Learning to Labor,Love,and Live: Shaping the Good Neoliberal Citizen in State Work and Marriage Programs

Job Club

Woodward conducted a year-long ethnographic study in 2002 to 2003 of two welfare offices in Northern California that administered TANF. She spent 16 weeks—eight weeks at each site—specifically observing mandatory Job Club and Job Search classes in the two offices. Despite being 15 minutes apart by car, one office served predominantly Black families (77 percent), and vastly mothers (about 89 percent of the adults); the other served a racially diverse clientele (38 percent Black, 19 percent white, 15 percent Latinx, and 15 percent Laotian), with fathers comprising about 21 percent of the adult recipients (Woodward 2013). While TANF was designed with single mothers in mind, all the observed classes contained one or more fathers. Because couples were not allowed to attend the classes together, only one member of a couple was present at a time. Most instructors were Black women, although there was a Black man at one office and a white woman assistant at the other, as well as one white male Job Search instructor. In addition to more than 300 hours spent observing classes, Woodward spent several months (and approximately 300 hours) shadowing welfare workers as they completed their daily work activities, including participant intake interviews, assessment meetings, and follow-up appointments with clients. She also conducted informal interviews with 10 to 15 workers in each office and semiformal, in-depth interviews with 11 welfare-to-work participants. While informed by the larger project that broadly examined women’s experiences with welfare reform, this article draws on the ethnographic data from eight weeks of Job Club classes and a qualitative textual analysis of the more than 300-page binder distributed to participants.

Thriving Families

Based in a different Northern California county, the Thriving Families program received a federal five-year Healthy Marriage Initiative grant to teach relationship skills to low-income, unmarried couples with (or expecting) a baby. Almost all participants lived below the poverty line, and most (84 percent) received some form of public assistance, including TANF. The classes were racially diverse: 40 percent identified as Latinx, 24 percent as Black, 22 percent as white, 3 percent as Asian or Pacific Islander, 2 percent as Native American, and 9 percent as multiracial or “other.” Participation was officially voluntary, but many enrolled in the program to meet court-ordered requirements for domestic violence and Child Protective Services cases; others enrolled because they received food, money for transportation, and a $100 “graduation stipend.” To receive these incentives, participants were required to attend 14 hours of class as a couple and could not be legally married at the time of enrollment. With the exception of one lesbian couple, all couples Randles observed were heterosexual.

Randles conducted participant observation in a training session for the program’s curriculum and qualitative textual analysis of the 274-page instructor’s training manual and 100-page participants’ workbook. She also conducted more than 150 hours of participant observation in Thriving Families classes and recruitment sessions and in-depth interviews with 45 parents who graduated from the program and 15 Thriving Families staff and instructors. Randles interviewed nearly equal numbers of men and women, including 20 heterosexual couples who took the classes together. Couples were interviewed either separately or together depending on respondents’ comfort level and space and time constraints. This article draws on observational and interview data and the curricular analysis.

Analytic Strategy

Authors separately analyzed their respective data using a combination of strategies derived from grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1998), the extended case method (Burawoy 1998), and qualitative data analysis (Charmaz 2006). For both projects, this process began with an open coding phase, during which descriptive and analytic themes emerged. The second major coding phase involved a line-by-line rereading to code all data using these inductive codes. This resulted in a structured coding system for each (Miles and Huberman 1994). Our growing familiarity with one another’s work revealed similar analytic patterns—especially themes related to various types of skills—thereby highlighting how the overriding goals of Job Club and Thriving Families converged. Personal responsibility, calculated decision-making, rationalized emotions, and work/relationship/life skills were inductive themes that emerged through this process in both cases. After deciding to pursue this combined analysis, we wrote analytic memos to create a new joint coding scheme and systematically recoded both datasets focused on the three primary skill sets curricula and instructors conveyed to participants: the ability to value hard work and self-sufficiency, the ability to rationally plan and make calculated decisions, and the ability to exercise self-control and strategic self-presentation.

We bring these two datasets into analytic conversation as a lens into important assumptions about welfare recipients and what individual and interpersonal skills are believed to be important for escaping poverty. Jointly focusing on the two curricula and their implementation in actual classes allowed us to analyze the rhetorical and tactical similarities between government job training and marriage education programs, two seemingly disparate poverty-prevention strategies. In doing so, we reveal the centrality of efforts to shape good neoliberal selves who work hard, rationally plan, and self-regulate by deploying these skills. Drawing specifically from our observational and interview data, we also show how these strategies generated both acquiescence and criticism on the ground among participants.

Self-sufficiency through Hard Work

Job Club was designed specifically to prepare welfare participants—disproportionately single women of color—for work. The formal Job Club curriculum adopted by the County, and used in three of the four observed Job Club sessions, contained six pages aimed at promoting employment. This included a list of “more than 200 reasons why my life would be better if I was off welfare and working,” ranging from “I would get respect” and “I could pay my rent” to “I would go to Walt Disney World with my children.” Ms. Johnson, a Black instructor, wrote the welfare grant amounts for families of different sizes on the board, along with the hourly wage that corresponded to that monthly amount. At the time, a single parent with one child received a monthly welfare grant of $548 a month, which was equivalent to making $3.43 an hour for a 40-hour work week. Ms. Johnson impressed upon participants the benefits of even minimum wage work, which would pay more than welfare. She asked, “Is this chart a reality check?” Participants responded with nods and affirmative murmurs.

In another Job Club class, the team of instructors presented participants with a scenario about an association, “Citizens for a Stable Society,” tasked with ending poverty and other social problems by making decisions for the community, including when and where people would work and what their hobbies would be. After some discussion, one instructor told the class that this scenario was similar to the welfare program, which directed and monitored all their actions. Ignoring the constraints of low-wage employment, the message was that real freedom could only be found in the free market through employment and self-sufficiency.

While many types of training and up to 18 months of college classes were allowed work activities, and encouraged by most Job Club instructors, the message that self-sufficiency was the ultimate goal was ubiquitous—regardless of participants’ race, gender, or marital status—and necessarily so given time limits on welfare receipt. The formal curriculum, and in turn the instructors, therefore focused heavily on teaching participants the skills believed to be needed to find and keep employment, beginning with interest inventories and personality mosaics intended to assess participants’ affinities for various careers. Instructors used various skills assessment forms where participants had to list or rank the employment, personal, and “transferable” skills they possessed. For example, the curriculum suggested that “sorting laundry” was a “transferable” skill that could be presented as a skill in “organizing, classifying.” The curriculum also emphasized how to articulate one’s skills and strengths, including lists of helpful words and phrases. In one class, instructors presented articles about what employers want. In another, participants were encouraged to think of themselves as employers and identify qualities they would want in an employee. Responses included "committed," "honest," "respectable and respectful," and "reliable."

Approximately 25 pages in the Job Club binder were devoted to filling out applications and creating a résumé, with additional pages devoted to cover letters and thank-you notes. Participants received individual résumé assistance from staff who worked in the Resource Rooms at each office, where participants could use computers and copy machines to aid in their job searches. The curriculum addressed common and difficult interview questions, barriers to finding employment, and suggestions for how to handle questions about gaps in work experience. While the curriculum indicated that participants may refuse to answer illegal questions (e.g., “Do you have children?”), it also implied and was echoed by instructors that participants should answer such questions with the information employers really wanted to know, for example, that parents have dependable childcare and will be reliable workers. In one class, when a woman proposed lying about having children, the instructor cautioned against lying because of the effort and stress involved. Instead, she recommended “answering questions about kids briefly but honestly—and say they are good kids and that they are all in day care, etc.”

In addition to encouraging work and teaching the skills presumed necessary to find employment, Job Club also covered job retention. The formal curriculum included self-assessments about why participants had quit jobs in the past and questionnaires to help participants think through a decision to quit a future job. Several pages focused on convincing participants that they should work hard to keep jobs. One sheet, “Daily Activities to Keep Me Going to Work,” included, “Make a list of why I am better off working” or “Call or visit someone who encourages me to go to work.” The assumption that formal employment needed to be encouraged likely reflects both the realities of the target audience—single mothers with caretaking responsibilities that may make employment challenging—and racialized stereotypes of Blacks and welfare recipients as lazy (Soss et al. 2011).

Job termination was another common topic. A Black instructor, Mr. James, told his class, “Sometimes we leave jobs because of a poor work ethic.” He described losing his first job because he was “spoiled.” He asked the class why they had gotten fired and wrote their responses on butcher paper: “I got fired because . . . (1) Job abandonment, (2) Not following company procedure, (3) Insubordination, (4) Excessive absences and tardiness, (5) Lying on your application, (6) Office politics, (7) Not doing/performing job duties.” While there were instances of participants faulting their employers for firing them, these common responses illustrated participants’ tendency to accept the logic of individual responsibility central to neoliberal welfare policies by viewing job termination as a result of personal failings.

Although Thriving Families focused significantly less on finding and retaining work, it too taught parents the skills presumably needed to develop a proper work ethic that would allow them to financially support their children without government assistance. In the introductory lesson, instructors told participants that one of the main topics they would learn about was how to “acquire the resources to support your child and meet their needs.” Classes rarely addressed, however, how poor parents could access resources through private or public social service organizations. Instead, instructors focused on teaching parents that their co-parenting relationships were a primary resource for their children. In the first activity of each Thriving Families series, the yarn web, parents took turns answering instructors’ questions about their children as they threw a ball of yarn around the room, creating a web onto which an instructor would toss a beach ball meant to symbolically represent participants’ children. Katherine, a Black instructor, once explained: “Much like this web, if you create a strong network of support for your kids through a healthy co-parenting relationship, it will take care of your child.” As evidenced by comments made after the exercise, participants appreciated the emphasis on parental love and care as resources children need to thrive. Yet the exercise did not convey how parents raising children in poverty were supposed to convert love into the money needed to provide for children’s physical needs. Although Job Club targeted the work beliefs and habits of single parents and Thriving Families emphasized the importance of committed co-parenting for couples, both similarly instructed poor parents to believe that socioeconomic success—their own and that of their children—depended on their abilities to adopt the right work ethic in matters of labor and love.

Every Thriving Families class series also included a lesson on the “benefits of a healthy marriage,” when instructors described how working hard to create and sustain a good marriage could generate additional income. The curriculum noted, “There is more money in a married household. People pool their incomes and are able to build up more resources over their lifetime.” In the lesson on “barriers to a healthy marriage,” instructors asked participants to discuss whether the fictional couple “Kevin” and “Diane” should get married. Noting that not having enough money or well-paying jobs often keeps couples from getting married, the curriculum and instructors encouraged couples to seek “employment training and job placement services to improve their job prospects” so that they could improve their marital odds. However, parents did not understand how marriage created more economic resources, especially when most parents Randles interviewed had avoided marriage because they “couldn’t afford it.” As Jessica, a white mother who took Thriving Families classes, explained in an interview: “We’ll probably end up getting married, but not today. I can barely pay to keep our lives going. I can’t pay to go out and get married.” Like Jessica, most of the other parents were so financially strapped that the cost of the marriage license was an economic hardship. As many parents were unemployed and already cohabiting, the message that marriage is economically beneficial did not resonate with their financial realities.

Thriving Families lessons on the importance of fathers focused on how men especially would work harder if they were married and committed to the well-being of entire families, not just themselves. Cynthia, the white executive director of the Thriving Families program, explained in an interview how the program improved men’s work ethic:

Once men commit, they do all kinds of things differently. . . . They go out, they make more money, they’re healthier. . . . I mean why are you going to work? Why are you doing something you don’t really want to do all day long? . . . He would do it for his family. Would a single man do that? Not on your life.

Fathers appreciated the program’s emphasis on their value, but parents also expressed how hard both fathers and mothers were already working, despite not being married. During an interview, Amber, a white mother, told Randles about her boyfriend, Saul, a Latino father who participated in Thriving Families: “If it wasn’t for him, we would . . . who knows where we would be. He works, he brings the money home, the food, he’s our everything.” Neither Amber nor Saul needed a class to convince them of the importance of work for their family’s well-being or the lack of importance of marriage for Saul’s work ethic.

These examples from Thriving Families and Job Club reveal how both programs sought to shape important aspects of poor parents’ self-concepts regarding dependency and employment. They taught participants that work increases self-worth, virtue as a spouse and parent, and value as a self-reliant citizen. However, these messages obscured challenges poor parents—especially single mothers and parents of color—face in finding and retaining employment. Little in the curricula or classes addressed structural barriers to employment, including workplace discrimination against mothers (Correll, Benard, and Paik 2007), applicants of color (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004), and those with a criminal record (Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009). While discussions of transportation challenges, childcare issues, mental and physical health problems, erratic work schedules, and workplace injustices—including sexual harassment, which a number of women in the classes reported having experienced—were common, these problems were largely expected to be solved by individuals and their families. Parents who were working typically made so little that it did not enable them to pull their families above the poverty line. Like Jessica, who was working full time as a home healthcare aid until the birth of her daughter, noted, most parents we observed and interviewed could “barely pay to keep their lives going.”

Personal Responsibility through Rational Planning and Decision-making

Job Club and Thriving Families classes also focused on teaching participants to make rational life choices, to set goals and devise strategies to meet those goals, and to organize their time and money in carefully planned and calculated ways. Both programs, for example, taught skills for problem solving, decision-making, organization, stress management, and budgeting. Individual agency was lauded, and participants were encouraged to think of anything as possible, as long as they made the right choices. Ms. Johnson told Job Club participants on the first day of class, “Everything that has happened to me is because of the choices I’ve made.”

All observed Job Club classes taught participants about goal-setting and money management; three of the four classes also taught time management skills. On the first day of class, Mr. James presented four types of choices that people make: unplanned “impulse choices”; “forced choices” that are not planned but where a decision must be made; “compulsive choices,” such as addictive behavior that inevitably disrupts one’s life; and “rational choices” that are “planned, well thought-out, controlled.” While admitting to his own compulsive and impulsive choices, and allowing participants to share as well, he encouraged more rational choices.

Another Job Club class began with participants taking an assessment, “What’s Your Organization I.Q.” After answering a variety of questions about time management, cleanliness, and efficiency, participants totaled their “yes” scores. Five participants scored in the top category; most were in the next category called "Time Jugglers." Others were labeled “Time Strugglers” and “Needs Help.” A Black instructor asked a young woman in the latter category, “Why?” and then critiqued those in this category for being “packrats.” The young Black mother responded that it was due to laziness and too little time; she would rather go out. A white instructor told her she was procrastinating, and the mother agreed. Participants were then asked to go through a time management assessment, “How Do I Use Time?” A discussion of “time robbers,” such as doing nothing while on the bus, or failing to plan meals ahead of time, followed.

Goal-setting was a dominant theme in both programs. Thriving Families instructors presented lessons on “SMART Goals”—an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely—to emphasize the importance of setting feasible goals. Instructors explained that goals give individuals a sense of purpose and inspire happiness and self-esteem. Similarly, the Job Club curriculum had a worksheet on goal-setting that encouraged setting “Realistic—within the year” goals, “Realistic—1 to 5 years” goals, and “Visionary—5 or more years” goals. Participants were to fill in the total and monthly costs of their goals and devise plans to achieve them. A “job goal analysis sheet” asked participants to identify an immediate job goal, what would help them attain it, what obstacles might arise, and how they could “minimize or eliminate the negatives.” These lessons implied that goal attainment only required ambition and skills.

Teaching goal-setting as a cognitive capacity and skill belied how parents’ economic constraints and race and gender inequalities undermined their aspirations for well-paid work, marriage, and getting off government assistance. In one Thriving Families class, Karen, a Black instructor, used spending a certain amount of time every night with children as an example of a “smart” goal. “Is this attainable,” she asked, “even if you’re working 60-hour weeks and are exhausted when you come home?” Parents in the class reluctantly agreed. Karen concluded, “Yes, it is attainable, but you’ll have to make sacrifices, like getting less sleep.”

Lessons on money management in both programs instructed participants to organize financial papers, budget more effectively, and identify unnecessary expenses. In each Job Club class, a Black credit counselor spoke. Beginning each presentation by asking about their future goals, she then chose a goal and had the class calculate the goal’s cost. Often, her goal seemed out of touch with participants’ lives—going to San Francisco to see a play and have dinner, for example. The class brainstormed ways to achieve the goal, including delaying it until they had the money. She also spoke about communicating with debt collectors, checking credit scores, building or fixing credit, and monthly budgeting. Some of the topics resonated with participants. In one class, the credit counselor suggested taking care of traffic tickets, which James, a Black man, replied he had already done, while a Latino father said he had not. Her mention of video rental late fees also resonated with James, who had paid $72 in late fees last week. The credit counselor also warned about check cashing places and payday loans. Tadisha, a young Black woman, responded, “It’s worse for your credit report to owe a little money and not make payments than to owe a lot and pay a little.” The credit counselor agreed.

Thriving Families instructors similarly asked parents to list fixed expenses they had during a typical week, identify which ones they could do without, and brainstorm ways to adjust to income changes after losing jobs or government benefits. One Thriving Families budgeting lesson called “Needs vs. Wants” asked participants to categorize various items—e.g. college degree, bus pass, four-bedroom house, cigarettes, milk, and beer—as either necessary or unnecessary. Similarly, the Job Club curriculum included a list of “money gobblers,” which, strikingly, included “garden supplies,” “boat/boat supplies,” and “domestic help.” One set of Thriving Families instructors, Rochelle and John, both Black, focused on ways to cut incidental expenses, such as making coffee at home rather than purchasing it out. Rochelle encouraged parents to put their daily change in a jar as a “savings account” for unanticipated expenses or occasional treats and asked them to identify two expenses they could cut. When Rochelle asked Larissa, a Latina mother, what she wrote, Larissa said “cable television” and “my cell phone.” Cutting those out would save a lot of money each month, Rochelle noted, and she inquired if Larissa could call the cable and phone companies to have them shut off. “Oh, I already got rid of them both months ago,” Larissa quipped.

Some parents viewed their financial problems as matters of individual culpability, while others simply faulted lack of money. A Latina Job Club participant said, “If we knew how to handle money, we wouldn’t be here.” A Black woman in the class turned around and agreed with this statement. In another class, a Black participant said she saw no reason to save, but further explained that her family has a spending problem and she overspends like her mother. Many other parents, however, found messages about budgeting useless and condescending. When Randles interviewed Amber, she noted that her family could not afford to let their daily change, which often bought diapers, sit unused in a jar. A Black mother of five in a Job Club class said she had nothing to work with at the moment and described herself as “living on a wing and a prayer.” When asked if they had used any of the information on money, many parents said that the budgeting lessons were common sense and that they had already been doing without and carefully calculating expenses their entire lives. “When you have so little,” a Black mother in Thriving Families explained, “how can you not know where every cent goes?”

Parents’ receptivity to lessons on money seemed to depend on how instructors framed their messages about keeping household costs low and whether the lessons assumed that parents were irresponsible or ignorant about budgeting. Thriving Families participants were most critical of the Black instructors John and Rochelle’s advice to save daily change, cut frivolous expenses, and save before paying bills. They were less critical of the tendency among Katherine and Karl, both Black, to teach about budgeting by creating lists of expenses and income. Participants most appreciated how Susan and José—white and Latino, respectively—discussed how to align spending habits with parents’ most deeply held values. Lewis, a Black father in his 50s, took classes with Susan and José and described how they changed his plan for the graduation stipend he and his girlfriend received:

I told her I’m going to do something with my part, and she said, “No you’re not.” We’re going to take the $100 and go get some baby clothes. I said, “No, I’m going to take $10 and do something for myself.” Then after that class about money and values, I was listening to her, and I knew she was right.

Couples also valued lessons on money taught by the Black instructor Deborah and the white instructor Mark about how to create a list of free family activities available in the community. Thus, instructors’ race seemed to matter less to participants than whether the messages they emphasized assumed deficiencies among parents.

Lessons that did assume participants were deficient in managing money, such as the directive to cut unnecessary expenses, reflect the neoliberal emphasis on making rational consumptive choices as emblems of agency for good neoliberal citizens (Gershon and Alexy 2011; McGuigan 2014; Wrenn 2015). Building on the racialized stereotype of African Americans’ overconsumption and inability to delay gratification, these lessons implied that participants’ precarious economic circumstances were the result of unnecessary and ill-informed spending habits—something some participants believed to be true. The underlying logic of neoliberal work and marriage programs was based on the assumption that welfare-reliant families are deficient because they lack the cognitive skills necessary for financial responsibility. Correcting for this deficiency by learning how to self-assess and implement skills for goal-setting, organization, time management, and budgeting would presumably compensate for what they lacked. However, what many lacked most was not the ability to envision feasible goals, but the opportunities and resources necessary to realize them. Rather than address the deficiencies in parents’ socioeconomic opportunities and circumstances, both programs emphasized their presumed lack of money and time management skills.

Self-control through Emotional Regulation and Strategic Self-presentation

The third element of good neoliberal citizenry taught in Job Club and Thriving Families was emotional regulation and strategic self-presentation on the job and at home, specifically as a means to attain self-sufficiency through occupational and relational stability. The focus on being in control of oneself and one’s life was pervasive, as was the encouragement to always present oneself as rational and in control.

Job Club and Thriving Families both taught participants how to identify sources of stress and to use stress-reduction techniques. One page of the Job Club curriculum, which began “How do you cope with stress?” instructed, “The key to beating stress is CREATING A SENSE OF CONTROL.” Another page had participants rate their stress level to compute their “stress control score.” Yet another, titled “Getting Control,” included tips for managing anger, such as counting to 10 and breathing. Discussing his volatile divorce and how it interfered with his work, Mr. James told Job Club participants that you “have to keep personal problems out of the workplace, and when you can’t, stay controlled.” In another class, instructors went over “Skill 21: Controlling Your Anger: Keep Your Head So You Don’t Lose Your Job,” from a supplemental book, 30 Ways to Shine as a New Employee. Participants learned to take a time out, identify their anger triggers, choose a response, and “convert the anger into energy.” During this activity, an instructor asked the class, “Who doesn’t know when they are getting angry?” A middle-aged white mother quickly responded, “Me!” and explained that she blows up easily and “at the drop of a hat.” A Latina mother told of an altercation she had with another woman, while yet another participant (white/Latina) shared how she had recently cracked a teenage boy’s head open with a pan when she got mad at him while she was cooking. Embracing the notion that their poverty was at least partly a result of their emotional issues, many Job Club participants welcomed the chance to share about their struggles with self-control.

The Thriving Families lesson on “Managing My Stress” asked participants to rate how stressful certain situations—“no health insurance,” “can’t find a job,” “not having enough money to pay bills,” and “finding and paying for childcare”—were for their families. Unemployment and not having enough money topped parents’ lists. Yet, regardless of which stressors came up, instructors generically encouraged parents to find ways to manage their stress for the health of their relationships, such as by doing breathing exercises and relaxing together. While some instructors from both programs acknowledged the structural constraints that many participants faced, such as deteriorating labor market conditions and racism, discussions about stress focused on managing it as a personal problem. Much like their response to the budgeting lessons, Thriving Families parents reported that the stress-reduction techniques were nice ideas, but mostly useless in practice for actually managing the stressors resulting from their poverty and struggles with finding and keeping well-paid work. Similarly, Job Club participants easily brainstormed healthy ways of dealing with stress—take a walk, meditate, prepare in advance—but showed few signs that they actually used such strategies.

In addition to controlling one’s emotions and managing stress, another key element of Job Club classes was self-presentation. Films and discussions about “first impressions” and appropriate interview and workplace appearance and hygiene were regular topics. Most classes showed films depicting often outrageous job interview scenarios, including exaggeratedly inappropriate interview outfits. Participants were regularly instructed to dress in their “conservative best” for interviews and warned against having long nails, piercings, and tattoos. Strong handshakes, eye contact, and good attitudes were also encouraged. Participants were expected to control their bodies and conform to employers’ expectations for self-presentation. While usually taking these discussions in stride and showing interest in appearance guidelines—for example, inquiring about covering tattoos—participants occasionally resisted these messages. When one participant, Patricia, a white (or perhaps Latina) mother, got a new tattoo on her hand during Job Club, a Black woman instructor criticized her publicly. Patricia maintained that she would never regret her tattoos and that it would be “prejudiced” to fire her because of them as they have nothing to do with the work she can do. A white male Job Search instructor who happened to be there responded that “lots of things are prejudiced, but it’s the real world.” The implication was that, in the “real world,” good neoliberal citizens strategically self-present in line with employers’ assumptions of how a good worker looks and acts. Other conversations centered on hair; a Black woman instructor advised her mostly Black class not to wear colors in their hair. Furthermore, she said that while she wears Afros to work sometimes, for an interview she always blows and presses her hair. The implicit message was that the good and successful neoliberal citizen embraces restrained, white styles of appearance.

Many Job Club and Thriving Families lessons also focused on interpersonal communication skills. A common Thriving Families exercise was about positive strokes, or “units of human recognition.” The workbook asked participants to identify if statements such as “You did a good job changing that diaper” and “You’re too fat” were positive or negative strokes. Quoting from the manual, instructors explained that, “Researchers have found that good relationships—especially good couple relationships—have five positive words or actions for every negative one.” Couples practiced exchanging positive strokes about their partners, and instructors encouraged them to keep their positive-to-negative stroke ratio below 5:1. This highly rational and calculated approach to interpersonal communication embodied the elements of self-control and emotional regulation inherent in good neoliberal citizenry.

Other Thriving Families lessons similarly focused on skilled communication, such as how to be an active listener and speak from one’s own point of view by using “I” and “me” rather than “you” statements. If partners could avoid attacking one another, couples could presumably talk about their problems with empathy and honesty rather than anger and blame. The workbook explained that, instead of saying, “He never looks for a job” or “She’s always spending money we don’t have,” couples should rephrase these statements to give primacy to the feelings underlying them, as in “I feel insecure about our financial future since neither of us has a job.” The message was that it mattered less what couples fought about than how they fought. The goal was to teach couples to resolve conflict more effectively so they would stay together, pool resources, and increase their chances of self-sufficiency. The Job Club curriculum also included training in active listening and emphasized the importance of using “I” statements, particularly at work.

Thriving Families participants found lessons on managing emotions more useful than those on managing money. However, many reported that the communication skills were hard to implement because they could not regularly practice them. The strains of unemployment or arduous workdays, parenting young children, and living in cramped housing, shelters, and cars prevented couples from prioritizing active listening. Other strategies, such as using “I” and “me” statements, seemed silly and unnatural to parents. When asked by an instructor to convert her claim that “My boyfriend is an asshole sometimes” into an “I” or “me” statement, a Latina mother said pointedly, “Ok, I feel like my boyfriend is an asshole sometimes, and that pisses me off.”

Relationships were also discussed in Job Club Classes, although usually in the context of building a “Dream Team,” as Mr. James called it, or assessing participants’ “support circles,” as the curriculum noted. While self-care and issues such as domestic violence were covered in all classes, some groups of participants—particularly those at the predominantly Black office—were resistant to therapeutic discourses. Following a workshop on self-esteem, Alicia, a young Black mother, said she disliked “psychology because it makes things tense. . . . There are certain things you can’t say in a group.” She added, “Therapy makes you bring up stuff you don’t want to bring up” (Woodward 2014b.). Similar issues arose again when a different counselor came to speak to the same group about domestic violence. Some of the women gave this white counselor a hard time; when she left the room, two participants claimed that she “sucked.” One Black woman quietly defended her, saying she was “cool enough” and then, voicing the real issue, “No one really wants to talk about abuse.” Many participants at this office resisted the arguably white, middle-class practice of therapeutically processing emotions and traumatic experiences (Woodward 2014b), or what Rose (1990) calls “technologies of subjectivity,” to better function in the formal labor market and have “healthy” relationships.

Participants at this welfare office appeared even more suspect of this therapeutic approach when it was delivered by white counselors. All the instructors at this office were Black; they were not universally loved, but participants generally gave them a chance. White welfare workers or other staff seemed to be treated with open suspicion by some participants, and had to work harder to prove themselves as “cool enough.” At the more diverse welfare office, where participants were less suspicious of therapeutic approaches, they also seemed to be less suspicious of white welfare workers. While most Job Club instructors were Black, a Job Search instructor at this office was white and well loved by most participants. However, this instructor was known for going out of his way for participants, meeting with them individually—sometimes after hours—to help with career planning, and finding employment. He won over most participants quickly, but as a white man perhaps needed to make these extra efforts to earn their respect. The white counselor at this office, however, was also well respected by clients, suggesting that the more diverse participant population led to an office culture that was more open to white welfare staff.

Despite one program targeting single parents and the other focusing on couples, both characterized certain relationship behaviors and choices as “healthy” to signal that participants could learn to differentiate between productive and destructive relationships, romantic or otherwise. This implied that creating and maintaining good relationships at both work and home is a knowledge- and skill-based capacity of the neoliberal self that generates productive alliances (Gershon and Alexy 2011). Instructors taught participants that the ability to adopt certain communicative and self-presentation styles was a form of emotional competence that supports stable jobs and marriages, which aid self-sufficiency. These strategies reveal job and marriage programs’ shared certain neoliberal goals: to develop poor parents’ abilities to be self-aware and self-motivating (Illouz 2007), to productively regulate internal emotional experiences (Hochschild [1983] 2012), and to manage others’ impressions (Goffman 1959).