Living on a Single Parent Budget

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Living On a Single Parent Budget Families and children need to have a healthy environment irregardless of financial background in order to thrive and live. It is important for families to contribute back to society by being able to provide for themselves certain essentials in their environment. This would include such things as adequate education, housing, nutrition and medical care. From our readings we know that a family living on a single parent budget can likely lead to a lack of one or more of these necessities a family and children need and that is a large social problem with a potentially profound and exponential fallout for generations and generations to come. In this essay I will attempt to review why this is a social problem on both a societal and individual level as well as provide a real-world example of how I found it almost impossible for a single parent to provide all of those items in the area I grew up in, in Northern California. And after reading our course materials and discussing the difference between a minimum-wage and living wage, I believe a family living on minimum-wage would be unable afford the necessary essentials to live almost anywhere due to the cost of living in todays society. In our book, Social Problems, Anna Leon-Guerrero mentions how Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro wrote that “wealth is a particularly important indicator of individual and family access to life chances. Wealth is a special form of money not used to purchase milk and shoes and other life necessities. More often it is used to create opportunities, secure a desired stature and standard of living.” (Leon-Guerrero pg. 39). This means that the authors are saying that families with higher incomes have access to higher quality choices in things like housing, education and healthcare. And therefore allows certain people the benefit of opting for more comfort, better

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