A new study is out on an overlooked subject: why children who grow up in rural trailer parks 'flounder' as they reach adulthood, despite the resourcefulness of their parents. chronicle
from the chonicle:

"Little research has explored why children who grow up in rural trailer parks almost all flounder as they approach adulthood, write Katherine A. MacTavish, an assistant professor of human development and family sciences at Oregon State University, and Sonya Salamon, a professor of community studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They examined one park in central Illinois to see how many of its young people escaped the predominant fate of American youth: to reproduce the social status of their parents, "despite the achievement ideology of American culture that motivates dreams of social mobility."
In the park they studied, the authors say, parents had resourcefully taken up residence on the outskirts of an upscale small town so that their children could profit from its good schools, safety, and neighborliness. But even when park youth took part in town activities -- at schools, churches, and other institutions -- few realized benefits. So, write the authors, "parental efforts succeed only in positioning youth tantalizingly close to, but not on, a pathway leading toward social mobility."

In fact, they found, trailer-park youth could flourish only by completely disengaging socially from their park neighborhood -- by, for example, adapting well to adult mentors outside the park, taking leadership positions in outside groups, or becoming "virtual members" of middle-class friends' families.

By contrast, "floundering" youths, who were a majority, narrowed their life opportunities with drugs, unprotected sex, and delinquency. "There seems little most trailer-park parents are able to do to manage the neighborhood and community context," the authors say.

They propose some ways to "address the social distance between working-poor trailer-park families and small-town resources." Those include developing opportunities for young people to engage in productive activities such as park-beautification programs that "would go far to give them a sense of ownership and accomplishment." They also recommend that social-services agencies provide help to parents of trailer-park youth in areas like teaching the children to resist stigmatization, so that the adults "are not left alone to manage the task of parenting an adolescent."

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