Blog Post #6

Low-income, working mothers now need to use a wide range of care for their children in order to meet their family’s needs. If it is a two parent home, many times they will arrange their schedules so they work opposite of each other. Otherwise, single mothers use care that ranges from family/friend care, to at home day care, to child care centers. When these families can no longer afford real day care, they settle for what tends to be a patchwork of care by care centers and family members/friends which can be rather unpredictable. In Putting Children First, the mothers say the care ranges from “babysitting to “nurturing” to “developmental” to “educational” to “special needs.” These families must always be concerned with money, location, availability, and rules around subsidies first before they can worry about what is going on during the care. In the book Putting Children First, Brittany wanted to do an internship that was unpaid, but if she was successful at it she could get a job after 4 months. However, she needed someone to watch her daughter. At first she allowed Brittany’s uncle to watch her because he was not working and he was willing to accept the little amount she was given in subsidies, and he had immediate availability. He didn’t do much with her when he was with her, and then he started slacking and not showing up so she needed to find a new arrangement immediately so she did not loose her internship. So her sister took her daughter. The problem with this was that she lived far away from where the internship was located so she would have to leave her daughter there for several days at a time. These are both good examples of how many single, working mothers must sacrifice the needs of the child just to make sure there is someone there to look after them, and give them at least the bare necessities. After she was offered a job, she put her daughter in a child care program but she had to pay the full cost on her own for nearly two years. The arrangement ended due to a dispute with the provider over money. Her next provider seemed nice until she started acting weird and not answering her phone or door when Brittany was supposed to be picking up her kid. Finally, Brittany started taking her to work until she could get her subsidies and put her in a real center, not a home. She no longer wanted her child in home care.
It seems that one of the biggest challenges represented in both the videos and the book, is that when a family starts to make more money, they lose all or most of their child care subsidies which makes them unable to afford their care anymore. The first video, “Child Care Struggles,” showed a mother who received a scholarship for care which allowed her to pay only $206/week for 2 children. When she was given a $6000/year raise, the price was increase to $306/week. The problem is that she really only made $20 more per week, but now she needed an extra $100/week to keep her children in a day care center. She had to find alternative plans, which we not necessarily the best for the development of the child but it fit within her budget.
Parents would like to have their child(ren) in one ideal arrangement but many times they need more than one arrangement because the primary one does not meet all of their needs. This is sometimes because of the day care providers have set or limited hours that tend to run during traditional work hours but many low wage earners do not work traditional hours. However, most of the time, giving up their ideal arrangement for their child is due to a lack of funds. From the book, Brittany prefer that her daughter went to a day care center for care but many times she ended up using an at home care center or family members. Many of the home day cares or the cheaper child care situations turn out to be short-lived and unsatisfactory, offering poor quality care. In the news report provided, one person says, “I saw a center with 58 kids spread across three rooms and only one or two adults looking after them.” Clearly, these centers are not only poor quality intellectually, but they also offer very little attention to these young children which can negatively affect young children. Many parents would love for their child’s care to be developmentally focused, directed to involve parents, and provide parents with more than just day care services like the Head Start Programs, but this is not true of many of the second choice programs. These programs are often hard to get into, and they do not cover a whole day, normally just about four hours. So if a child can get in, they still have to receive some other form of care.