Aibu to expect people to help themselves in their own lives?

[Lazymazy1]

Have wanted to be a social worker for many years, have a degree and was looking to do a MSc.
However, doing voluntary work with a family who are in a very chaotic position, who won't help themselves, ie getting pregnant again whilst effectively homeless. Not taking control of things which will make a big difference in their current situation.

It isn't a case of can't, but won't help themselves, perhaps ingrained.

Am I being unreasonable ? Or are there good reasons why people just won't help themselves?

Thanks little

Haven't RTFT as I'm too cross.

Everyone does the best they can at the time, OP.

Please stay away from vulnerable people, you aren't cut out for it. You know best though so well done you.

While I sympathise for your loss I now also wonder if that is how you feel how are you going to cope with being put in a position where you're expected to help/support not just be in a room with people who've been convicted and served time for murder/manslaughter/paedophilia/rape ?

Not saying I'd cope with that but that's one thing you likely will have to if you become a sw.

Another agreeing with just.

Income is also such a big deal in these situations, less income in your life overall and you grow up not knowing what are the right choices to make

Why? just

You could try reading this from Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier" - it's old, but makes some good points about living in poverty.

(It's about food, but it describes how some of the decision-making people make when they're poor looks irrational to those who are better-off - and this is people who are generally organised, not living in chaotic situations like the people you'd be working with.)

Will have a read thanks I ed

It's long, so here's the relevant bit:

When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

A nice bit from the previous chapter dealing with living on the dole. It's not all still relevant, and I don't agree with Orwell on everything, but I think it's worth the read.

So you have whole populations settling down, as it were, to a lifetime on the P.A.C. And what I think is admirable, perhaps even hopeful, is that they have managed to do it without going spiritually to pieces. A working man does not disintegrate under the strain of poverty as a middle-class person does. Take, for instance, the fact that the working class think nothing of getting married on the dole. It annoys the old ladies in Brighton, but it is a proof of their essential good sense; they realize that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a human being. So that in one way things in the distressed areas are not as bad as they might be. Life is still fairly normal, more normal than one really has the right to expect. Families are impoverished, but the family-system has not broken up. The people are in effect living a reduced version of their former lives. Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards.

But they don’t necessarily lower their standards by cutting I out luxuries and concentrating on necessities; more often it is the other way about—the more natural way, if you come to think of it. Hence the fact that in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all cheap luxuries has increased. The two things that have probably made the greatest difference of all are the movies and the mass-production of cheap smart clothes since the war. The youth who leaves school at fourteen and gets a blind-alley job is out of work at twenty, probably for life; but for two pounds ten on the hire-purchase he can buy himself a suit which, for a little while and at a little distance, looks as though it had been tailored in Savile Row. The girl can look like a fashion plate at an even lower price. You may have three halfpence in your pocket and not a prospect in the world, and only the corner of a leaky bedroom to go home to; but in your new clothes you can stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as dark Gable or Greta Garbo, which compensates you for a great deal. And even at home there is generally a cup of tea going—a ‘nice cup of tea’—and Father, who has been out of work since 1929, is temporarily happy because he has a sure tip for the Cesarewitch.

Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can’t get much meat for threepence, but you can get a lot offish-and-chips. Milk costs threepence a pint and even ‘mild’ beer costs fourpence, but aspirins are seven a penny and you can wring forty cups of tea out of a quarter-pound packet. And above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days’ hope (‘Something to live for’, as they call it) by having a penny on a sweepstake. Organized gambling has now risen almost to the status of a major industry. Consider, for instance, a phenomenon like the Football Pools, with a turnover of about six million pounds a year, almost all of it from the pockets of working-class people. I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury. And then there is the queer spectacle of modern electrical science showering miracles upon people with empty bellies. You may shiver all night for lack of bedclothes, but in the morning you can go to the public library and read the news that has been telegraphed for your benefit from San Francisco and Singapore. Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.

Do you consider all this desirable? No, I don’t. But it may be that the psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is the best they could make in the circumstances. They have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard. The alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of despair; or it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly governed country like England, could only lead to futile massacres and a regime of savage repression.

I think he's too optimistic. Poverty grinds you down way more. Living in benefits isn't fun and you end up making bad decisions about what to spend your money on. You could at any point get a big bill that wipes out all your money, so what's the point of saving? You can get a TV from BrightHouse right now.

But i think this is primally the most relevant bit (from the same chapter the first but I posted) - on being told what to do by people who look down on you:

When you hear of a thing like this you feel yourself torn both ways. I have heard a Communist speaker on the platform grow very angry about it. In London, he said, parties of Society dames now have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping-lessons to the wives of the unemployed. He gave this as an instance of the mentality of the English governing class. First you condemn a family to live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money. He was quite right—I agree heartily. Yet all the same it is a pity that, merely for the lack of a proper tradition, people should pour muck like tinned milk down their throats and not even know that it is inferior to the product of the cow.

OP - I don't understand why you think you can't discuss a parents actions with them as a social worker. If done without judgement i would say it's a perfectly valid part of the role to sit and ask a parent what barriers stopped them from being able to make that phone call . Surely that's how change occurs .. By opening it up to discussion (again, not judgement). Making a phone call isn't as simple as you have assumed, there are a million reasons it may not have happened - ask, find out why, help.

It's probably also worth realising, these children you are so desperate to help? Many of them are the parents you now judge just 20 years down the line , those who didn't get help as kids and are now stuck repeating old patterns.

Probably, not primally.

There have always been poor people who don't act like we think they should act. And these are the respectable poor. Below that are the permanently chaotic, and they've always been there too.

I'm trying to find something I read about how, a few centuries ago, people advocated sending the dregs of society away to America and making them sort out the land there. ITT described their disgusting lives and how they were worthless and needed nothing more than to be used as slave labour. I think it was in a textbook I was reading.

Why can't I find it? They were chaotic scum who were wanted to get rid of so it was useful to send them as labour to improve the land over there. Didn't work.

How about the Ewells in To Kill A Mockingbird?

(As am example of the kind of families who have always been there.)

Trying to find a recent longread I read on sterilisation of the feeble-minded and scummy in America. Some of those people are still alive.

Ah, here we go.

Lovely article. Long. Forced, or even coerced, sterilisation is wrong.

Elaine Riddick is one of the most outspoken victims of North Carolina’s sterilization program. She has appeared on NBC’s Rock Center and on Al Jazeera, and has been interviewed by reporters from across the country. Like Lynch, she was 14 when she was sterilized, immediately following the birth, by Cesarean section, of a son, her only child. Although Riddick scored above the state’s IQ threshold of 75, the five-person Eugenics Board approved the recommendation for her sterilization, labeling Riddick “feebleminded” and “promiscuous” and noting that her schoolwork was poor and that she did not get along well with others.

*>>‘The job of parenthood is too much to expect of feebleminded men and women,’ the pamphlet reads.

Thank you iced
Sorry it's taken long to get round to reading the articles.

Very interesting, I appreciate you taking g the time to post.

Absolutely shows how complex it all is regarding poverty and other issues in society.
Particularly interesting (to me) is to why, if poor you may buy a most expensive item, just to help help you fit in to society, have what 'the others' have. I appreciate, being on poverty would have many detrimental effects on many different areas of your life.
However, this is where I do need more experience as I just haven't seen people yet in absolute poverty, choosing whether to heat or eat. So whilst there are families in this position, I haven't seen it as the norm.
Also, my own experience when looking at separation from husband , I was amazed at the amount of benefits I would have received. I could live on that and wouldn't hAve described myself as being poor.

Those who have large families, so who are in poverty, maybe they need to feel loved/ fill a void/ fit in etc , is it an individualist way of looking at things as opposed to collectivist?

Re Eugenics, I hadn't realised about the movement, and so few years ago too. And whilst it appeared Galton's thinking was for the greater good of society I can see what a slippery slope it's on.
I do still feel however , whilst mass sterilisation is wrong, coercion is needed in some instances / or education, children being born to parents , then continually taken into care for eg.Just for the benefit of the child.

Is it a human right to have a child no matter what?

But the articles have made me see things in a slightly different light. Big topics

Thanks again for your input.

Hi, thanks for replying! They were very long articles…

Particularly interesting (to me) is to why, if poor you may buy a most expensive item, just to help help you fit in to society, have what 'the others' have. I appreciate, being on poverty would have many detrimental effects on many different areas of your life.

I find this interesting too. I grew up very middle-class in a well-off family, in a solidly working-class area where many people had been out of work for a long time due to the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. The poorest of the kids still managed to have the best trainers. Mine were pretty cheap, not ShoeZone cheap but not Nike, Adidas etc. - more what my parents would call good-quality, sensible trainers . Not wanting to look poor, like you said "fitting in", is a big part of it, and I think a lot of it comes too from parental poverty - their parents would've grown up in the 70s and lots of them would've had to wear visibly cheap clothes, and not wanted their kids to have to go through the same thing. Nobody was going to think I was poor, not when I lived in the big house. Still got the piss ripped out off me, but for different reasons.

And charity shops were places most people would never dream of going to because it would make people think they were too poor to afford their own clothes instead of somebody else's castoffs. Whereas for my family that wouldn't have been an issue.

Also, my own experience when looking at separation from husband , I was amazed at the amount of benefits I would have received. I could live on that and wouldn't hAve described myself as being poor.

IMO this one is tricky. You're right in that for people in some situations, benefits money is plenty, especially if you already have a good quality, secure place to live, with good newish appliances and maybe a car, and reasonably-priced electricity and gas, and, more importantly, the cultural capital, daily living skills, and mental resilience to make the best use of that money and hopefully get back on your feet and earning. A lot of it, I think, is hope - you have no reason to believe that for you, a life on benefits could be permanent, and you probably won't end up in one of those permanent cycles where it's really hard to pull yourself up because of the situation you're in.

I'm trying to think of an article I read, Polly Toynbee maybe? about how ludicrous it is when politicians etc. say how easy it would be for them to live on benefits, and when people do "living on benefits" experiences for a week/month to demonstrate how doable it is. They usually don't have an incident where the door breaks cause it's knackered, and your hearing costs go way up for that week, and then your kid comes home the next day having ripped his school bag in an accident and desperate for a new one (and it "has" to be the right bag, and you're angry but just want to your kids to be happy, but £30 is a lot of money and you kinda want to tell them you can't afford it, again).

But yes a lot of the time benefits are enough to live reasonably comfortably on, and I think that's what we want in our society - I think that on the whole, people who have other options don't generally choose to sit on benefits because it's easier, even tho some of them look to an outsider like they're doing just that - there's a lot of issues around qualifications for jobs, daily living skills, mental health, literacy, confidence, childcare, community etc.

I think mostly the eugenicists were probably doing what they thought best for the good of society, who wanted to reduce suffering. I don't think they were all evil people.

Maybe it wasn't Polly Toynbee, actually - she actually sometimes does do these experiments, but with the political slant of trying to show how hard it is rather than how easy it is.

Article

I found your posts really interesting Iced. They may go some way in explaining my own irrational behaviours to myself!

Iced a lot of what I see with people expressing how poor people can't be poor because they have xy or z is down to perception of lifestyle.

Nobody is going to think my kids come from a poor household if they wear a tesco track suit because it's fairly obvious that in every other area of their life they have an expensive lifestyle.

To someone who does not have an expensive lifestyle (or even a things are a bit tight but not dreadful one) that tracksuit is a outward sign of one.

Having that tracksuit because you have made a choice to have it over a more expensive one is very different to that being the most expensive choice you have

100% agree Sock - you put it better than I could.

You and articles make very valid points.

I see the amount is vastly different if you don't have children. (Of course) but she didn't state total amount she had all week to spend and pay bills with.
She also concentrated on the start up rather than the day to day dealings and costs ( I appreciate its the unforeseen items which can throw people aswell ) . And people may want the best or good enough rather than 2nd hand. (Interesting g that those who possibly could afford happy for charity shops etc. But those who would really benefit may shun the charity shop/ second hand furniture ).

But, it's apparent as pp have pointed out aswell , it's the invisible things , the pressure to fit in, the hopelessness, the need to feel loved which can steer people to make certain choices. On top of the dv, substance abuse , MH issues etc.

Who know's what the answer is .

Thanks again for the articles - I facinating stuff

Yes that article is a bit crap, I agree.