Most books focusing on the consequences of poverty not only present the negative results of poverty, but also unwittingly paint a somewhat negative picture of the affected individuals as well as of their families. While a minority of poor families disproportionately provide this society's criminals and chronic delinquents, the fact remains that the majority of poor families struggle on as law-abiding citizens and try to raise their children conscientiously. Poverty places a heavy burden on these deserving parents and their children. Some of the problems they face are similar to those of the rest of their more dysfunctional counterparts. For instance, both they and other poor may live in a neighborhood that is unsafe. However, while a minority of their counterparts contribute to the lack of safety in the area, the rest of the poor struggle to keep their children safe, to prevent them from joining gangs or getting prematurely pregnant, to maintain them in school, and to encourage them to find jobs.

It is unfortunate that deviant minority elements too frequently endow an area with a threatening atmosphere. The danger for the other families is that the neighborhood subculture and structure become dominated by these deviant persons, some of whom come from outside the district to deal in drugs and prostitution. The negative structure and subculture may come to pervade the daily life of all the families, and they have to be extremely vigilant in order to protect their own safety and particularly to safeguard their children's upbringing (Garbarino, 1995). In detrimental neighborhoods, both poor and nonpoor families whose children complete high school without either a juvenile record or early childbearing have had to invest of themselves in these children far more than would have been necessary in a better neighborhood.

Mothers who have succeeded despite all odds are more attentive to their children's whereabouts and activities and, as Furstenberg et al. (1993) have observed, possess superior communication skills. They are better able to obtain their children's cooperation and transmit their values and goals. These authors note, "Often, these same parents had a greater capacity to cope with high levels of stress, were more imaginative and persistent in finding solutions to dayto-day problems, and were generally more positive and easygoing when facing troubles" (p. 236). They have to spend a great deal of time with their children, taking them out of the neighborhood for leisure activities, perhaps even for school. Some mothers walk their adolescents to and from high school to make certain that they do go to school or that they get there safely (Lorion and Saltzman, 1993). Furstenberg and co-authors (1993:243) label them "supennotivated" mothers.

Parents who are thusly motivated and raise successful children (for indeed, there are equally motivated parents whose children fail) are endowed with certain strengths of character that some of their children may also have inherited. Therefore, the personal resources that such parents utilize to raise their children may be mirrored in responsive counterpart qualities in their offspring, who are by nature motivated to be cooperative and to stay out of trouble (Ambert, 1997a). Unfortunately, other equally resourceful and motivated parents live in an area that is too dysfunctionally powerful, and negates all the possible effects of good parenting and positive child predispositions; their children likely would have done well had they lived elsewhere. Finally, in still other cases, resourceful and motivated parents' children did not inherit similar resourcefulness, are not resilient, and are therefore vulnerable because of the area they live in or the school they attend.