Feeling Poor: The Felt Experience Low-Income Lone Mothers

Abstract

This article describes what it means to feel poor from the perspective of low-income lone mothers. The construct of feeling poor is complex and multifaceted for these mothers, whose common behaviors include self-sacrifice and coping. The authors identify 10 feeling domains for these mothers: feeling deprived, righteous, the need for occupational choice, relatively better positioned than others, the need to manage the appearance of poverty, judged/degraded, guilty, isolated, dependent, and despondent.