ATLANTA — On evenings when Kari Tyler-Tucker’s electricity was off because of her poverty, she used a flashlight to spotlight her children as they took turns entertaining each other in a homegrown version of “Night at the Apollo.”

“I didn’t have money for the light bill,” she recalls. “I remember one time the water was off.” As the nation revels in the holiday shopping that follows Thanksgiving, there are nearly 40 million Americans who remain in poverty. In Georgia, 15 percent of all households are in poverty, twice that for those headed by unmarried women like Tyler-Tucker was at the time.

Single women, especially those with children, are more likely to be in poverty and have a tougher time getting out than other demographic groups. Obviously, children require money to feed and clothe as well as 18 years of attention, often attention that could otherwise be devoted to education or a career.

People in other demographic groups face similar challenges but have better luck overcoming them for various reasons. Men, for example, often escape the implications of poverty by simply skipping town and stopping child-support payments. Married women have a husband to help with child care and transportation to work.

When unmarried women are able to get to work, experts say they earn less than men, on average, because of discrimination. Black women may also face racial discrimination.

The longest and deepest recession in 50 years added to the numbers living below the federal poverty level, but the forces drawing down single women into poverty can be just as powerful at any time, regardless of economic conditions.

A cruel irony is that widespread poverty perpetuates itself by discouraging economic development when potential employers avoid neighborhoods or whole cities with rusting automobiles, dilapidated houses and elevated crime rates.

“In the sense of trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s just not realistic because of racism, sexism and several other types of barriers,” said Kim Frendak , spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based Women’s Resource Center on Domestic Violence. “... Where we’ve seen women who have made it successfully, there’s been some kind of family stability, a kind of support system.”

Most likely causes

While social workers swap tales of people in poverty who had lost six-figure incomes in the recession, statistically, there are more common patterns in poverty. Two factors are most pronounced: unmarried mothers and high-school dropouts.

Tyler-Tucker fit into one of the patterns while she was in poverty, an unmarried head of household. She had married a man she dated briefly in her aborted college career but eventually left him because of his behavior, taking her two sons with her.

“I thought that I would do the American-dream thing. I got married and had children,” she said. “Unfortunately, my husband was very abusive.”

Her mother had not been married — another frequent ingredient in poverty. As a result, Tyler-Tucker had no model for a marriage and was at a loss when her husband told her it wasn’t like what she had seen on “The Cosby Show,” that his abuse was normal.

“I didn’t really see a husband and wife, or man and woman, interacting in a household,” she said. “I didn’t have any image of real life. I didn’t know what went on behind closed doors.”

As a divorced mother with just a high-school education, she didn’t earn enough in retail jobs to pay all the bills. Soon, she sank into poverty.

Stephene Pearson never married the father of her five children because, she said, “we were too young, and we didn’t want to take

that step.” He paid child support for a while, but she didn’t pursue him when he stopped, preferring to be self-reliant.

When she was laid off from her job at an auto-parts plant and two of her children’s asthma worsened, she, too, fell into poverty.

Pearson eventually worked her way out, and she is helping others do the same, just as Tyler-Tucker is.

Both women experienced what demographers call situational poverty, a streak of bad financial luck triggered by something like divorce, illness or perhaps a spouse’s arrest. Inter-generational poverty describes people born into poverty who find themselves poor as adults.

Douglas Bachtel, professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Family & Consumer Sciences, said for both types, the scenario is common. Women having unprotected sex give birth in their 20s, with little family support to rely on for child care, housing or transportation. The expense of extra mouths to feed is too great for the income of a woman with little education and facing sexual and racial discrimination.

“Men raise hell, and women raise children,” he said.

Plus, these women often end up the last hired and first fired when the economy slows, he said. But even when jobs are available, it might not be the sole solution.

“The last thing that these women would need is jobs,” Bachtel said. “What they need is transportation, day care, learning how to find a job. They need education. They might need some counseling.

“If you create the jobs, they won’t qualify.” If job creation is one frequent goal of policy makers to address poverty, another is raising the minimum wage, notes Simon Medcalf, economics professor at Augusta State University. Many employers reacted to the last increase by cutting the hours their minimum-wage employees worked. In more robust economic periods, employers boost prices, triggering inflation that also negates the benefit to workers.

“As a way of attacking poverty, that’s just not efficient,” he said.

Challenges for policy makers

Poverty presents policymakers with three challenges: how to deal with those in poverty, how to get them out of it, and how to keep others from falling into it.

For those now in poverty, Medcalf said economists favor use of earned-income tax credits, essentially a check sent in response to a poor person’s federal income tax return. The last option should be regular payments, what economists term transfer payments and what the public calls welfare checks.

“We can’t forever keep giving them those payments for the economy to continue to be productive,” he said.

Generous, long-term unemployment benefits as are common in Europe, or welfare payments like the United States had for years, provide no incentive for finding work, he said.

The United States enacted welfare reform when President Clinton signed legislation passed by Congress during the “Republican Revolution” following the 1994 elections. Its caps on benefits were credited with getting millions of Americans off welfare and into jobs at a time when the economy was rapidly expanding.

“The previous system didn’t reward women who had the determination to get a job and get ahead,” said Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond.

The Athens Democrat headed Georgia’s welfare-reform efforts, a job that built on his legislative efforts and was followed by his election to the state labor commissioner, where he still deals with the issue.

“You really can’t think about work unless you make provisions for child care,” Thurmond said.

He had tried to pass legislation when the was in the House of Representatives that would have provided child care. It didn’t become a reality until it was included as part of the federal welfare reform.

Pearson and Tyler-Tucker each took advantage of the child-care and transportation benefits available from Georgia’s welfare-reform effort that Thurmond ran called GoodWorks. The child care could be used during work or while attending various skills workshops, from typing and answering the phone to using computers.

In one workshop exercise designed to build self esteem, women were handed a mirror and told to tell the reflection “I love you. You look pretty,” Tyler-Tucker said.

“As women, we need someone to validate us,” she said, adding that girls tend to seek it through boyfriends, even in unhealthy relationships. “If I didn’t really think I’m cute or pretty, at least you’re there with me.”

The education system can’t prevent poverty

Except for immigrants, nearly every woman in poverty attended 10-12 years of public education. Given society’s interest in preventing poverty, some might expect schools to focus more over all those years on personal finance and life management.

Georgia schools operate on a policy of relying on parents to provide most of those lessons, according to Wanda Barrs, chairwoman of the State Board of Education.

Barrs, a one-time home-economics teacher, says there are some optional classes in middle school and high school with pointers on handling money, careers and the benefits of marriage, but the kids who might benefit the most rarely take them.

“It’s central that the families teach some of that too,” she said. “It’s not possible to have that mandated as a part of every student’s curriculum.”

Could public education prevent a child born into poverty from repeating the cycle? “I don’t think there’s any curriculum that can overcome that,” she said.

Jazmin Martinez thinks about what she will tell her child about how to avoid poverty. Martinez was 14 three years ago when she got pregnant.

“I don’t think I would say, ‘Don’t have sex.’ I don’t think you can say that because they won’t listen,” she said.

In her health classes at school, all her friends laughed at the teacher, she said, because the discussion was couched in antiseptic, scientific terms.

“It’s better to talk to someone your own age who has done it because teachers won’t get specific,” she said.

Martinez acknowledges that she got swept away into sex because of peer pressure and the influence of popular culture. Every song, movie and television show seemed to dwell on how much fun sex is until she wanted to experience it for herself.

Many groups and individuals rail against the pervasiveness of sex in popular, including Georgia’s former Supreme Court chief justice, Leah Ward Sears. After retiring from the bench in June, Sears began a fellowship at the Institute of American Values in New York devoted to strengthening the family.

“I think Dan Quayle got it right,” she said, recalling when the vice president was critical of how popular culture dealt with unwed motherhood, including the television show “Murphy Brown.”

Quayle’s 1992 speech drew anger and ridicule from groups on the left, but Sears says much of society’s ills — including many of the cases clogging courts — could be solved by solid marriages.

Still, despite clear evidence that finishing school and being married while raising children are helpful in avoiding poverty, millions of girls are consciously making decisions that will leading them to a lifetime of economic struggle.

Why do they do it? Why do they act against what a rational person would consider to be in their best interest? “To me it’s a puzzle,” said Augusta State’s Medcalf.

Policy makers have scratched their heads for centuries over the question. Now, an emerging branch of economics may offer answers.

Behavioral economics, supported by neurological research, looks at a range of actions that seem irrational.

President Obama has drawn some behavioral economists into his administration. The aim is to see how people — in this case, girls — evaluate a situation in order to understand why they select a path that seems logical to her but not to anyone else.

“If we start to understand how people make decisions and how their choices are framed in a context in which decisions are made, then we can make better policies,” he said.

Until then, persistent poverty may remain a mystery to most people except for those doomed to experience it.

Definition of federal poverty level is limited

The definition of poverty most commonly used by state and federal government as well as many private experts is determined by basic food needs.

In the early 1960s, the Social Security Administration published an analysis of poverty defined as people who couldn’t afford the cheapest of basic grocery lists developed by the Department of Agriculture in 1955 to be nutritionally adequate for short periods. The analysis also relied on the department’s research showing that the typical family of three at the time spent about one-third of the household’s after-tax income on food.

Using the grocery list and personal budget information, the federal government devised a poverty level for other sized families, including for single adults.

That original poverty level is updated annually by the U.S. Census Bureau to show the impact of inflation on food prices.

Some advocates for the poor say the formula unfairly ignores many families because it doesn’t include the cost of other necessities, such as housing, transportation, child care and health care. On the other hand, critics of government spending say the formula shows too many people in poverty by not including the value of benefits like food stamps, unemployment checks and welfare payments as part of the family income.

Efforts to devise more comprehensive poverty level figures have failed to catch on.

Morris News Service