UNIT B - Blog 6

Child care used by low-income mothers ranges from part time day cares to relatives. In the child care struggles video one woman received assistance from Syracuse for child care since her income was so low. They lowered her monthly charges from $360 to $205 but when she found a new job that gave her 6k more a year than before they raised her child care charges back to $360. Even with her six thousand more a year that still only gave her $20 extra dollars a paycheck than before which isn't much and raising her child care back up just put her right back where she started with her financial struggles. Another video said that nine months of child care for an infant can exceed a years tuition at the University of Mississippi and this is astonishing! It's awful that day care costs so much for these working mothers and families when they are already finding it hard to make ends meet and most families don't even have family members that can or are able to help babysit their children while they are at work.

In the second chapter of "Putting Children First" single working mothers are faced with hard choices when it came to providing child care for their children. Some factors that challenged these mothers were that they made very little income and couldn't afford child care. They were also put on waiting lists to earn financial support such as child care vouchers and subsidies that offered them help with paying for the child care. Other circumstances for one woman was trust because she took her daughter to two different places and the women watching her child became untrustworthy and she had to take her child out of that situation. These women also are left with minimal choices for babysitters if they are unable to afford day care for their kids. Some women have family members that are too old or sick to watch their kids or maybe family or friends are just too irresponsible to watch over their kids so they are stuck in a bind. The child care these women want and need is a stable place that can watch over their kids, teach them and feed them within a safe environment but their costs are just too high for most single mothers. Therefore these women are left with unreliable choices for their kids that leave them struggling for help constantly.

These women are having to jump through hoops just to find someone to watch their children and they are doing this while juggling a full time job which require them to be gone numerous hours of the day. It's a tough life for these women and they'd be better off if day care cost less or they were able to receive more public assistance from the states.