Unfortunately we do not have a summary for this item at the moment

Halpern-Meekin makes worthy critiques to try to strengthen public policy to support relationship education ... Halpern-Meekin's in-depth understanding of these couples' lives allows her to add the lens of social poverty to help us understand why stressed and struggling couples are drawn to these programs and how the programs could actually help them. -- Institute for Family Studies
In this thoughtful and important book, Sarah Halpern-Meekin reframes decades-long debates over the value and efficacy of government-supported relationship and marriage education programs. Drawing on rich in-depth research into the lives and relationships of low-income, unmarried couples, Social Poverty powerfully shows how policy can play a key role in alleviating, not only economic deprivation, but families unmet, though equally important needs for emotional closeness, intimacy, and support. With a smart set of recommendations researchers, practitioners, and policymakers should heed, this book is crucial reading for a sophisticated and beautifully written analysis of how promoting social connection can and should be at the heart of anti-poverty policy. -- Jennifer Randles,author of Proposing Prosperity?: Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America
What would happen if we considered the relationships that sustain us as important as financial resources, or if we viewed isolation or loneliness as serious social problems as we do disease? With the deceptively simple concept of 'social poverty,' Halpern-Meekin asks us to recognize the tremendous inherent value of human connection, and greatly expands our capacity to understand the costs of low-income couples thin emotional ties to other people....She picks her way through the detritus of the marriage promotion debates to issue her own clarion call: we should consider social poverty as important as income poverty, and aim to redress both. -- Allison Pugh,author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity

Sarah Halpern-Meekin is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the co-author of It's Not Like I'm Poor: How Working Families Make Ends Meet in a Post-Welfare World. She received her PhD in sociology from Harvard University in 2009.