Poverty and Family Troubles: Mothers,Children,and Neoliberal “Antipoverty” Initiatives

Contesting Womanhood/Motherhood, Naturalizing Childhood

Underpinning Molyneux’s work, and indeed that of similar feminist critiques, is an important contestation of normative ideas about motherhood and, more broadly, a “troubling” of idealized views of the family (Ribbens McCarthy & Gillies, 2017). Molyneux (2006), for example, argues that ideas about self-sacrifice for child and family in the name of good motherhood pervade the design and implementation of Oportunidades. She contests assumptions that reproductive labor is “women’s work” and maternalist discourses which suggest that not only is this a reflection of a natural division of labor but it is one that women should, and do, desire to provide.

At the same time, however, globally hegemonic ideas about childhood lie at the heart of, and are reproduced by, her account. For instance, Molyneux (2006, p. 440) suggests that the program “has enabled low-income households to cope financially with the demands of school-age children” and “can help to tackle children’s educational deprivation.” Implicit in the use of the term “school-age children” is the idea that school is the site where certain human beings not just could, but should as a matter of essence, spend their time. This statement also takes for granted that such humans are determined, quite unproblematically, by chronological age. The chain of signifiers reproduces the familiar bundling of the triad child-education-school in a way that takes for granted that schools are the place where education for the young occurs, as opposed to in families, communities or places of work and that children are primarily objects of socialization and teaching, as opposed to contributors to their social worlds or learners alongside others in their communities. Similar assumptions about childhood populate Molyneux’s (2006, p. 438) discussion of care:

Men are not incorporated in any serious way, and no effort is made to promote the principle that men and women might share responsibility for meeting project goals, let alone for taking an equal share in caring for their children.

Her salient critique of the gendered nature of the way the program distributes responsibility, perhaps inadvertently, positions children as a homogenous group—“school-age children”—essentially in need of care.

My point here is not that children do not require care or that care is somehow undifferentiated across the life course, just as it is also differentiated in terms of abilities, unanticipated family troubles and structural vulnerabilities (Rosen & Newberry, 2018). Certainly, many children globally spend many of their waking hours in schools, and may find great satisfaction in schooling (Balagopalan, 2014). However, hegemonic discourses of the schooled child are just that: socially constituted ideologies and practices about childhood which, in this case, have their foundation in Euro American capitalist projects. Just as women are not naturally caregivers, with their place in the private space of the home, children are not presocial or antisocial beings in childcare or schools by any natural necessity.

As scholars of childhood point out, the mass scholarization of childhood, where learning is separated from labor and the family into specialized institutions, is a modern invention (Hendrick, 1997). The prevalence of age as a mechanism for categorizing and segregating populations is also a relatively recent phenomenon, albeit one that has achieved a fetishized status in both legal and popular discourse (Vitterbo, 2012). Shifting expectations as to the spaces in which children live their lives relate to the changing moral status of children, as Zelizer (1994) points out. Examining the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, she argues that children have been increasingly sacralized, moving from being valued for their contribution to family incomes and social reproductive labor to being viewed as “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.” Changes in the cultural status, and related normative assumptions about the “proper” place of childhood, are also deeply connected to the changing interests of industrialists, corporations, and state actors. These include political concerns for social order and “civilization,” with deep roots in colonial and middle-class anxieties (Gagen, 2007; Hendrick, 1997), and demands for workers with literacy and numeracy skills (Qvortrup, 1995). But they can also be linked to the production of subjectivities governed and disciplined by the punch card and routinized flows of abstract capitalist time or others grounded in the flexibilized nature of contemporary patterns of accumulation. This is not to suggest a straightforward economic determinism and progress narrative. Historical shifts in advanced capitalist countries cannot simply be mapped on to neocolonies/postcolonies, a point Balagopalan (2014) makes forcibly when grappling with the global spread of the schooled child. There are competing and contradictory interests across sectors, and a dynamism and vernacular to capitalist projects, and schooling is certainly linked to the production of differentiated laboring bodies. The overarching point here is that we cannot, with Molyneux, take the schooled child as an empirical or normative given, nor the neoliberal school as an unproblematic moral and political good.

Similarly, a large body of empirical data contradicts the notion that children are simply dependents, or the passive recipients of care, an idea which also pervades Berlant’s more philosophical exploration of the “investing in childhood” paradigm. This literature highlights the active role that children play in caring for siblings, peers, and adults (e.g., Abebe, 2007; Robson, 2004), not just as a result of economic necessity in conditions of impoverishment or because of the ways that crisis such as AIDS/HIV, war, and migration may reshape family’s lives. In many cases, children’s participation in caring relations is viewed as an appropriate and desirable activity, bringing increased intimacy, status, and benefits to the family as well as fulfilling children’s relational responsibilities (e.g., see Bartos, 2012; Magazine & Sánchez, 2007). Care here is viewed as a set of interdependent exchanges between generations, and an existential and social requirement of all.

In pointing to these cases, my purpose is not to valorize caring labor or children’s role within in, given that caring relationships can simultaneously be sites of control, exploitation, or justification for familization of reproductive labor. Balagopalan (in press) is again instructive here. She makes the point that we must attend to the afterlife of colonialism in understanding spatially specific constructions of childhood. Care for the “dependent” child took on a more “extractive logic” in the colonies, with health and education services linked to the production of laboring bodies rather than protecting the innocents. Crucially, in contrast to Molyneux’s implicit assumptions, children are far more than simply dependents and infants’ caring needs are often overextended to all those positioned as children (Rosen & Newberry, 2018).

Making these points is partially a matter of setting the record straight, so to speak, but it is also to indicate the intellectual and political ramifications of doing otherwise. Children who are not in schools, or who are recognized as providing caring labor, can be treated as deficit, deviant, or with a problematic liberal tolerance (Balagopalan, in press), a deeply classed and neocolonial imposition of idealizations of childhood masked as a universal norm. Indeed, “description” quickly shifts into “prescription” given the moral-laden status of childhood (Burman, 2017). The lack of recognition of children’s caring labor, or labor within schools, has implications for the status of children, much in the way that feminist scholars have pointed to in relation to the gendered nature of care. Children are rendered as costs, albeit precious ones, or burdens rather than contributors to the social worlds they live in (Qvortrup, 1995). It can provoke new troubles as families struggle to cope with changing contexts for reproductive labor. These troubles may appear as a conflict between mothers and children, and indeed they do seem to in Molyneux’s account; this misattribution is a point which I take up further below.

Neoliberal Policies Benefit Children?

Running parallel to the important critique of the neoliberal turn to “child-centered policy” from the perspective of gender equality, there is a tendency in this critical literature to posit such initiatives as benign for, or even of benefit to, children: a neutral acceptance of the discourses of neoliberal social investment states. In describing Oportunidades, Molyneux (2006, p. 440) argues that the program is fundamentally “child-centred,” helping to improve “children’s health and life chances” and ensuring that “young people from poor households can access some of their social rights such as education and health” while “there are reasons to doubt how far the program has succeeded in ‘empowering women’ and getting women out of poverty.”

These are important points about the consequences for gender justice of state policies and programs implemented in the name of the child—including those which purport to promote gender equality, such as Oportunidades. However, childhood research demonstrates that children’s interests, especially for those in impoverished communities, are not one and the same as those of the neoliberal state or supranational bodies. Indeed, neoliberal policies—even under the auspices of “investing in children”—have insidious impacts on many children’s lives. Providing an assessment of the specific Mexican policies on children’s lives is beyond the scope of this article and indeed the data I have is available. Here, I present a general set of challenges to a view of a benign neoliberalism. In so doing, I gesture toward to some lines of inquiry which are foreclosed by accepting that models of investing in children are straightforwardly good for impoverished children.

Neoliberal approaches do not simply promote investment in human capital but they essentially turn children into human capital, goods into which adult efforts and financial contributions are invested in a calculated effort at individual and national self-aggrandizement on a competitive playing field (Rosen & Newberry, 2018). Success in maximizing human capital is closely tied to prescriptive developmental norms which assume that particular interventions, such as the use of the exaggerated speech sometimes called “baby talk” or “motherease” and caregivers stimulating children in dyadic interactions through singing and reading, will achieve not only “normal” development but ensure that investment in children achieves its anticipated rewards (Penn, 2011). Such teleological views of development also inhabit Edelman’s (2004) child figure, leaving little room to consider the how and why children have come to be viewed in such a way and what the implications are for real children’s lives. Indeed, it is noteworthy that interventions formulated as investing in children are typically those based on assumptions about child rearing and idealized childhoods in the Minority World (Ribbens McCarthy & Gillies, 2017), which are then imposed onto children and their families globally and expected to work, regardless of context, quality of the program, and the unequal terrain on which families live their lives (Penn, 2011).

Other research points to the ways that neoliberal projects often target local knowledge for replacement or denigration, affecting children’s cultural rights, alienating children from older generations in their communities or even increasing the risk of impoverishment. In the case of Western Ethiopia, for instance, Kjørholt (2013) describes the ways that school knowledge has supplanted children’s knowledge of wild plants which have long served as a buffer for hunger and starvation in times of economic crisis. Here, formal early years and schooling provision is promoted as a panacea for family troubles. But, as Unterhalter (2014) points out, this “occlude[s] discussions of what is taught, to whom, the socio-economic relations of schooling, work and livelihoods, the messy and difficult relationships associated with learning and teaching . . . , and the politics of who presents what to whom” (p. 120). Countries with high-attendance rates demonstrate that school does not guarantee poverty alleviation, as it cannot resolve the absence of decent paying jobs or the destruction of livelihoods. Instead, economic inequality within countries is key to understanding health and social outcomes (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009), suggesting that larger structural problems are crucial to understanding family troubles caused by impoverishment.

Childhood scholars have provided profound critiques of “investing in children” approaches on these empirical grounds, challenging their recourse to decontextualized notions of linear causality in unequal global contexts, but they have also done so on moral/political grounds. The treatment of children as futures projects, an impossible fiction of insulation against uncertainties, is an instrumentalization. Children are constituted as “becomings,” “not the current generation but the next one,” to use Qvortrup’s (2009, p. 632) evocative formulation. This undercuts efforts to envision children as complex persons in the here and now, cocitizens and full human beings. By setting up personhood as a state of rational autonomy and age of maturity, which children will reach only once they leave their childhood behind, their practices are typically “interpreted as reflections of their limitations rather than expressions of their own intentions, desires, or opinions” (N. Lee, 2001, p. 44). This tautology is then used to justify the marginalization of children from decision making about their lives and the lives of their communities (Liebel, 2014), only able to be spoken about rather than with. So, while we might stipulate Molyneux’s argument that the focus on alleviating child poverty through CCTs has increased children’s social rights, for instance, to health and formal educational provision, this is a rather thin version of rights at best.

Children are also not immune from the rewriting of personhood under neoliberalism. With the profound financialization of subjectivities, relationships, and everyday practices, people are often equated, and come to know who they are, simply as what they can accrue on themselves (Skeggs, 2011): homo economicus. People are measured by their abilities (or lack therefore) “to provide for our own needs and service our own ambitions,” and held responsible when they fail regardless of the constraints that they may face (Brown, 2005, p. 52). Although with Skeggs (2011), it is important to note that such interpellations are never total and market-based logics do not exhaust our value systems.

In the explicit model of “coresponsibility” embedded in social investment approaches, children—along with mothers—are increasing responsibilized for their own success and failures, with potentially devastating consequences. Kjørholt (2013), for example, argues that the increasing dropout rates in Norwegian schools are a result of the cognitive skills testing and pressures of educational performance management. And, while highly lauded on international educational ranking measures (e.g., PISA), countries like South Korea have high rates of depression among young people which have been linked to the performative neoliberal educational culture and competitive university examinations (M. Lee & Larson, 2000). In this sense, although responsibilization may differ in its form and location, where women are held primarily responsible for reproductive labor in the family, children too are rendered “coresponsible” for the work of social reproduction, in this case on themselves, via the “new poverty agenda” and neoliberal forms of early childhood education and schooling (Rosen & Newberry, 2018). Children’s unrecognized and unremunerated labor in schools costs little for capital or the neoliberal state, yet the “quality enhancement” of labor power is a central strategy for increasing relative surplus value (Rikowski, 2003).

The specificities of these critiques, and the extent of their applicability in the Mexican social investment state, is an empirical question. The point here is that by positing “investing in children” as neutral, or even beneficial, for children feminist critiques about gender inequity miss important questions about how such policies play out in real children’s lives.

Producing Antagonisms Between Women and Children

As I have already alluded, this body of empirical and theoretical literature presents a stark division, even antagonism, between women and children in their accounts. Molyneux (2006), for instance, comments that Oportunidades included “a combination of equality measures (for the girls) and maternalist measures (for their mothers)” (p. 436) or a “selective” (p. 439) commitment to gender equality, for girls but not their mothers. The structure of the arguments in this scholarship suggests that the demands of one group (e.g., children) can only be recognized through the exclusion of the other’s (e.g., women). In their discussion of Canadian citizenship regimes and antipoverty initiatives, Dobrowolsky and Jenson (2004), for instance, argue that: “One clear result of representations focused on the child is that claims for women’s equality rights have become more difficult to make” (p. 174).

To be sure, there are tensions in women–child relations, and the ways these are experienced. In part, this is a result of the deep entanglements of women’s and children’s everyday lives, given the “durable binding of the lives and fates of women and of children in public imaginaries” (Rosen & Twamley, 2018, p. 1) and the ways this shapes social practices and subjectivities. For instance, increasing state retrenchment from the tasks of social reproduction whether through shrinking welfarism or demands of structural adjustment programs, in combination with an explosion in compulsory schooling and early years education globally, can position women and children in conflict over household labor which they may have previously carried out together (Rosen & Newberry, 2018). This new form of family troubles is arguably the case with CCTs. Likewise, the tenacity of maternalism means the children’s interactions in broader social spheres are often mediated and controlled, at least on the surface, by mothers, whose own interests and concerns may not coincide with those of their children (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2018; Rosen et al., 2017).

As I have demonstrated, however, while there are certainly tensions in woman–child relations, children are not clear beneficiaries of neoliberal antipoverty initiatives aimed at “investing in children,” just as impoverished women are not. Perhaps even more crucially, arguments which paint children as winners and women as losers in the social investment state only work if we accept that well-being, citizenship, and social and economic justice are limited pots to which impoverished women and impoverished children make competing claims. A competitive framing of women’s interests and children’s interests falters in at least three ways.

My first point here has to do with the relational constitution of subject formation. The social positions of “adult/woman” and “child/girl/boy” are constituted and interpellate subjects relationally. “Adult” is nonsensical without “child” and, as with masculinity and femininity, the two are often marked and defined by their opposition in a gendered and “generational” social order (Alanen, 2011). What this suggests is that one is not born but becomes a child or adult, to borrow from Simone de Beauvoir, through processes of generationing: “the material, social and cultural processes through which individuals acquire the social quality of ‘childness’ and the status of the ‘child’” (Alanen, 2011, p. 163). Adults are those who are typically depicted as rational, mature, and competent, in comparison with children’s fundamental dependence, irrationality, and mutability. The precise formulation of adulthood and childhood is time and place specific, however, and is mediated by the intersections of generation with gender, “race,” class, and ability. As such, there are parallels in the way women and children are constituted, for instance, both are seen to embody powerlessness and vulnerability: the quintessential victims. Despite the clear emphasis on the constructed nature of gender, a consequence of the naturalization of childhood discussed previously is that Molyneux et al. seem to take distinctions between women as a social group and children as a social group as though they are natural, rather than socially constituted. In other words, they present children as a group which is essentially different and distinguishable from the group of adults/women.

Nowhere is the limit of this assumption more evident, or more troubling, than in the figure of the girl child. Girls have assumed a central place in recent development and “poverty alleviation” campaigns, spearheaded by a mixed consortium of the World Bank, corporations such as Nike and its Girl Effect project, and local and international charities (Koffman & Gill, 2013). Deemed “smart economics” by the World Bank, girls are viewed as a particularly good investment: hard working, efficient, more likely to contribute to their communities than boys. The go-getting, entrepreneurial girl child is simultaneously depicted as vulnerable, needing to be “reached” and “helped” before “‘the ticking clock’ has seen her married and pregnant” so that she can “go on to transform her life chances and those of her community and nation” (Koffman & Gill, 2013, p. 88). Leaving to one side the problematic assumption that incorporation into a global capitalist economy is the solution to poverty, and the reproduction of colonial narratives of “saving brown women [and girls] from brown men” (Spivak, 1988, p. 296), the primary point for my purposes is that here girls occupy an ambiguous position. Girls are distinguished as both more vulnerable and more productive than women (Koffman & Gill, 2013). Paradoxically, however, they are also positioned and targeted as “incipient women,” future mothers and not really children at all (Burman, 2008, p. 211), given that the emphasis on hard work and “feminine” altruism contradict hegemonic notions of childhood. My point, then, is that drawing a sharp distinction between children as winners, and women as losers, misses out these sorts of complexities in the intersections of gender and generation, and that reproduction of gendered power relations effect both women and children, who are simultaneously gendered and made generationally.

Women and children are not just linked at the more abstract level of social positioning, but their conditions of life are highly intertwined given that children are positioned as primarily dependent and women are positioned as natural caregivers (Rosen & Twamley, 2018). They are bound up in each other in so far as people are not isolated monads, autonomous, and independent from others as liberalism would have it (Ruddick, 2007). Given such relationality, it is not difficult to agree to the point that Dobrowolsky and Jenson (2004) raise: the impoverishment of children does not exist in a vacuum and it is necessary to address women’s impoverishment in order to address children’s. Indeed, an historical case can be made that addressing poverty under the mantle of “putting children first” has actually exacerbated children’s impoverishment (Gordon, 2008). Given the constitution of children as dependent, their welfare is largely protected and achieved through adults; however, efforts dedicated toward children are often punitive in nature for adults, or at least reduce the resources dedicated toward adults, who are then rendered less able to support children. Molyneux’s discussion of the conditionality of cash transfer programs is a case in point.

Here, I want to take this a step further to suggest that the reverse is also true: children’s impoverishment and status affects women. This is at once an affective claim, highlighting the stress and concern that many mothers face in seeing their children struggle and a more material claim. Given the increasingly hegemonic attribution of sacred moral value to children, and the pressures of neoliberal responsibilization, mothers may feel compelled to support their children at any and all costs: skipping meals so that children are able to eat, migrating globally in order to be able to provide remittances, or remaining in highly exploitative jobs in order to ensure their child’s survival (Rosen et al., 2017). Similarly, the rendering of impoverished children in singularities, often derogatory or demeaning in nature—feral and wild, vulnerable victim, trapped dependent, lost generation—affects women, both because of the ideological linkages in representations of women and children and because of the gendered nature of neoliberal responsibilization.

Finally, in unpacking the limits of such antagonistic formulations of woman–child relations, it is worth dwelling for a moment on what this occludes, namely potential affinities and reciprocities. As Llobet and Milanich (2018) discuss in their exposition of CCTs, what has often been framed as conflicts between women and children is experienced in quite a different way by women in an Argentine barrio. Here, children contribute to the “voluntary” labor required by CCT conditionalities or continue to participate in reproductive labor. Mothers can access resources and support from the state through their children and motherhood is mobilized strategically to enhance a women’s status. Now certainly this can be viewed as a form of “bargaining with patriarchy,” as Kandiyoti (1988) puts it, strategically mobilizing maternalism to improve individual or collective circumstances. Regardless, the point here is that in emphasizing conflict and competition neither Molyneux, nor many other critics, leave space to consider if and how a more positive valence in these relations and relationships might be (co)present.

What’s more, this ends up portraying generation as the only, or at least the most salient divide, minimizing other social divisions such as “race” and class and the ways these are simultaneously at work. To return to Llobet and Milanich (2018), they contend that more prominent conflicts were stratifications between women, reflective of class-inflected divisions in the barrio. Those with middle-class aspirations, and the resources to make these possible, looked down on those who were more impoverished, imposing class-laden values of mothering that were impossible to achieve and which positioned local practices as deficit in comparison with globally hegemonic, Euro American norms of motherhood and childhood.

Finally, the depiction of women–child relations as fundamentally conflictual forecloses the possibility of attending to the reciprocity and even solidarity between women and children who struggle to make lives worth living in conditions of destitution and marginalization, or even to transform the conditions of their subordination. This is not a naïve claim intent on denying the very real conflicts, tensions, and power relations between women and children, simply a recognition that this relation is far more nuanced than an antagonistic account allows. This requires a complicating of apparent oppositions while keeping in mind the powerful point made by Marxist and postcolonial feminists that emancipation for one group that comes at the cost of another is no emancipation at all.