Exploring Mindsets About Diaper Need and Systemic Poverty
Across the country, 1 in 2 families with young children struggle to afford or access diapers required to keep their children clean and healthy—a result of structural inequities. But when asked to think about the causes of poverty, people tend to blame individuals for their needs. To explore the reasons behind those views and to set the stage for new communications strategies, the FrameWorks Institute, in conjunction with the National Diaper Bank Network, has released new research on how Americans think about the experience and impact of diaper need. Spotlight spoke with Frameworks Senior Researcher Elliot Cohen about the new work; the transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why don’t we start with what was the aim for this research? What were you trying to do?
Our big picture is really to help the National Diaper Bank Network and more generally the fields of early childhood advocacy and anti-poverty advocacy to communicate more effectively about the issues that they’re working on. This first phase of research was really looking at the kind of gaps and overlaps between the field’s understanding of the issues and the public’s understanding of the issues. So, really doing a deep dive and having some long conversations and interviews with stakeholders in the field, advocates, researchers and policymakers about how they understand these issues and then doing deep, anthropological interviews with members of the public to better understand how people without that kind of expertise understand these issues. We then look at the ways that the field may be failing to connect with the public and the public is failing to connect with the field and what kinds of opportunities and challenges these gaps and overlaps pose for communicators.
Is there a statistic the network uses to illustrate how pervasive this problem is?
The National Diaper Bank Network talks about one out of every two families struggling with diaper need and access. I did not know that before the research started and actually at our interviews with folks, when we give them some background and context at the end of the conversation, they were shocked at that number. Something that we’ve found in our research is that people really don’t understand the prevalence or the urgency of this issue.
What were the major challenges that you found for the National Diaper Bank Network in trying to communicate on the issue?
There were quite a few, as the public’s thinking about poverty is limited and problematic in a number of ways. One of the main ones that we found is that people blame individuals for their own poverty. They tend to believe that individual choices, individual willpower, individual decision making essentially affects people’s outcomes rather than understanding the ways that systems and structures can shape people’s lives. We found quite a lot of blame of individuals, with assumptions that people in poverty are unintelligent or impulsive or immoral in different ways. And this kind of individualistic thinking was also sort of racialized and gendered, particularly in the context of poverty, and can take the form of racist and sexist tropes. Something that came up in our research quite a bit was this trope of the welfare queen—a woman, often assumed to be a Black woman, who’s supposedly immoral and promiscuous and living off government assistance. People use this as a way of demonstrating why individuals are to blame for poverty, and they also use it as a way of justifying a lack of support for government programs that could alleviate poverty.
I’d be interested in hearing what some of the other challenges are.
The public often assumes that poverty is a natural outcome of a zero-sum system—there’s only a certain amount of resources of wealth, it’s natural for it to be unevenly distributed, and therefore poverty is sort of inevitable. This profound kind of fatalism about the economic system can make it really hard for people to imagine systemic change and solutions—using a reductive understanding of history to think about what’s possible or not possible in the future. We also found this idea that when people fall on hard times, it’s just bad luck and there wasn’t a lot of thinking about how society might be designed in a way that could actually support people who fall on hard times.
The idea that it’s actually a policy choice to have the system we have.
Exactly. Very little thinking about the kinds of policy choices that create this kind of inequality. Getting a little more specific into diaper need, people often think about diapers as a kind of commodity that’s widely available and so lack of access or not having diapers is an individual’s fault and it has something to do with whether they’re deserving or making the right decisions, There must be something wrong with you if you don’t have diapers.
We also found this strong idea of parental responsibility, and in particular holding mothers responsible. There’s this idea that mothers are sort of inherently more caregiving and that it naturally falls on mothers to take care of infants. There’s very much lacking any idea of collective care or collective responsibility for the wellbeing of kids and this, again, can lead to some blame of mothers.
And finally, people really are skeptical of the systems and structures in place that could provide support for people. People can be very disparaging of government support, thinking that it leads to dependence and is essentially a form of social control. People can also be very disparaging of nonprofits and charities, thinking that they’re essentially run like for-profits and that they ultimately just benefit the people who run them. There’s a lot of this really profound skepticism and distrust of the institutions that could otherwise support people who are experiencing poverty.
That was, I have to say, very striking to me in, in looking through the report. Is that something that FrameWorks has encountered in any previous studies— that intense distrust of nonprofits?
I think that distrust of nonprofits is a relatively new or novel finding for us. The distrust of systems in general is something we found quite often and often linked to that view is the idea that the system is rigged by the powerful for their own benefit at the expense of the many. In some ways, this thinking about nonprofits is that thinking applied to a specific institution. It’s a big challenge. Nonprofits are often caught up in power systems and in complicated ways, and we also want to communicate to the public about the ways that nonprofits can and do support people.
Let’s switch to the more hopeful side with some of the recommendations that you found and suggestions for doing this in a more effective way.
Absolutely. One thing we found is that sometimes people have some understanding of the ways that social structures and systems can limit opportunities for some people and by that, I mean limiting people’s chances and their choices. This is often understood by the public in terms of education, for example—access to education, the ability to afford education, the education quality in the community. This is an opportunity, but it’s a limited opportunity in that this thinking is very localized. People sometimes think that there are some communities with limited opportunities, but that idea of communities is defined in sort of spatial terms—particular locations, particular neighborhoods—and this can be caught up with some complicated and troubling thinking around there being something wrong with particular communities.
It’s helpful to know that there is some understanding that lack of opportunities on a structural level can affect whether or not people experience poverty but there’s also a way in which sometimes people make a nod to the lack of opportunities, and yet still rely on deeply individualistic thinking. Some people have less opportunities than others, but it’s ultimately up to the individual to make the best of whatever opportunities they do have. So, there’s some opportunity there for communicators, but there’s still some challenge and some caution about leaning too much into opportunity thinking without knowing what other kinds of mindsets might be associated with it.
We did find that sometimes there is a recognition that diapers are a basic need, and that people can’t do without them. When people can really understand how fundamental diapers are to the wellbeing of caregivers, there’s much more urgency around addressing the issue. In this same vein, people can sometimes understand the ways that diaper need can lead to mental health struggles for caregivers in particular mothers. People had some intuitive understanding of the way that that might lead to feelings of shame and depression and anxiety. And that very much lines up with the way the field talks about diaper needs—a strong association with maternal depression is even stronger in some of the research than food insecurity. So, there’s definitely an opportunity there to build on this understanding of the association between diaper need, and mental health struggles to really strengthen people’s sense of urgency around addressing this issue.
During the debates about the expanded Child Tax Credit, there was polling that indicated that it tended to be more popular when presented as a pro-family policy rather than as an anti-poverty measure. And it sounds like there’s some of that in what you found on this specific issue.
The framing is definitely very important. We are in the process of testing different ways of framing these things, so I don’t want to speak too soon about what’s the most effective way to communicate about this. Right now, we’re just identifying the opportunities and challenges, but I will say there are signals of that in what we’ve found in that when talking about poverty, people tend to heavily blame individuals and yet be skeptical of systemic solutions. And yet people do see the way that not having the things that people need can affect their mental health, and that helps them understand that there’s a kind of urgency to addressing these issues, this lack of access to what people need.
My strong intuition is that communicating just on the level of poverty often carries a lot of associations with blame to the individual. So, I would suspect that talking about the effects on families and on health might be more beneficial. But we really need to test that, and we are testing that currently.
Were there other communication opportunities you wanted to highlight?
Just a couple. People do sometimes think a little more systemically about poverty and inequality when they’re thinking about the roles of corporations and poverty. And so, sometimes people can think about the ways that essentially the profit motive leads to underpaying workers, leads to a structural imbalance in the economy and leads to really high prices on things that people need. There’s an opportunity there to build on this understanding of some of the structural incentives in our economy and the way that those produce systemic poverty.
That’s really interesting. And that potentially offers maybe some bipartisan way to ignite some bipartisan conversations as well.
That’s really interesting. Could you say a little more about what you mean by that?
For an element of the Trump electorate, while they are wary of systemic solutions, if it’s framed more in an anti-corporate, anti-elite frame, it might be something that they would buy into.
I can definitely see that. There’s been a rise in anti-monopoly and anti-corporate thinking and pro-union thinking on both sides of the traditional political spectrum. In previous work on “system is rigged thinking,” FrameWorks has found that there is a risk in blaming specific, corporations, however, and ignoring the way that this is a design choice being made about how our economy functions.
And then you said there was another one that you wanted to mention?
Just that sometimes people can see a role for government and nonprofits. People can hold multiple, contradictory mindsets, so even when people are wary of government or nonprofit intervention, they may support it if the role is very limited as a protector from immediate harm or in providing collective care. People do see a role for nonprofits and coordinating their programs with government support. We really want to make sure that when we’re communicating about the role of nonprofits, we’re not communicating it as a kind of goodwill for some people at the expense of systems that really prevent the large-scale harm and deprivation that we currently see.
What are the next steps for this work? Sounds like you’re in the field doing testing with the results?
Exactly. Based on these opportunities and challenges, we developed some hypotheses about what we think might be effective communication strategies. We’ve gone through some exploratory qualitative testing with those communication strategies to narrow them down. And now we’re running multiple, large-scale nationally representative survey experiments to test which framing strategies are the most effective. And then we’re going to write another report in which we lay out how communicators can effectively use these strategies.
And when would you expect that?
It depends a little bit, but mid-2025.