Low-income families face many unique challenges that are both a cause and an effect of poverty, said Dr. Kathryn Edin at the 2017 Marjorie Pay Hinckley Lecture. Child support, for instance, troubles many fathers in poverty because it places high demands on them while affording them few rights concerning their kids. Many of them believe that the system actually makes it harder to provide by punishing them if they are late on payments in ways that impair their ability to make money (for example, by taking away driver’s licenses or work licenses).
Dr. Edin cited student debt as another cause and effect of poverty. Roughly 70% of teens make it to college, she said, but not all of them graduate, simply because they can’t afford their tuition. This leaves many people with debt and worthless credentials.
But worse than those things are instability, in which parents move through continuous cycles of breaking up and then repartnering, and complexity, in which step- and half-siblings join the family unit. In fact, 80% of children born to unmarried parents experience instability, complexity, or both by age 5. “Moving the needle on mobility from poverty must include the family contexts into which children are born and raised,” Dr. Edin said.
There is a surprising preventive solution to these problems, according to Dr. Edin, a sociologist who describes herself as an “intensely hopeful person.” She has studied low-income families for decades. She’s written several books on topics that include single mothers and their sources of income, as well as fathers who raise children in tough neighborhoods. One of her major research projects includes a longitudinal study that observed 150 children from low-income neighborhoods in Baltimore, and this is where she found most of the data she discussed during her lecture.
She cited what she calls ‘SPARKS,’ or ‘Supported Pathways through the Arts, Recreation, Knowledge, and Schools,’ as an intervention that can keep adolescents from becoming parents at a young age and from establishing patterns of instability and complexity in their future families. According to her ethnographic research in Baltimore, teens who found a passion fared better and found access to resources that could get them out of poverty. And according to randomized control trials done by other researchers, men from low-income neighborhoods who attended career academies instead of traditional high schools were 33% more likely to be married, 46% more likely to be a custodial parent, and 30% more likely to live independently with a long-term partner and child.
And empowering adolescents to move out of poverty involves helping them find their passions and then supporting those passions unconditionally. “SPARKS are things that give adolescents a sense of meaning and identity,” Dr. Edin said. “SPARKS are the ‘because’ that can interrupt haphazard processes of family formation.”
Dr. Edin shared three stories of Baltimore teens who found their SPARKS. Vicky, for example, realized that she loved birds, especially pigeons. She began raising her own pigeons in her backyard, and she set goals to take them flying in every part of the city. Bob, a bright young man, realized he loved anime after watching Pokemon on TV. His new passion motivated him and introduced him to like-minded peers, who became his friends. And Cody, a teenager often stopped by the police on his way to school, decided to become institutionally involved with the police. He joined the police athletic league and later the police academy, earning medals and participating in competitions while still in high school.
While it was good for Vicky to find a solitary passion that kept her going, and while it was great for Bob to find an identity project that connected him to subgroups, Dr. Edin said it’s best for teens to find SPARKS that link them to institutions, like Cody did. This gives them access to the support they need to succeed.
And as people learn to couple positive youth development projects, like SPARKS, with birth control efforts, teens will be more successful in escaping poverty, Dr. Edin said. They will no longer experience many of the problems that their parents did.
There is hope, then, and we can work on these problems through strategies that are still waiting to be discovered and implemented. SPARKS provides one bridge that leads people out of poverty, Dr. Edin said, and she believes that BYU students can find more solutions to improve people’s lives and to make their families happier. It will take work, but it can and should be done.