Overcoming Poverty & Hopeful Defiance
By: Jenny Anderson
Tags: Defiance, Poverty, Learned Helplessness, Children, Research

I remember the first time I realized I was “poor.” It was 8th grade and I had just moved back to my parent’s very small hometown with my mom and younger brother. We lived in a small one-bedroom trailer with an addition (if you can even call it that) to make it into a two-bedroom. There was no central heat or air, no washer or dryer, and my room could only fit a twin bed and didn’t even have a door. The walls were faux wood paneling and the carpet felt sticky. It didn’t just feel sticky, it was sticky — the kind of sticky that would stain your socks black-brown. It smelled like mildew and cigarette smoke mixed with my mamaw’s old perfume. It was a far cry from new the two-story homes I’d lived in before, but there we were, a family of three living in what everyone at my school called “the crackerjack box.”

Everything I’d known up until then pointed to being middle class — nice homes, new clothes, a happy family, and lots of fun with my parents on the weekends, but in middle school that all changed. My mom got laid off, my dad was medically discharged from the Navy, my brother was born, and the cracks in my parent’s relationship became giant canyons which led to a nasty divorce, foreclosed homes, repossessed cars, and lost trust.

My mom was as quick to call me an ungrateful snob as she was to force me to watch my brother for free after school, and my dad would go months at a time without checking in or seeing us in order to avoid paying child support. I found myself living in limbo, caught between being a teenager and parenting my brother. My best friends got used to him tagging along with us. There were even rumors he was mine.

My story is interesting because I grew up knowing both worlds, but mostly remember being stuck somewhere between having Goodwill Christmases and skipping lunch so I could buy Sonic drinks to fit in with friends after school. I envied my friends who always had trendy clothes and money for O’Charley’s and bowling on Saturdays. I was jealous of their big nice homes filled with loving families and afternoon snacks. I would sometimes pretend I was one of them, too, but I knew I lived somewhere on the fringe and although they didn’t say it, I was sure they knew it, too.

Growing up “poor” felt a certain way for me, but its long-term impact has been the most remarkable thing to evaluate. I’ve spent years of my adult life making minimum wage, living on public assistance, drowning in debt, and (for a time) even living in a motel. I’ve fallen down and gotten stuck more times than I care to admit and until a few years ago, lived in constant fear that things could go backward at any time. Many times, I doubted my ability to do any better.

This is something that psychologists have called “Learned Helplessness.” This article from Very Well Mind puts it best, “repeated experiences that bolster these feelings of helplessness and hopelessness can result in growing into adulthood ultimately feeling that there is nothing one can do to change his or her problems.”

It made me wonder if experiencing poverty played out like this with me, a strong-willed, stubborn, hyper-ambitious, Type A, how has it played out with others? What were the impacts? And most importantly, how can we make sure future generations avoid the trap?

So, like any well-meaning person on a mission to solve the world’s problems, I took to the internet to find out, calling on help from internet strangers and educator friends so I could better understand.

What is poverty?

I’m not sure that most people would have considered my family “poor” after those first few years of recovering from divorce. I think we hid it well for the most part. To be honest, I wasn’t sure that anyone really knows what poverty looks like, so I asked, and the answers were surprising.

While there are some consistencies in how people define poverty like lack of food or basic income, affordable housing, inability to meet living expenses, and even being on welfare or public assistance, there were many variations of definitions. Examples include:

“Having an income of less than $1000 a month”

“Living paycheck to paycheck.”

“Making less than $35,000 a year.”

When defined by the US Department of Heatlh & Human Services, poverty level is a pretty low bar. For a family of four, having an income of $26,400 is considered at the poverty line. When divided into quintiles, the bottom 20% of American Households earn $25,600 or less. To put that into perspective, let’s look at common household expenses:

Granted, not every family will have these expenses, but if these are averages for the most common monthly living expenses, the bottom 40% of US households could not meet basic living expenses. While it’s easy to say that the heads of household could get a better job or make better decisions on spending, ultimately it’s the children who suffer most from being low income.

Effects of Child Poverty on Kids & Adults

When adults who experienced poverty as children were asked “In what ways did being ‘poor’ impact you as a child?”, there were many consistencies:

mental health issues (anxiety, depression, self esteem, shame, embarrassment)

lack of healthcare & dental care

food scarcity & going hungry

extremes like “always” and “never”

lack of clothing

These were the experiences of children. If your thoughts of people experiencing poverty are limited to the stereotypes of drug addicts, lazy rednecks, and welfare queens, it’s time for a wakeup call. Here are some quick stats:

Again, I want to remind you that children have no authority to change their position but are the most affected and those effects take a major toll on how a child perceives their situation.

Overwhelmingly, children who experience poverty are more likely to question their potential and feel out of control of their future. Remarkably, despite their pessimism, they still remain optimistic and hopeful for their future.

Much like children remained hopeful despite their very negative perceptions of what they could control, adults answered similarly about their current abilities. Despite believing the things that lead to success — education and good paying jobs — are out of reach, and agreeing that poverty is not a temporary condition, they still believed in their ability to succeed.

Defiance

This led me to a very interesting realization — helplessness does not equal hopelessness.

I thought back to my conversations with a friend who works as a high school teacher in rural North Carolina. We were discussing the differences between children who “get out” and those who do not. “What’s the difference?” I asked, “Defiance.” she said.

It gives me chills thinking about it now. I thought about my own success and what motivated me — proving my mother wrong. During our last conversation, she told me I was worthless, afraid, addicted to food and attention, insecure, and selfish. Her last letter to me wasn’t any better. This is what inspired me, but it took a long time, years of abuse, guilt, and shame, to get to that point. I wanted to know how I could’ve gotten there sooner.

I dug into the stories from the survey as well as conversations and realizations throughout my research journey and found that there are four quadrants that most people who have experienced poverty fall into, and only one that defies the odds — Hopeful Defiance.

Where do we go from here?

Overcoming “Learned Helplessness” is generally achieved in five ways:

Embrace Change

Get Perspective

Set Goals

Achieve Success

Consider a Different Viewpoint

When I first started this project, I thought the answer was obvious — provide children with mentorship opportunities, let the mentors help guide and shape the next generation. Easy. Boom. Done. The problem is that it makes the very broad assumption that mentors are easily accessible and these children have access, ability, and perspective to make this work. That’s simply not the case.

First, we must assign the responsibility of raising children out of poverty, but with so many factors and people involved in a child’s life, who takes ownership of that? Overwhelmingly, respondents believe that it’s a parent's responsibility to teach children how to be “successful, financially stable adults”.

If parents are struggling in those areas, how can we possibly expect them to set the right examples for their children? What if we focused on what actually makes someone a “successful, financially stable adult” — careers, education, and job training. Then where does the responsibility lie? In stark contrast, most people said teachers and counselors should own that. And when asked what the best delivery method was? School Curriculum.

When discussing possible solutions with an Education Support Specialist with the Department of Children's Services, she confirmed that programs be intertwined with the school curriculum. Now, we’re not talking about some cutesy, once a semester career fair or life skills roleplay, but making career exploration and educational opportunities as repetitive a part of the school curriculum as math, literature, and science, starting from kindergarten and extending through graduation.

Some ideas of what a potential curriculum integration could look like:

Using geography classes as a way to expose students to colleges, universities, and campus cultures they may not otherwise know about

Incorporating money management & budgeting for college into math curriculum, think of a “Math for Modern Society” framework

Job exploration via computer labs and literature assignments

Food budgeting as part of health & wellness

But how? Completely overhauling the education system isn’t going to happen any time soon and educator resources are stretched thin, so the solution also needs to be an easy, inexpensive, low-effort one. Some possible ideas are:

Open source a curriculum

Work with a team of educators to self-publish a curriculum and distribute it for free

Create an assumptive culture where counselors don’t ask “What are you doing after high school?” but “Where are you going to college?”

The Cost of Doing Nothing

I’m not an educator, psychologist, or even remotely qualified to build out an entire curriculum to inspire Hopeful Defiance, but I am one of those students who could have benefited from it. It took years for me to have the courage and perspective to defy my mother’s expectations, to even understand that there were alternatives to the only life I’d ever known — survival. And there are countless people out there who have suffered the same way, and arguably, in much, much worse ways.

It is no longer acceptable to sit back and allow this to happen. We can’t depend on politicians to drive change. Supporting parents via assistance is not driving change fast enough for our poor youth, and there are countless children who aren’t living in poverty but are still learning the paycheck to paycheck habits of their parents.

I’ll leave you with one final story that proves the risks are too great.

One interviewee told me a story of a young boy who was being evaluated for special needs classes. As part of the process, they were asking him questions about himself, his family, and what he aspired to be when he grew up. Confidently, he said “Oh, I’m going to draw!” and the teachers, eager to uncover and cultivate his passion for art began asking if he liked other kinds of art, too, and “What do you like to draw?!” The boy, with a confused look on his face, said he did not like painting… or coloring… or even drawing.

“What do you mean?” asked the teacher, to which the boy replied, “I’m going to draw a check, just like my momma does.”

At 9-years-old, this boy had given up, he had no idea there were other options, no hope or idea that things could be better, just unwavering confidence in a system that isn’t made for success, but for survival.

Call to Action

If you’re interested in getting this off the ground, I need your help. I’m looking for child advocates, teachers, counselors, curriculum design specialists, and anti-poverty enthusiasts to help improve the solution and make a difference. For more information, please send me an email at JennyNAnderson@gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Interested in digging into the data & research?