photographs by Mark Ostow, text by Yvonne Abraham

These five families are just like many others. The parents make their kids eat greens, badger them to show report cards to guests, hug them long enough to make them squirmy. The kids want ice cream for lunch, take Tamagotchis to school, try to evade dishwashing duty.

But these families are also living near the edge. Each of them needs extra money to get by: for rice and blankets, for winter boots and asthma inhalers, for school field trips and irons. None of them expected to be using government money for such things. All five found themselves suddenly reliant on the state's goodwill because of circumstances beyond their control, from a sudden death to a son's descent into crack addiction. All of them want nothing more than to be independent.

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Single white female
Second time around
Mattapan transfer
Illness as luxury
The homestretch

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These are not the families legislators had in mind when they began the drive to reform welfare out of existence. These are not the stereotypical shiftless souls who need but a dose of stern discipline to get them off public assistance and into decent, working society.

The reality is that most poor Americans -- like the ones here -- already work, or are studying to get jobs that will keep them off welfare permanently. In the meantime, many of them will live their lives on the borderline: like these families, they barely qualify for benefits, or they just miss the cut. They need help with some things, but not with others. Juan Pagan, who earns too little to buy his wife health insurance but too much to qualify for Medicaid, works the night shift at a pharmaceuticals company. "But I go down to the Social Security office to ask for help, and they tell me to work for it," he says.

Welfare reform has legitimized contempt for the poor, and painted an oversimplified picture of their lives. The line between welfare recipients and working Americans is nowhere near as sharply drawn as government policy and righteous rhetoric would have us believe.

These families, like so many welfare recipients, lack neither the will nor the energy to escape the storied "cycle of dependence." What all of them do want for is the kind of support it would take to speed their exit.

"They were all sleeping on my floor," says Ruth Curran of her son, his wife, and their three children. "I had to put them in a shelter to make them homeless so they could get help."

Whatever their circumstances, all of these people place their families above all. It wasn't difficult to find five subjects who love their families as much as Mireille Pierrelouis, who says her three daughters "make me complete." Such families are everywhere, including on the welfare rolls.

All of them typify the family values touted by welfare reformers as the solution to society's ills.

But they're still poor.