Working on the margins

THIS IS HOW it is for a working mother struggling to stay off welfare:

You have run out of money for Pampers, and your child's day care center won't accept children without diapers. This happened once before, and you are afraid you'll be bumped from the hard-won day care slot altogether if you show up without diapers. So you balance the risks - that you'll lose your job for calling in sick one more time or lose your day care.

Or you're working as a $7-an-hour security guard and your son gets in a fight with another child at school. The teacher urges that you come in right away. You explain to your supervisor, but for missing work you are suspended and docked a week's pay.

The exhausting work of navigating a life on the margins - old cars that don't start, patchy child care, substandard housing, unreliable back-up from neighbors or relatives - is documented by new research into working families in low-income America. The project - conducted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and 9 to 5, an organization of working women - offers an intimate portrait of real lives at the bottom third of the income scale (up to 200 percent of the federal poverty line). Researchers interviewed hundreds of parents, day care providers, teachers in low-income neighborhoods, and employers in entry-level workplaces in three cities. They uncovered a web of anxiety, frustration, and, often, crisis.