The Unwritten Rules of Generational Poverty
Posted: Wednesday, December 31, 2008
by Tex Norman
I live in Oklahoma and all my family on my wife's side have their roots in this area. Oklahoma City and Tulsa are major, urban, progressive cities, but within this a sort of survivor mentality still exists because of the Great Depression, and the "black blizzard" dustbowl days. Times were very tough for the people of Oklahoma , and many fled the state for California thinking things would be better there. If you haven't read Grapes of Wrath and you want to understand the plight of the Okie refugees then this book will give you a deep understanding of their experience. There is a residual thought common among Okies that goes something like this:
This " just enough to get by" thinking is not limited to the survivors of the dustbowl. Setting the bar low for one's life is true of all people who have a heritage of poverty, and a long history of setbacks, bad breaks, and misfortunes.
What I am starting to figure out is that there is a poverty language and a poverty mode of thought that is common to most of the poor and it both explains their behaviors and decision making, and indicates those areas that must be addressed if the poor is ever going to break the poverty life cycle.
A upper or middle class person who is suddenly poor may be worse of than someone who has been poor their entire life.
The generational poor (families who have lived in poverty for at least two generations) know stuff that middle class folks don't:
which churches provide meals for the indigent.
how to make a weapon out of the stuff around you
how to live without electricity, and running water
how to move residence within a few hours
how to obtain life services: food stamps, free clinics, etc.
how to can get by without a car
and they are experts at bartering.
But middle class folk know things about which the generational poor are clueless.
how to get their kids on a soccer team
how to set a table properly
how to dress for a job interview
how to built a positive credit history
why the appearance of your residence matters
There are sets of unwritten rules, automatic rules that govern the behaviors of poor people. The poor may not understand these unwritten rules but the rules govern all their thinking and behavior. [Yes, there are different unwritten, automatic rules that govern the thinking and behaviors of the middle class and the rich.]
If you are part of the generational poor then your thinking is limited by the box of automatic thinking and you may not be able to think outside this box.
One of the biggest difficulties in getting out of poverty is learning how to handle money. How can you manage what you have never had? If you gave me fifty head of cattle and told me to manage this small herd I would be in trouble, and my cows would be in even bigger trouble. How can I manage cattle when I have zero experience with cows? The concept of using money for security purposes is not a concept familiar to the poor, but it is well known among the middle class.
Poor people believe. "Life happens to me."
It doesn't occur to the poor that they have any control over their life. If your family and everyone you know has been stuck in substandard housing, and low wage dead end drudgery jobs then you grow up knowing that you are going to live in a dump and work your butt off for not enough money and that is just the way it is.
You have probably seen TV documentaries and dramas that depict gang kids who say that they don't expect to live into their 20s because of the violence and gang activities in their neighborhood.
I once taught school in a town listed by the State as an Oklahoma Ghost town. They bused in farm kids. The population of the school was over 400, but the population of the town was less than 200. I had kids that were teenagers and they had never been further than a 2 hour drive from their homes. They could not imagine going to college, or living in New York City . These were not options for them because they could not wrap their heads around the idea that such a thing was possible.
Poor people focus on pitfalls and brick walls.
Working with the generational poor can be frustrating because they argue with you about their options. Every suggestion you make that might help them get out of the generational poverty they have been born into is met with reasons why your suggestion won't work for them.
Taking control of your life, creating the life you live is wasted effort to them because everyone they know has crashed into the same walls that box them in and no one they know has ever broken through so why should they even try. The effort is doomed to fail before it begins. The generational poor can be surrounded by opportunity, but all they see are pitfalls and brick walls.
Poor people choose to get paid by the hour.
There are jobs out there moving from seniority pay to merit pay, and this change creates some heated debates among the workers. Poor people prefer to be paid by the hour and by their seniority. Pay based on time is something you can count, and therefore it is something you can count on. Rich people choose to get paid based on results.
My grandfather use to tell a story about a secretary he had at the bank. She came in late and said she would stay late to make up her time. At the end of the day he saw the secretary had put everything on her desk away and she was applying nail polish to her nails. This infuriated my Banker grandpa. She thought she was paid for BEING at work, not for completing work. In her mind her job was time, not what she could produce.
People stay poor because they don't know there is a choice and if they did know the choices were there they would have no one to teach them the hidden rules of the un-poor.
Some poor do escape
The people who do escape poverty do so for one of four reasons:
1. People break out of poverty because they obtain a goal or vision for something they want to be or to have.
I had a close friend who was raised poor who tells a story about mowing lawns on a hot day and he was very thirsty. He asked the homeowner for a glass of water and was told to just drink some water out of the water hose. He called this his Gone with the Wind moment where he said to himself, As God is my witness I'll never be treated this way when I get older. I'm sure this was not the only incident that served to motivate him, but it was the example he gives for his vision of being treated with dignity and not being a worthless lump of humanity that didn't deserve a glass of water, but could just drink out of a hose.
2. People break out of poverty because they are in such a painful situation that they are willing to try other things in an effort to escape their pain.
I worked with someone raised in poverty who watched their mother die because they could not afford to provide her with medical care. This may sound incredulous to those living in the middle and upper class. Well off people say, "Well, the poor can just go to the ER and they have to take care of you." This is only partially true. The ER is required to stabilize you and then discharge you. The prescriptions they give you may be too costly to have them filled. People really do die because they can't afford to pay for their medical care. My peer suffered with her mother until she died and then made a commitment that she would do whatever she had to do to have health insurance.
The odd thing is that sometimes a tragedy will motive one person to break out of a rut and struggle to improve their plight and another person will be crushed by a similar tragedy and surrender to a life of hopelessness and deprivation.
3. People break out of poverty because they obtain a mentor who shows them a different way or convinces them that they could live a different life.
It is really true that if you have never had anyone show you how to work, or why an education can help you in life, or the value of having a savings account, then you just don't know how to work, why you should go to school, or why anyone would bother to save money when they could spend it.
4. People break out of poverty because they have a specific talent or ability that provides an opportunity for them to move from poverty to some higher class.
This last one refers to the poor kid who makes it big because he can play basketball or football, or can rap, or sing, or run, or act. If you have some talent that is better than anyone else and if that skill can sell tickets, or records, or be used by advertisers then you can break out of poverty.
I remember once, in that little Ghost Town school I taught in, that we had this great basketball player. This kid was like Michael Jordan for us. He seemed to fly when he was making a run at the basket. The ball seemed to love his hands. The baskets were always hungry to receive the ball when he made his shots. This young poor black kid was sure he was going to make it as a basketball player. The problem was he was only 5 feet tall. He was a great player for a tiny little country school, but his size made it certain he was never going to make it to the pros. A few years after leaving that school I heard that this young man was in prison for various crimes.
Talent does get people out of poverty, but the numbers are limited. It is because few people have that level of talent that makes it possible for a lucky few to use talent to get out of poverty.
The poor can break out of their cycle of poverty. It is possible. It not only can happen, it does happen, all the time. The problem is that s elf-image, episodic memory, fatalistic attitude, and lack of motivation make it difficult for the generational poor to see the need to change, or to believe that change is possible.
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Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)I liked the article I think the All I gotta to do is just enough to get by and "Life happens to me." are very true for the poor I've seen.
I'm currently mentoring someone who has no idea how to use money. This person has a well-paying, salaried job, yet at the moment is in a great deal of debt and has no savings. It's taken years of coaching for her to get to the point where she actually keeps track of her bank account and plans ahead for expenditures. Part of the problem is her Attention Deficit Disorder, which makes impulse control very difficult for her. People with ADD often don't think about the consequences of their actions until the deed is done -- their lives are a series of runaway trains, constantly derailing. I've read that a vast majority of criminals in prison have ADD. I wonder how many of the poor are similarly affected?It can be immensely frustrating to help these people when it seems they can't or won't stop doing foolish things. I've had to stop mentoring another person because she simply refused to implement any of my suggestions -- a classic example of the defeatist excuse-making highlighted in this article.With so many people in our society clueless about handling money, perhaps our schools should focus on it more. But we need to help the parents as well as the kids, or it's a lost cause.
I enjoyed this article. It hit the nail on the head
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