SOCW 6301

Zeitschrift für Familienforschung – Journal of Family Research ‒ Special Issue/Sonderheft 2016/2017, S. 119‒134 https://doi.org/10.3224/zff.si11y2016/2017.07

Sabine Andresen

How families experience deprivation: A qualitative study on mothers and fathers living in poverty in Germany

Wie Familien Deprivation erfahren: eine qualitative Untersuchung über Mütter und Väter, die in Deutschland in Armut leben

Abstract Experiences of deprivation are not homogeneous. Perception and evaluation can depend on gender, generation, ethnic or cultural background, or even specific belongings. In this sense, this article fo- cuses on how mothers and fathers perceive and evaluate their experiences with deprivation. De- privation has a major impact on how parents put their way of parenting into action. The article draws on an empirical study of families living in poverty that examined their personal perspectives and experiences as the experts on their lives. It explores how families experience deprivation in their everyday world, their dependence on public support from employment agencies or social ser- vices, and their ideas on what constitutes a ‘good life’. The study ‘Kinder – Armut – Familie’ (An- dresen/Galic 2015, ‘Children – poverty – family’) is a qualitative case study located in the specific German context of public social support and family policy. Therefore, its results have to be discussed within this national context. Nonethe- less, they also offer insights into the challenges parents face when everyday family life is shaped by poverty and deprivation. The analysis of the new turn to parenting has to take social contexts of families and parents’ socio-economic back- ground into account. The insights from the pre- sent study can be related to international debates on deprivation in families. In this article, the con- cept of deprivation refers to the multidimensional concept of well-being. Therefore, the understand-

Zusammenfassung Deprivationserfahrungen sind nicht homogen. Ihre Wahrnehmung und Beurteilung kann vom Ge- schlecht, dem Lebensalter, vom ethnischen oder kulturellen Hintergrund oder von spezifischen Zu- gehörigkeiten abhängen. In diesem Sinne steht im Mittelpunkt dieses Artikels, wie Mütter und Väter ihre Erfahrungen mit Deprivation wahrnehmen und beurteilen. Deprivation wirkt sich massiv auf die Art und Weise aus, wie Eltern ihren eigenen Erzie- hungsstil verwirklichen. Dieser Artikel stützt sich auf eine empirische Studie von Familien, die in Armut leben, und untersucht deren persönliche Perspektive und Erfahrungen als Experten ihres Lebens. Es wird erforscht, wie Familien Deprivati- on in ihrem alltäglichen Leben erfahren, ihre Ab- hängigkeit von staatlichen Leistungen der Jobagen- turen oder sozialen Dienstleistungen und ihre Ideen über ein „gutes Leben“. Die Studie „Kinder-Ar- mut-Familie“ (Andresen/Galic 2015) ist eine quali- tative Fallstudie, welche in einem spezifischen deutschen Kontext von sozialer Unterstützung und Familienpolitik zu lokalisieren ist. Aus diesem Grund gilt es, die Ergebnisse in diesem nationalen Kontext zu diskutieren. Gleichwohl bieten sie Ein- blicke in die Herausforderungen, mit welchen El- tern konfrontiert werden, wenn ihr alltägliches Fa- milienleben von Armut und Deprivation geprägt ist. Die Analyse des „new turn to parenting“ muss sich der sozialen Kontexte von Familien und des elterlichen sozioökonomischen Hintergrunds be- wusst sein. Der Einblick in die Studie lässt sich mit

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ing of deprivation is multidimensional as well. Key words: deprivation, experiences of mothers and fathers, public support, families in Germany, families’ everyday life, qualitative research

der internationalen Debatte um Deprivation in Fa- milien verbinden. In diesem Artikel bezieht sich das Konzept von Deprivation auf das multidimen- sionale Konzept des Wohlbefindens. Daher ist ein Verständnis von Deprivation ebenso multidimensi- onal. Schlagwörter: Deprivation, Erfahrungen von Müt- tern und Vätern, öffentliche Unterstützung, Fami- lien in Deutschland, Alltagsleben in der Familie, qualitative Studie

Introduction

Any examination of experiences of deprivation soon reveals how wide-ranging these are. They encompass not only the areas in which deprivation is found but also the exclusion it leads to and the effects on those experiencing it. Experiences of deprivation can depend on gender, generation, or ethnic and cultural background as well as on specific belong- ings. Therefore, it is necessary to reconstruct experiences of deprivation within the spe- cific frameworks in which they occur – such as the generational order when examining differences between children and adults (James et al. 1998/2010). This article focuses on families with a low socio-economic background and their experiences of deprivation. It centres on the experiences of mothers and fathers, on how they see their decision making and action options, and what they consider to be a ‘good family life’. Deprivation puts pressure on parents to be aware of the current expectations regarding ‘good’ parenting. They often reflect on their childrearing abilities, their material and social resources for educating and raising their children, and on how they can offer them good opportunities in life. All these considerations play a role in the background of parents’ reflections on a ‘good family life’ together with their everyday practices.

The analysis of qualitative data presented here follows well-tested approaches and in- formative findings from childhood studies in several ways (Andresen/Künstler 2015; Ben- Arieh 2008; Garbarino/Stott 2011). First, it starts by taking the perspectives of relevant ac- tors as the basis of the analysis. In this case, the relevant actors are decisively the mothers and fathers who live in a family with children, who are doing and living family, while – at the time of the study – being dependent on state transfer payments; that is, exposed to the risk of poverty. Second, it links up with studies defining, assessing, and measuring depriva- tion with a particular emphasis on the associated research on child poverty (Bradshaw et al. 2012; Main/Pople 2011; UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre 2012). Third and finally, the entire study is oriented towards a multidimensional concept of well-being. When addressing this concept within the framework of the study, I draw on my own international comparative research on child well-being (Rees/Main 2015; World Vision 2010, 2013).

The study Kinder – Armut – Familie. Alltagsbewältigung und Wege zu wirksamer Un- terstützung (Andresen/Galic 2015, ‘Children – poverty – family’), on which the following is based, focuses on three aspects. The first aspect is everyday life in a family with a low socio-economic background. This is linked to the assumption that structural features such

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as the availability of and access to possible care services for young children or the quality of public transport impact on family life. However, it is also assumed that specific fea- tures of individual families such as the number of adults and children living in the family or the illnesses of individual family members likewise exert a major influence on every- day life and shape perceptions of and judgments on public support services. The second aspect of the study is the perceptions of and judgment on public support services such as employment agencies in the case of unemployment, child care provision on the communi- ty level, or the general health system experienced via medical care on a local level. The third aspect focuses on the families’ understanding of well-being and the ‘good life’ (Feg- ter/Richter 2013). This leads to the following research aims:

‒ to reconstruct experiences that are particularly relevant for the everyday lives of fami-

lies living in poverty; ‒ to reconstruct experiences of deprivation from the perspective of adult members of

the family; ‒ to reconstruct ideas on well-being and a ‘good family life’ on the basis of family in-

terviews; ‒ to reconstruct the factors that facilitate and impede support for families in poverty

from the perspective of mothers and fathers; ‒ to reconstruct the factors that facilitate and impede support for families in communi-

ties from the perspective of professionals.

The next section addresses the systematic framework and the methods of the study. The third section presents selected findings on the experiences and perceptions of parents. It distinguishes the parents’ perspectives on deprivation in their everyday family life from barriers to social support and the main categories of parents and children’s understanding of a good life. The last section discusses the findings in light of the systematic framework.

Framework and methods of the study

Kinder – Armut – Familie is a qualitative case study located in the specific German con- text of public social support and family policy. It is part of a larger project funded by the Bertelsmann Foundation that aims to determine how child and family poverty can be fought effectively, what kind of support families require, and how support has to be tai- lored to fit special problem states such as those of single parents (Lenze 2014). The key feature is to discuss strategies in family and poverty policy from the perspective of providing children with support either within or independently from their families. Along- side studies from different academic disciplines, the topic is being addressed by an inter- disciplinary group of experts from the fields of economics, law, sociology, and educa- tion.1

1 See website https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/de/unsere-projekte/familie-und-bildung-politik-

vom-kind-aus-denken/did/60/ [Retrieved: 2016-06-12].

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The theoretical framework

As pointed out above, the perspective on deprivation plays a central role in the study and it is related to the concept of precarity (Motakef 2015). However, such a perspective har- bours the danger of treating family members primarily as passive individuals or as ‘vic- tims’ and thus denying them per se the ability to reach decisions and act.

For this reason, the study links up explicitly with the approach in international child- hood studies that address children as the experts on their own lifeworld and, in particular, it uses this approach to reconstruct their experiences (for instance, Ridge 2002). I have carried out a series of studies on the experiences of children living in poverty in Germany, and examined how children view poverty and experience deprivation.2 Methodologically, the study presented here links up with quantitative and qualitative child poverty studies (Andresen/Fegter 2011; Andresen et al. 2015). The perspectives of those suffering from poverty are not just relevant in research on child poverty. For example, the classic study by Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel (1976 [1933]) Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal [first translated into English in 1971 as Marienthal. The Sociography of an Unemployed Community] offered systematic insights into the everyday experiences and interpretations of both individuals and a complete village community living in poverty. The present study also links up with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s (2012) approach to research on poverty. This is particularly so because they explicitly examine the economic logics of people in poverty, their action options, and both the reasons for and the criteria underlying their decisions (Banerjee/Duflo 2012). The latter in particular should provide access to those factors that mothers and fathers perceive as facilitating or impeding sup- port for families in poverty. This theoretically founded methodological and ethical ap- proach helps researchers to view people living in poverty as also being the people who deal with their situation actively and are the experts on it. This shifts the focus of attention not only to their decision making and action abilities but also and above all to their deci- sion making and action options and latitudes. To adequately describe and analyse the lati- tudes constraining everyday family life in poverty, we additionally link up with Sue Dockett’s (2013) research on families with multiple needs for support as well as with the multidimensional concept of family well-being (Bertram/Spieß 2011).

Poverty risks and the related low socio-economic status are defined and measured in different ways (Bradshaw et al. 2012; Bradshaw et al. 2013). I shall not discuss this fur- ther here. Instead, I shall address the experiences of families in poverty in relation to spe- cific experiences of deprivation, while conceiving deprivation as being multidimensional and not just related to a lack of goods alone. In light of the decision making and action options available to mothers and fathers, this is a promising perspective, as the results re-

2 Major German studies using qualitative methods include the DFG (German Research Foundation)

project ‘Precarious childhood: How children experience poverty’ (2011–2013) and the BMBF (Fed- eral Ministry of Education and Research) project ‘Risk factor poverty: What makes children strong but also makes them in need of protection’ (2013–2016). Based on quantitative methods, I worked on three surveys of children in Germany using the concept of child well-being (2007, 2010, 2013) that also addressed experiences of deprivation among children. I also ran the international compara- tive study ‘Children’s Worlds’ (Rees/Main 2015) together with Jonathan Bradshaw, Asher Ben- Arieh, Ferran Casas, and Gwyther Rees. This study also applied a deprivation index.

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ported below will show. Analogue approaches from childhood studies also prove to be helpful when reconstructing differently shaped experiences of deprivation. For example, Report Card 10 (UNICEF 2012) ‘Measuring Child Poverty’ bases its definition of poverty on concrete experiences of deprivation. It assesses child poverty with a material depriva- tion index and compares this assessment with findings on the relative poverty concept. Hence, it assumes, on the one hand, that child poverty can be assessed by referring to childhood development and childhood needs independently from the prosperity of a so- ciety, but, on the other hand, that it still has to be related to the average income within a country. By surveying children with qualitative methods, Gill Main and Larissa Pople’s study, made one particularly important contribution to the development of a child-centred deprivation index (Main/Pople 2011). They drew up a list that included pocket money and savings, sneakers from brand names such as Nike or Adidas, an iPod or comparable de- vice, a garden, and a family car (see Andresen et al. 2015; World Vision 2013).

All this merges with the concept of family well-being, and delivers important links to the concept of child well-being. As mentioned above, the framework of this qualitative study is also inspired by international research on child well-being and especially by work within the ‘Children’s Worlds’ study. ‘Children’s Worlds, the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being’ (ISCWeB) is a worldwide research survey on children’s subjec- tive well-being.3 It aims to support the collection of solid and representative data on chil- dren’s lives and daily activities and on their perceptions and evaluations of their lives in as many countries as possible. The goal is to improve children’s well-being by promoting awareness among children, their parents, their communities, opinion leaders, decision makers, professionals, and the general public. This fills a substantial gap in international comparative research evidence on children’s own views of their lives and well-being (Rees/Main 2015).4 The project – funded by the Jacobs Foundation – consists of a survey of children aged 8 to 12 that has now been completed by just over 53,000 children in 15 countries: Algeria, Colombia, Estonia, Ethiopia, Germany, Israel, Nepal, Norway, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom (England).

Drawing on the intensive research on the concept of well-being, our study views family members (adults and children) as experts, and it focuses on the multiple, structur- ally determined challenges they face in their everyday lives. Within this concept, dimen- sions of well-being have been formulated that not only take account of subjective experi- ences and perceptions but also make it possible to describe their structural framing condi- tions (Andresen 2014; Bertram/Spieß 2011; Rees/Main 2015). This serves as the basis for developing a multidimensional concept of family well-being that is particularly sensitive to the circumstances surrounding a low socio-economic background. It includes ten di- mensions of familial well-being: coping with limited material resources, balancing family life with gainful employment, leisure time and recuperation with the family and for indi- vidual family members, public support and how far it extends, family relationships and networks, rearing and educating the children, the self-images and goals of family mem- 3 See website http://www.isciweb.org/ [Retrieved: 2016-06-12]. 4 The principal investigators during the first representative wave were Sabine Andresen, Jonathan

Bradshaw, Asher Ben-Arieh, Ferran Casas, and Gwyther Rees. The second representative study has been started in 2016. The principal investigators are Andresen, Bradshaw, Ben-Arieh, Casas, Bong Jo Lee, and Rees.

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bers, ideas on the good life, accommodation and security in the residential district, and opportunities for consumption and experiences of deficit. These ten dimensions serve as the basis for the interview guidelines.

The methodological approach

Proceeding from our goals and the theoretical framework, this qualitative study was car- ried out in three German cities: Nuremberg, Hagen, and Neubrandenburg. Cities were se- lected on the basis of quantitative statistical data such as the general employment rate, the female employment rate, household sizes, family forms, and the proportion of persons re- ceiving welfare benefits as specified in the German Social Code II (SGB II: Basic Securi- ty for Jobseekers). Thus sampling was based on a selected regional representation. Draw- ing on the available analyses of the accumulation of poverty in certain regions of Germa- ny, the goal was to select one city in the new German states, one in the particularly se- verely affected West of the country (North Rhine-Westphalia), and one in the ‘affluent’ South of Germany (Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg).5 We carried out a total of eighteen individual interviews with adult family members, nine family discussions in which chil- dren also took part, and three group discussions with professional experts in the commu- nities. We also took different family forms into account.6

The sample covers a variety of aspects of modern-day family life as well as some common circumstances related to a low socio-economic background. It varies greatly in family status. We interviewed one-parent family members, members of re-partnered fami- lies, mothers and fathers from ‘traditional’ families, families with one to five children, family members with a migration background, and parents with a variety of qualifica- tions. The homogeneity of circumstances related mainly to employment status and the lack of residential property. All interviewed persons lived in rented apartments.7

We studied the everyday expertise and the perspectives of families with two different methods: semi-structured individual interviews with one parent plus family interviews and family discussions. We reconstructed the perspective of professional experts through group discussions. In the first principal step, the study procedure was oriented towards the narrative interview approach developed by Fritz Schütze in the 1970s and further devel- oped and refined methodologically within the biographical research tradition of the 1980s (see, e.g. Schütze 1978, 1983). When gathering information from interviews with mothers and fathers in precarious living conditions, it was important to encourage parents to nar- 5 Initial access to the city institutions was gained by writing to the highest levels of each city admin-

istration. We contacted a total of six administrations with detailed letters and telephone calls. We then selected the three aforementioned cities. Initial access to individual families was gained through a gatekeeper in the city administration, through family centres, or through other institutions. Then, with the help of the usual snowball effect in qualitative case selection and posters, we extend- ed the number of persons or families surveyed and recruited further families that were not involved closely in the local government project-related support system.

6 We ended up with approximately 60 hours of interviews to analyse; that is, roughly 1,100 pages of interview transcriptions.

7 In Germany, it is still less common to live in one’s own house or apartment compared to other coun- tries.

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rate their own biographical experiences. Therefore, interviews followed the principles of narrative conversation (Rosenthal 2005) without taking a methodologically strict ap- proach in the sense of the narrative interview. Drawing on the theoretical framework, we developed an interviewing guide with questions and prompts to encourage interviewees to express themselves frankly.8

The family discussions and group discussions with professional experts were based on the principles of group discussion. The group discussion procedure emphasized the significance of ‘interaction, discourse, and group processes for the constitution of opin- ions and patterns of orientation and meaning’ (Bohnsack 2008: 105, translated by the author). The subject of group discussions was conceived collectively with persons pos- sessing existential and perceived communalities sharing a realm of experience together (Przyborski/Wohlrab-Sahr 2010). Up to now, research on family discussions has tended to be only exploratory. The potential of the family discussion lies in being able to recon- struct not only the family formation process but also shared values and family images as well as contradictions, conflicts, and opposing opinions.

The analytical strategy adopted here links the documentary method with the theoreti- cal framework and our research interests. The first step was to gain an overview of the en- tire course of each interview. We listened to the audio recordings of the interviews while reading the transcript. We then marked conspicuous passages containing, for example, contradictions. We also marked the beginning and end of each individual topic block. This approach gave us an overview of the complete oral data. In our second step, we summarized the passages into blocks, numbered them, and entered them into the first col- umn of an overview. In the second column entitled ‘Interpretation’, we entered key state- ments from the selected text passages; and in the third column entitled ‘Notes’, we deter- mined key themes. Statements that seemed contradictory in the first interpretation phase or that were difficult to understand were noted in the third column so that we could return explicitly to difficult text passages and work on them.

This use of tables enabled us to access the individual text excerpts rapidly, to reread the original transcript, to check the context, or also include the prior question or the narra- tive impulse. For example, if we were interested in the use of services by families, we could look at the key terms associated with the theme in the third column and find the ap- propriate passages in the text. Afterwards, the second column ‘Summary’ provided more detail on the actual content of the text passage. This approach of summarizing and form- ing blocks was applied here as a technical means of gaining fast and efficient access to text passages in the transcript, because the table presentation was oriented toward the structure of the course of the interview.

The third step was to put together individual key topics matching the questions guid- ing this research. Finally, the fourth step was to group together the key topics gathered from the material and classify them to the main themes of the study. These then document the conditions that either impede or facilitate the use of support services on various levels. 8 The individual interviews took between 60 and 120 minutes. All interviews were transcribed as

complete texts using standard orthography. These were all then included in the analyses without ex- ception. Short summary overviews of the individual interviews and the family discussions were composed on the basis of the parent questionnaire in the third ‘World Vision Child Study’ (World Vision 2013).

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In general, the analysis focused on describing and evaluating the experiences, perspec- tives, and outlooks of the individual groups of actors.

Experiences of deprivation: Everyday life, barriers to help via social support, and the meaning of the ‘good life’

This section presents the three main approaches to analysing the interviews. The selection of results is an outcome of focusing on experiences of deprivation in order to describe their multidimensionality. It starts off with childrearing and education as relevant topics taken above all from the individual interviews referring to everyday family life. To some extent, these already point to barriers in the provision of support to families, as the second approach shows. The final approach addresses the reconstructed categories of a ‘good family life’. It is precisely by looking at these wishes and ideas that indications emerge regarding what is lacking for families living in poverty.

Childrearing and education as everyday locations for experiencing deprivation

Two questions guided the preparation of the empirical material when analysing everyday family life: (1) Which challenges in rearing and educating their children do parents dis- cuss as being relevant for their everyday lives? (2) How do parents cope with an everyday life shaped by poverty? The findings presented here deliver a view of family life and de- privation. In almost all interviews, regardless of whether they were carried out with moth- ers or fathers, the needs of their own children and their children’s personalities formed a central starting point for narratives on everyday family life. The central problem from the mothers’ and fathers’ perspectives is that they generally lack the resources to promote their children’s development appropriately. Especially the mothers in the study seem to be under permanent pressure to be ‘good mothers’ under socio-economic constraints.

In the interviews, this fundamental experience of deprivation is documented by being unable to pay for the child to pursue a certain hobby, hardly ever being able to engage regularly in leisure activities that cost money, or being unable to purchase specific age- appropriate consumer goods such as fashionable clothes. Hence, deprivation here means that parents experience in their everyday lives that, although they are able to acknowledge and also accept the interests of their children, they do not have the means to support them.

This links up with a second experience of deprivation: the lack of decision making and action options in childrearing. Naturally, not fulfilling children’s wishes or not letting them have consumer goods is a general part of the challenge of rearing any child, and it is something that relates closely to parental norms and ideas. The mothers and fathers in our study also point to the relevance of these issues for a specific childrearing style. However, they stress that they themselves have hardly any latitude in childrearing, because they have to deny their children a great deal of social participation due to their limited means, and that this does not stand in any relation to their children’s behaviour. In addition, one of the central challenges they face in childrearing is the need to explain this deprivation to

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their children. They disappoint their children when doing this, but try to tell them to ac- cept deprivation as part of their (current) living situation.

The deprivation in everyday family life resulting from the lack of what are basically average resources in society links up with a host of associated parental worries. These worries are all based on the wish to make things as good as possible for their child. One worry is emphasized particularly strongly in all interviews: the emotional strain on the children due to the material situation of the family. Beyond this, mothers and fathers wor- ry that their children would be overburdened if they were to be aware of their parents’ ac- tual worries. A third worry that is relevant for everyday life addresses the stigmatization of their children as being ‘poor’, for example, at school.

Finally, I shall address a further aspect of deprivation that is relevant for everyday life and was emphasized particularly by mothers of young children. The main socio-political strategy for fighting poverty, as stipulated by Social Code II, is to integrate people as quickly as possible into the labour market. For mothers, this is an exceptional challenge when the employment services show a lack of sensitivity towards their role as caring mothers. In other words, it is particularly the mothers in this sample who address their need to take care of their children at home and question whether public care services will fully meet their children’s needs. However, there is a lack of any public legitimation for their worries, because the primary concern is to ensure that they find work. This also has a negative impact on decision-making and action options that are highly relevant for every- day family life. Mothers and fathers also point to the lack of safety for their children when discussing this category of care. This is particularly relevant for everyday life, because it concerns issues such as a safe route to school, security in the neighbourhood where they live, the health of their children, and their own health as a guarantee for a good family life. Hence, care is closely linked to general parental worries about the well-being, the physical safety, and the health of their children.

Finally, most of the parents in our sample are motivated by the desire to show their children pathways towards a ‘better life’. They are prepared to invest a great deal in this motive – both materially and emotionally. However, they also articulate their limits and the worries accompanying this. Therefore, much time in the individual interviews is de- voted to narratives about the children’s education, the demands imposed by schools, pa- rental efforts to help them with their homework, and their educational aspirations. Parents talk about their attempts to get involved with the school or to support their children’s learning. However, they also express their anger and frustration over difficult interactions between the parental home and school. This links up with the work of Dockett (2013) who shows how difficult it is for parents living in poverty to gain a good reputation, par- ticularly in their children’s schools.

Dependent on support: The barriers seen by the families

Narratives and information on obstacles and barriers make up a large part of the interview material and the family discussions. It is addressed far less frequently to what degree pub- lic support has been successful. Nonetheless, this does not automatically mean that sup- port offered to families tends to fail more often than succeed. When talking about barriers, families first of all narrate their experiences with the people in the ‘system’, that is, the

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professionals; second, they talk about problems with the bureaucratic procedures; and third, they say they suffer from a lack of information and counselling. All three key themes indicate what families, who depend on public support services such as employ- ment services, state transfer benefits, debt counselling or family assistance, experience as being precarious, and what kind of latitude is available to them for making their own de- cisions and acting in a self-determined manner.

This section focuses particularly on those findings that can also be interpreted as an expression of experiences of deprivation. Two aspects stand out particularly: access to satisfactory interactions with local professionals and the lack of information and counsel- ling.

Families gauge their experiences with the public support system primarily in terms of the people they meet there. From their perspective, the following indicators are relevant for a successful interaction: being treated with respect, experiencing a continuity of staff, dealing with staff who are well-informed about each single case, having enough time to explain problems properly, and being included in working out strategies to solve a prob- lem. In contrast, relations become difficult when families experience the activities of pro- fessionals as reinforcing the psychosocial strains accompanying a low socio-economic status – in other words, when professional actions reinforce the loss of personal meaning- fulness, the lack of recognition, and uncertainty about the near future.

Hence, the central aspects for families include how professionals respond to the chal- lenges they face in everyday family life, to their family values, to the needs of individual members of the family such as a child with a disability, to their restrictions to mobility, and to the need for flexibility in the support process. Both the analyses of our material and comparisons with existing research findings show that the reasons for the tendency to neg- lect these aspects are to be found in the expectations of what is standard in, for example, employment services with their orientation towards current socio-political strategies to fight poverty by ignoring, for example, mothers’ fears about the way their children are looked after in childcare services. As said before, it is especially mothers of preschool-age children in the sample who frequently felt pressurized to justify their greater interest in ensuring good care for their children rather than expressing any strong orientation toward being integrated in gainful employment (mostly in the low-pay sector).

Analyses of the interviews clearly showed these personal experiences along with a partial personalization of structural or institutional relations. Families living in precarious conditions gather experiences and impressions from people they feel dependent on, peo- ple whose understanding they need and people whose competencies can contribute to an improvement of their personal situation. However, the intentions behind professional ac- tivity in the public support system, the professional background, or the institutional and legal framework are in no way always transparent or visible to them. In certain situations, this state of affairs can contribute to mothers’ and fathers’ feelings of being at the mercy of these professionals or being unable to stand up for themselves. They gain the impres- sion that they do not receive adequate counselling and that their individual situation is not being acknowledged. From their experiences with the support system, they feel exposed to hierarchies of power.

As a consequence, the interviews show that it is primarily individual persons who are made responsible for the structurally determined constraints to professional action. For

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example, family members seeking advice from the local employment agency often expe- rience and suffer from the time pressures felt by staff members. They gain the impression that they always have to describe the particular problem of their family all over again right from the start, because staff fluctuations or rapid changes in task assignments mean that it is always somebody different who is responsible for their case. From the family’s perspective, why staff members feel this time pressure – whether for personal and indi- vidual reasons or for structural and organizational ones – is initially irrelevant. However, both types of reasons need to be differentiated carefully when analysing the success or failure of support measures.

The second main theme connected to experiences of deprivation reconstructed the handling and communication of information. The lack of suitable information and access to it can be identified as major challenges confronting the families. On the whole, the analysis reveals an extremely negative appraisal, because the families in the sample ad- dress what they perceive as a lack of easily accessible information as being an actively pursued dereliction of duty by the authorities. This is the area in which they locate the feeling of being denied their rights. The interviews also address access to knowledge and information in relation to various aspects of everyday life. In nearly every interview, criti- cisms of the communication and processing of knowledge and information refer to:

‒ information on the Bildungs- und Teilhabepaket, a ‘package’ of mainly vouchers for

educational, leisure or sports activities for eligible (poor) children; ‒ information on local government support and voluntary services; ‒ information on health topics such as children’s illnesses; ‒ information on which measures are to be taken to gain places in childcare for their

children; ‒ information on training or further training when you have children.

In addition, the excerpts from the interviews emphasize the ability to gather information by oneself and the possibility of passing it on to others. In these excerpts, individual mothers and fathers talk about new (e.g. social media) and informal ways to acquire and disseminate knowledge and information about action strategies that are independent from the local authorities and public services. Information on leisure options, for example, play an important role, and they use new media for this very purposefully.

The way some families talk about deficits in information also indicates their wish for face-to-face and individualised counselling on a broad range of concerns. They frequently feel the need not only to be informed but also to receive an individual recommendation or appraisal. This need should not be understood as merely an expression of helplessness, but as a clear interest in being able to decide and act competently. The interviews also ad- dress informal forms of counselling. These include, for example, conversations with other parents at the day care centre. Such informal networks that crop up in the context of edu- cational facilities prove to be a very important resource that also casts a new light on the significance of parent cafés in day care centres. However, as important as the informal exchange of information, counselling, and recommendations may be, it cannot replace targeted, formal, and binding professional counselling. Otherwise parents would depend on chance or picking up important information only in passing.

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Family and the ‘good life’

What is a good life? What ideas do families living in poverty have about this, and what do they need to make their wishes come true? What do they consider to be a good family life in view of the everyday precarity of their situation? Once again, the study links up here with my work and international research in childhood studies on the well-being of chil- dren and children’s ideas on the good life (Andresen/Wilmes 2015; Fegter/Richter 2013; World Vision 2010, 2013). The question on the good life is oriented towards Martha Nussbaum’s (1999, 2000) Capability Approach. This approach also considers decision making and action options as well as the ability of individuals to reach a decision for their own good reasons and act according to it. Hence, it addresses how to bring about a good life and views this as depending on both the framing conditions and the capability of the individual human being. Nussbaum developed a list that she herself called ‘vague’, al- though she takes anthropologically based ideas on fundamental human capabilities and links these with the philosophy of Aristotle.9

For the study of family poverty, the nine family interviews in which the children also participated ended by handing out different sets of picture cards for the game ‘Pairs’ (also known as ‘Concentration’ or ‘Memory’) together with play money. This is because of the idea that participants should have the opportunity to choose money as being important for the good life. All participants were asked to select cards showing pictures of one element of a good family life. The families as a whole, and the individual family members – both children and adults – participated very openly and enthusiastically. The approach gave, above all, children the chance to link up with a game with which the majority of them were familiar and to narrate something on the basis of the selected picture cards. Most of the interview passages initiated through the cards were very detailed. These narratives, the explanations by single family members, and the discussions between them were used to compile lists of a good life. One preliminary finding stands out and differs from the re- sults reported by Duflo and Banerjee (2012). The ideas of a good life articulated in the family interviews reveal a very realistic orientation and point to average or ‘normal’ ideas on prosperity in society. In other words, they did not articulate exorbitant expectations or hopes, but wishes for a normal everyday family life. Second, results show that children and adults formulated both a material list and a non-material list. They mentioned not on- ly material aspects such as having money to save but also non-material aspects such as having time for themselves or having fun with their children. Both types belong together

9 In close cooperation with Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum formulated the following ‘capabilities’

for a fulfilling human life: being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; health (par- ticularly being adequately nourished), shelter, sexual satisfaction, and mobility; the ability to avoid unnecessary pain and to have pleasurable experiences; being able to use all five senses, to imagine and to think; being able to have attachments to things and people, to love, to grieve, to experience longing, and gratitude; being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflec- tion on planning one’s life; being able to live for and towards others and to engage in various forms of familial and social relationships; to relate to animals, plants, and the whole of nature; being able to laugh, to play, and to enjoy recreational activities; living one’s own life and not that of another person; the ability to live one’s own life in one’s own surroundings and one’s own context (Nuss- baum 1999, 2000).

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and give valuable insights into what families require in order to be able to achieve a good life.

A total of ten perspectives on a good family life were reconstructed. Almost all of them were central to the discussions for both children and adults:

‒ basic needs: roof over one’s head, food, clothing, health; ‒ having money and being able to save some of it; ‒ play and relaxation, leisure time and holidays; ‒ education and school; ‒ media and education; ‒ mobility; ‒ gainful employment and family-related work; ‒ time and rest periods; ‒ enjoying nature; ‒ security and safety.

In summary, all families prove to have ideas about a good family life. They also try to achieve this life despite the aforementioned barriers in their difficult everyday lives, and they focus particularly on the well-being of their children. In addition, the reconstructed dimensions provide insights into concrete experiences of deprivation.

Reconstructing the experiences of deprivation in families

The present article links up with data collected and analysed within the framework of the study Kinder – Armut – Familie (Andresen/Galic 2015) and it focuses on the experiences of deprivation in families. Deprivation is reconstructed from three perspectives: (1) in re- lation to the everyday life of families, (2) in relation to the barriers to social support due to specific experiences of deprivation, and (3) oriented towards the ideas on a good life within the families. Such a reconstruction with an analysis focusing on deprivation re- veals its multidimensionality and complexity.

Living in families that have to cope with a low socio-economic status and thereby mostly also other multiple strains in everyday life also strongly affects the children. In Germany, family policy, just like social policy, is closely linked to the employment status of the parents – both father and mother – and draws attention away from the structural need to ensure the well-being of the child (Prognos 2014). When the primary concern is to make it possible to work and to protect oneself against unemployment, then treating other aspects of everyday life becomes secondary, even though these are central to family life. These aspects include supervision and care for family members, the education of the chil- dren, and the quality of family relationships. The reconstructions in section 3 pointed out how mothers in particular are put under pressure through gaining the impression that their children are not being well looked after while they are away at work. Such worries about the care of children tie up resources and cost energy. However, they are hardly taken into account at all in the political context or within the structure of the system of support. They are treated as if they are merely a private concern.

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The analysis of the parent interviews has also shown how strongly parental actions concentrate on the well-being of their children, their education, and their leisure time. This is also in line with findings from other studies on, for example, single parents (Stadt Wolfsburg 2013) or families with a low socio-economic status in Germany (Diakonisches Werk der Ev.-luth. Landeskirche in Braunschweig e.V. in Zusammenarbeit mit der Stif- tung Braunschweigischer Kulturbesitz 2011). International research is also focusing in- creasingly on a detailed description and analysis of the multiple and complex needs of families in precarious life situations combined with a critical survey of national strategies in family and social policy (e.g. Easton et al. 2012). Contrary to the scepticism in not only popular but also political discourses regarding whether state transfer payments are actual- ly spent on the child and whether parents feel responsible for their children or are willing and able to rear them, our findings combined with the studies reported above show a completely different side of parental activity: first, they reveal the challenges that families have to deal with in everyday life. Second, we can see the deliberation processes by which mothers and fathers strive to achieve the well-being of their children. The inter- views show, for example, how parents have to explain to their children that they will have to do without things or leisure-time activities that are more or less taken for granted by many of their peers, or how they try to find action options for themselves and their chil- dren, whereby they frequently and quickly come up against material and social barriers. The issue of decision making and action options is linked to the issue of material re- sources, because their lack is a major indicator of constraints and barriers. Vouchers that replace direct transfer payments to parents while generally increasing choice may consti- tute a serious constraint if hedged by complicated rules and procedures, as in the case of the aforementioned Bildungs- und Teilhabepaket, can also have a constraining effect.

Many passages in the parent interviews address what the options for organizing the family are like in concrete terms and how these are constrained. This reveals exemplary indicators regarding whether parents perceive themselves as being able to effectively shape their everyday lives, particularly in relation to the social support system and their children’s educational institutions. The adults interviewed link the issue of different deci- sion making options and action scopes to issues affecting their children. However, their ideas on a good family life also reveal that they do not just want to be seen in their role of rearing and taking care of children, but also as persons with their own (e.g. health-related) needs. This also seems to be based on experienced deprivation. Decisions and the options they require also have to take worries about the own person into account. Particularly the family discussions on a good life revealed that all family members – mothers, fathers, and children – negotiate how extensively they are able to shape their lives. However, this rais- es the more far-reaching systematic issue of how the diversity of experiences of depriva- tion relates to the categories of generation and gender. Hence, one next step could be to analyse differences within families in not only the distribution of resources but also the experience of deprivation.

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