Personal Narrative: My Inner City Culture

At the beginning of this assignment, I choose inner city culture because I was under the impression that I knew at least a little about it. I live in the suburbs of Chicago, and my parents have often worked in the inner city, and so I have heard many stories. However, completing this project has shown me how little I know about other cultures, and how important it is to research before meeting a client. To begin, I have often been told that violence and poverty in the inner city are partially caused by bad parenting and drugs.While those can be a cause of problems in the inner city, just like they can be anywhere, none of my research identified those aspects as ultimate causes. In fact, my research showed that inner city parents are just as strict as my suburban parents. A large difference though, is that everyone, not just my parents, expects and helps me to succeed. For inner city youth, many people do not expect or help them succeed. To illustrate, they may assume that someone from the inner city will be a bad parent or drug user, just like I did. If I had not taken the time to research and critically think about this culture, I never could have provided an inner city client with relevant and objective information.

In class we talked about possible motivators for therapy such as tokens, or time to play a game. For this paper I needed to generalize that to how you get a client to physically come to therapy. For example, it may be ideal if an SLP can offer a client breakfast. This is an expense, but it could be a motivating factor for a client living in poverty to come to therapy, while playing a game may not be. Particularly, if a client (or their family) views receiving therapy as a luxurious or selfish act, giving the client a token may not help the