Making Ends Meet
With first-hand accounts and detailed financial data, Making Ends Meet tells the real story of the challenges, hardships, and survival strategies of America's poorest families. If this country's efforts to improve the self-sufficiency of female-headed families is to succeed, reformers will need to move beyond the myths of welfare dependency and deal with the hard realities of an unrewarding American labor market, child care for single mothers who work, and the true cost of subsistence living. Making Ends Meet is a realistic look at a world that so many would change and so few understand.
In this book, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein interviewed nearly four hundred welfare and low-income single mothers from cities in Massachusetts, Texas, Illinois, and South Carolina over a six-year period.
Making Ends Meet demonstrates compellingly why the choice between welfare and work is more complex and risky than is commonly recognized by politicians, the media, or the public.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Single Mothers, Welfare, and Low-Wage Work
Chapter 2: Making Ends Meet on a Welfare Check
Chapter 3: Why Don't Welfare-Reliant Mothers Go to Work?
Chapter 4: Making Ends Meet at a Low-Wage Job
Chapter 5: Why Some Single Mothers Choose to Work
Chapter 6: Survival Strategies
Chapter 7: Differences Among Mothers
Chapter 8: The Choice Between Welfare and Work
Appendix A. Interview Topics
Appendix B. Regression Results
Notes
References