Blog Post #10

The women that were greatly affected by the welfare reform of 1996 brought several survival strategies with them into their new life. Most of the women say they wanted to work and that they gained satisfaction from earning an income and raising a family despite the obvious amount of stress that lifestyle brings. Regardless of if that life is something they wanted, they knew what they had to do and they did it, and most of them did it well. These women are entirely resilient. It seems as if they have learned to handle anything that is thrown their way. While making remarkable work efforts and making significant economic gains, they still proved strong in raising their child(ren) and finding one child care arrangement after the next in order to keep moving forward. If there is one thing these women know how to do, its use their resources, and use them efficiently. They took the time to learn the social welfare system, and became very good at negotiating their way around it. A good example is of Sara who knew that getting her child into a Head Start program was based on need so she made sure her kid was in need in order to assure that she received a spot in the program. They know how to patch together what resources they do have in order to make an arrangement that works for them and for their child(ren). These women learn to adjust very quickly to ever changing job and care circumstances, mainly because of their inherent instability. They have learned to prioritize well because they must decide what they should base their decisions around. Should they be more concerned about their job hours or they child care hours? Also, they learn how to change their priorities as situations change and children get older. They persevered through all the tough times in order to make sure that their child was in the best situation they could get into given the current circumstances. Mainly, they became very good at making do with what little money and resources they had.

These strategies that these women have either brought to the table or learned throughout their lives on welfare have strong relations to both work and care, and how they related to one another. Mothers have spent much of their time and energy looking for accessible, affordable child care that works with the need of their family, whatever those may be; whether it is a schedule that works around work hours or a schedule that works around day care hours or something that satisfies the child’s developmental needs. Often, it tends to be the case that child care is the anchor around which to base other decisions. As previously mentioned, these women learn to prioritize and then use their resources in order to make sure everyone involved gets what they need. They must make changes to make child care and work correspond with one another; this seems to be a constant feat for most low income mothers. These women continually work as many hours and as many jobs as they can in order to make enough money to put their children in the best care possible. They end up spending a significant amount of their pay check on child care so they can work. And many times the care they can afford is low quality. However, they do learn to make the second best situation work. In the book Putting Children First, Uma explains that “the scarcity of adequate child care slowed down her own development and opportunity in her job but care for her child always comes first.” These women, unfortunately, need to make a decision between time with their young child and working enough to make enough money to meet the basic needs for their family. Many children that are forced into making this decision are very concerned about their child’s emotional, physical, and intellectual development but decide that economic stability is a precursor to adequate development, as they cannot develop without the bare essentials like food and shelter.

I feel like most of the critiques are generally the same as most of them cannot be argued with. It is true that our social welfare system has too many statutes in place that really do hold these women down and negatively affect the children born into poverty. What our country is doing to the poor is cruel. It is clear from both Chaudry’s book and the videos from the course material that there are clearly problems in the arena of child care for low income or poor families. The biggest problem is that most good child care is really expensive and does not accept government subsidies because they do not pay out on time. Another large problem with the system is that it forces women to work, and therefore make more money. When these mothers do that they tend to lose any government help like food stamps and child care subsidies, and they are right back to not being able to afford care for their child and therefore cannot work, again. It seems to be a never ending cycle. Care in general is very expensive is relation to the income levels of these women, and the quality care costs even more.
The affordable care is often low quality and lacking in continuity and stimulation that young children need. This type of care also tends to be unstable.