Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

by Andrea Elliott

She sees out to a world that rarely sees her.

Depending on the audience, Dasani’s parents are either “working the system” or “making ends meet.” Either way, they are living in a city where no poor family with eight children, supported by parents lacking college degrees, could easily get by.

sees no reason to shed one name for another. They all claim space within her kaleidoscopic self. When

Entitlement is born of self-worth. Some kids have it naturally. Others must develop it against the proof of their experience.

When I take off my uniform, Will I be safe from harm— Or will you do me As the Germans did the Jews?

“culture is a response to social structural constraints and opportunities.”

President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform act had passed three years earlier, in 1996, sending hundreds of thousands of single mothers back to work across America. “Welfare is time limited,” read a letter to Joanie on March 18, 1999. “A job is your future!”

Her life is defined by extremes. In order to leave extreme poverty, it follows that she must become extremely rich or extremely something. Precisely what, she is unsure. Even to dream is an act of faith.

Most of these children were not even orphans. They had been taken from, or handed over by, parents too poor to feed them. Society’s answer to poverty, time and again, was to separate children from their families.

To be poor is to be stressed—a condition that all children experience, to some degree. A young girl might dread getting a shot at the doctor’s office. She sees the needle, and her stress response system is activated: Her heart beats faster, her adrenaline surges, and her body is energized for “fight or flight.” Once the threat passes, she returns to her physiological baseline, ideally with the help of a nurturing adult. But what if the threat continues, day after day? Poor children tend to live with chronic stress. They have greater exposure to violence, hunger, sleep deprivation, and illness.

But by age four, the poor children had developed less “gray matter,” the areas of the brain responsible for impulse control, emotional behavior, problem solving, memory, and other skills critical to learning.

Over half of all Black children in America are subjected to at least one child protection probe before turning eighteen. They

Put another way: More than a century after President Theodore Roosevelt’s landmark conference concluded that America’s homes “should not be broken up for reasons of poverty,” the federal government is giving ten times as much money to programs that separate families (most of them poor) as to programs that might preserve them.

In total, the care of Chanel and Supreme’s children is costing more than $33,000 per month—a figure that will approach $400,000 per year. The Foundling supervisor, Linda, often thinks about this math. It would cost far less to keep a poor family intact, sparing them the trauma of separation, by placing a full-time aide in the home to prevent the problems that lead to neglect. An aide could help to fill out medical forms, keep school appointments, draw baths.

The word “understand” comes from Old English—understandan. Literally, it means “to stand in the midst of.” It does not mean we have reached some ultimate truth. It means, to my mind, that we have experienced enough of something new, something formerly unseen, to be provoked, humbled, awakened, or even changed by it. If I did anything in my eight years with Dasani, it was to stand in the midst of her life.

To be poor is to be surveilled.