A Closer Look at Welfare Mom?

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A Closer Look at Welfare-Mom

What comes to mind when you hear the words "welfare mom?" Stupid? Lazy? Promiscuous? Immoral?

As a welfare mom, I attest to being none of the above. I live my life to a higher moral standard than I'd venture to guess most welfare-bashers do. I do not drink, do drugs, and rarely go for an evening out. For the entirity of my adult life, I've loved and been intimate with one man only. Along the way, I've worked and interned, even paying a babysitter in order to work for free, obtained an education, taken an active role in my children's lives, taken other needy children into my home as a foster mother, and lived the life of honesty, caring, and understanding that I expect my children to emulate.

Am I a woman trapped by welfare into a cycle of dependency that only imminent death will motivate me to break out of? Actually, I'm just caught in the moral chasm between the "family values" we so tout and our working definition of "personal responsibility" as meaning "economic viability and nothing else." In my moral code, actually raising my children takes the highest priority. Certainly, I desire and strive to be financially self-sufficient. Being independently wealthy wouldn't be half-bad, either. But I place a premium on my children, and as their sole provider, I feel obligated to invest in them an abundance of that preciouscommodity called time.

The strength of my mothering instinct should not be confused with an unwillingness or inability to work. In fact, as anyone who has stayed home with a young child understands, sometimes the toils of the office are a welcome relief compared to the back-breaking and unappreciated job of full-time parenting. During periods of unemployment, I have actively, if depressingly unsuccessfully, sought employment. But I've also resigned myself to sacrificing a high earnings potential and upward mobility in exchange for enough flexibility to be available when my children need me. It is useless to provide a moral compass if it's always out of sight.

As I see it, the primary problem with our public welfare debate is that the care-taking role has been so devalued, no one seems to question the goal of moving more mothers from the home to the workforce, but rather only the merits of the various means to that understood end.

We've come full circle since federal financial aid for single mothers began. Then motherhood was seen as a service to society and a subsidy was provided to allow that service to continue. Now the attitude is, if everyone else has their kids in daycare, why should poor mothers get the "luxury" of staying home? It only being right and fair that poor mothers miss their children's childhoods, and systematically abandon them to the care of strangers, if middle-class moms must (or think they must). The outsourcing of motherhood is in its final stages.

Parenting, when taken seiously, is a sacrifice. Every minute given to a child is a minute not given to yourself, your interests, your career, your financial stability. And giving it is not idle or irresponsible -- it is probably the hardest work one could ever undertake. It is vital to the success of that child, but can be fatal to a career