Caroline Payne's Culture vs. the Culture of America Caroline Payne is known as the “poor cousin of the middle class,” as written in an article published by the New York Times. Caroline Payne has been struggling with poverty all her life, beginning with her parents, who worked insufficient jobs; her father was a janitor and her mother was a factory worker. As a result, they moved all around New England in search of work. This ended up causing Caroline to be yanked from school to school, unable to obtain a good education or even get used to her environment. These factors caused Caroline to struggle in the future. Issues would cause Caroline to end up replicating these same problems within her family and cause her to make bad decisions going forward, causing this …show more content…
It also supports the argument that Caroline's financial situation is more of an issue of the culture of Caroline than the culture of America. Although this affected her greatly, she ended up replicating the same issue with moving with her family, involving her daughter Amber. In addition to the issue of moving within her family culture, Caroline also had an issue with jumping into relationships too quickly with bad people. As stated in the article, “Two months after graduating high school, Caroline married.” In addition to this, Caroline stated, “It was almost like if a guy gave me affection, I’d latch onto it, almost like the first one that comes along." This quote supports that Caroline would often jump into quick relationships without knowing much about the person; this was due to her not getting as much attention and security as she needed growing up, making it a sort of cause and effect. This problem caused Caroline to plunge deeply into greater financial debt and