Welfare

Okay so this is interesting... I waited like three weeks to make this post (okay, not waited... just failed to remember to do it in all the craziness that has become my life), but anyway.. It's crazy that I waited because I just had an interesting situation happen concerning welfare last weekend. My friend for some reason mentioned welfare in reference to some girls we grew up with and their abuse of the system. "People like her live off of our tax money", etc,etc,etc. To which I had to stick up for that girl that we should have graduated that has four or five kids. I'm not at all saying that she was wrong completely, but I had to make her aware that not all situations are the same. While I am fully aware that there are people abusing the system, which is crap anyway, there are a lot of women who have no other options. My friend made the point that these women need to get off the couch and get a job, they can't be living off of us. I had to argue that my friend doesn't know the situation that these women are in. It is hard for my friends and me that are goign to be graduating to get jobs, I can't imagine what it would be like for a woman trying to take care of her children, being a single parent, and being jobless but trying to get a job. On one hand we want our children to be upstanding and part of a bright future, however, with little guidance from their mother who is forced to work a minimum wage job and random hours of the day to "support" their children the chances that these children will learn the correct ways to act in society are pretty slim.
My feelings about this topic have not always been what they are now. Like my friend, who clearly has never taken a class that picks apart the welfare system, I had these same preconceived ideas about what welfare means. My social work class opened my eyes to a lot of things that I would have never known.  As a single mother, there is no good option to the crisis. Get a job that pays poorly, spend little time with your children, and use your paycheck to pay for babysitting or daycare OR stay home with your children and give them the care that you can provide them.  Either way you have NO MONEY and NO RESOURCES.
I didn't really understand what the book was trying to argue... It was a lot of information, I will say however that as a child I was ALWAYS told that money is no object when it comes to happiness. I feel like, from what I understand, these roles of care and money are reversed (???) in this chapter. Women are trapped and limited in their decisions to provide care OR money to their children. Care=Money??
One thing that I learned in my social work class is that EVERYONE benifits from welfare, which is also a point I had to make to my irate friend. So let's not be so quick to make judgements on those who "use welfare" because we will all be there someday. Just another little tidbit about welfare that I thought I'd throw in there...:)