Conditions of impoverishment underlie many family “troubles” and the family is often a site of antipoverty interventions. Feminist scholars have provided a series of trenchant critiques of neoliberal initiatives which purport to tackle familial poverty but have the effect of retraditionalizing gendered divisions of labor, as well as sidelining demands for social and economic justice for women. Taking one article as an in-depth case study, this article considers what happens to “the child” in such feminist critiques. I suggest there is a tendency to posit neoliberal antipoverty initiatives as benign for or even of benefit to children. The unintended consequences are to position impoverished women against impoverished children and to naturalize childhood at the same time as contesting motherhood. In troubling the family in this way, I argue for the productivity of complementing feminist critiques with critically oriented childhood scholarship to better understand the operations and impacts of neoliberal antipoverty initiatives.
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