Race plays a role, the researchers said. However, communities that isolate blacks isolate poor whites and Hispanics, as well.

Many researchers predicted some form of political, social or economic upheaval if Chattanooga's rich kept getting richer, its poor continued to multiply and the middle-class shrank even further.

The birth rate among poor, single women was growing, while the birth rate among more educated single women was down, data showed, and it meant that the local burden of childhood poverty wouldn't be going away any time soon.

Still, change won't come from Washington, D.C., or from the pundits who drive the 24-hour news cycle,experts say.

"When the stork drops a child into his or her new home, the location of that drop will affect fundamentally the child's risk of facing poverty or segregation or experiencing reduced opportunities for mobility," a 2015 Stanford University report on poverty and inequality states.

The economic mobility of local children is a local fight, they argue. It is a battle won or lost, in part, by the daily decisions of women just like the ones sitting around the table at the Room in the Inn that night in December.

It is a battle won or lost by women just like Tonya Rooks.

Tonya Rooks reads over a draft of a paper for one of her classes at Cleveland State Community College while her younger son, Terrance Marbury, gets a drink from the kitchen in December 2015. Rooks has gone back to school for her associate degree in social work.

The Mother Lode

ROOKS SPENT HER EARLY CHILDHOOD in a well-kept, predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood in Brainerd.

It was a middle-class life her single mother, Mary, scraped and clawed to get for her children. It was also a success story that defied the welfare-seeking mother narrative used by conservatives to argue against President Lyndon Johnson's

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist later elected to the U.S. Senate, stirred controversy when he published his infamous report, "

In response, some argued that African-Americans had been trampled on for centuries. Suggesting that black parents were to blame for their children's lower levels of achievement seemed a convenient excuse for the South, which had systematically denied African-Americans basic economic and educational rights, his opponents said. "Blaming the victim," a phrase often repeated throughout the culture wars, was coined by a social scientist who wrote a book in response to Moynihan.

But Moynihan gave voice to another fury, too.

Southerners, especially those who considered themselves evangelical, had come to resent academia. Many resented being told that their faith was fiction. Many who had fought to stay married and sacrificed to provide for their children didn't want to hear about sexual freedom and that it was fine to do whatever made them happy. Children needed married parents, they said.

In Chattanooga at least, reality was far more complicated.

Rooks' mother, Mary, hated the idea of staying on welfare and certainly didn't get pregnant because she wanted to be on the government dole. She had grown up in the public housing projects adjacent to Howard School in the 1960s, and all she ever thought about was getting out.

Rooks' grandparents, who had been denied rights as children and adults simply because they were black in the South, were not married. Her grandfather traveled with a gospel group, and her grandmother, who was often ill, died not long after Rooks' mother had her first baby at age 15.

Mary Rooks had nothing in terms of money, Tonya Rooks said, but she was smart.

Mary Rooks excelled in high school at Howard, and when she graduated she was at the top of her class and college ready, her daughter said. By then, she also had three children - Tonya being the baby.

The single mother had her eye on working in the medical field, not a fairy-tale romance, Tonya Rooks said. Nursing was a surefire way to earn enough money to buy a house and make a modest living for her children in the new Chattanooga where blacks and whites were beginning to coexist in the same schools and neighborhoods. Financial stability and independence was her ultimate goal. She didn't have time to wait for a capable male breadwinner to come around. At the time, most black men in Chattanooga were still suffering from the scourge of racial discrimination.

BIRTHS TO UNMARRIED MOTHERS

For 2004 through 2013 the highest percent of out-of-wedlock births was to mothers under 18 years of age. Those babies were at the greatest risk for negative social and economic consequences because of the fact that adolescent mothers very often lack education and job skills needed to succeed.

Source: Tennessee Department of Health, Division of Policy, Planning and Assessment.

But to provide materially, Mary Rooks couldn't give her children much of her time, either.

Working on her nursing degree, she would flit in and out, often leaving the children with neighbors willing to babysit. Mary Rooks didn't talk about her childhood or about how the rhetoric of feminism, free love and civil rights, which hit a fever pitch just as she was coming of age, shaped her thinking on marriage and family.

She always focused on moving forward, Tonya Rooks said.

After they left public housing and moved to Brainerd, which was still a collection of traditionally white neighborhoods, Mary Rooks held down a full-time job at Moccasin Bend Mental Health Institute, along with a part-time job at the Vance Road Women's Clinic, just to make sure she could pay the bills.

So, when Tonya Rooks started her first menstrual period or was bullied at school, she leaned on her older sister, who fed her, tucked her into bed at night and made sure her hair and clothes were right for school every day.

2016 POVERTY GUIDELINES

For the 48 contiguous states

Source: Equality of Opportunity Project by Harvard University and University of California at Berkeley.

They lived a comfortable life, but an anxious one, too, Tonya Rooks said. Although their mother wasn't around much to monitor or guide them, she had high expectations. If they didn't look busy, Mary Rooks would often force the children to read the encyclopedia aloud and write reports on different entries. They certainly never dared to make a noise while she was sleeping, Rooks said.

"We read lips because we were so afraid," she said.

Rooks said tensions in the house came to a head once she reached adolescence. She started smoking cigarettes, she said, and began running away whenever she feared her mother's rebuke for a bad grade or minor misstep. Eventually, she missed so many school days that she was forced to take the GED to graduate with her class at Brainerd High School.

When she drove out of Chattanooga and toward Nashville to start her first year of college at Tennessee State University, she left not knowing how much her mother's independent spirit has grafted to her own heart.

Tonya Rooks' home is just steps away from the church her father built and preached at for years.

Drifting

AT COLLEGE, ROOKS DID WELL.

Like her mother, she easily blended into a middle-class professional world.

In her medical records administration class, she earned B's. At the state capitol, she took a work-study position helping state lawmakers craft a new seatbelt law.

Replacing her intrauterine device, a form of long-term, reversible birth control known as an IUD, was on her to-do list. The device had expired and been removed before she left for college, but getting a new one was not a priority.

She hadn't expected to meet the nice guy she started dating her freshman year or to have sex with him. She hadn't expected the positive pregnancy test, or the severe sickness that washed over her during her first trimester and left her too ill to eat anything but canned corn, much less study and attend class.

Daughters of single mothers became single mothers at higher rates than women raised by married couples, statistics have shown, but researchers had struggled to understand why. What was clear, though, according tomultiple studies, was that almost all women had sex before marriage. Women such as Rooks were just more likely to get pregnant from it. They were also more likely to keep their baby.

Hoping to rebound and stay in school, even with a newborn, Rooks stayed in her Nashville apartment until she became so thin and frail from sickness that she was forced to drop out of school and return home.

"I was heartbroken," she said, remembering the drive back from Nashville.

CARELESS SEX, RISING POVERTY?


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