After welfare reform the women in Chaudrys study used other forms of adaptive survival strategies. Some of these strategies were options of day care, when they stopped receiving payments from the WEP program that helped them pay for day care they were forced to find other means of child care for their children. They chose options such as a family member or friend to watch their children. One woman worked at a school that had an after school program and she brought her kids with her to work and had them stay in the after school program which helped accommodate her through her long busy work schedules. Some of them even found agency type places that had cheaper rates but after a while it became too much to afford or handle because of their demanding work schedules. Agency based child care are only open certain hours and the women that worked after the hours the agency closed were left with no other choice but to find other means of child care. Some of these women also decided to go back to school to get a better education so they can acquire a better job and others chose unpaid internships and training courses to help their performance at their current job and help them gain the skills for a higher paid job in the near future.
These strategies point to the interrelations between work and care because these women are doing anything necessary in order to provide for their children whether it be working two jobs and still finding time to pick them up and drop them off at day care. Care can be quite expensive and these women need decent paying jobs in order to pick up the tab for this and it became very difficult but somehow like every good mother they managed to survive. You need to work in order to afford care and they did this and found ways to take care of their children while providing a roof over their heads and a paycheck in their accounts.
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I find the resilience that most of these women show to be quite amazing! I feel like if I were put in a situation like that I would feel so beat down, and give up. But these women never do that, probably because they know their child’s lives depend on it. I love how they have learned to use what little resources they have, and get as much as they can out of them. However, may favorite survival technique that was discussed was higher education. Obviously, as most college students are, I am a huge advocate of higher education and I do agree that it is the best and easiest way to move forward in job prospects. Personally, I feel like we should work on our social policies in order to make it easier for these women to at least gain some kind of education past high school. I think in the long run it will do a lot for our economy and the children of our country. I say this because the children are affected by what they see their parents do. If their parents sets the path that higher education is imperative, that child is more likely to follow their parent and therefore not get stuck in the poverty cycle. I feel like making high education more accessible with benefit everyone.
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