When families of means are in crisis, friends and relatives tend to offer material help. They drop off casseroles or make phone calls to doctors. They see their primary purpose as one of stress reduction, because no family can properly function—much less attend therapy—when the electricity has been cut or the fridge is empty. Yet when poor families enter the child protection system, the opposite tends to happen. Parents must attend therapy or parenting classes. This approach, writes the scholar Dorothy Roberts, “hides the systemic reasons for poor families’ hardships by primarily attributing
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