Unit B - Blog 6

The range of childcare varies for poor working mothers. It can be a friend of a friend to a sister to a day care program. Some women are lucky to have family around but as one woman points out, they are not always the best types of people to look after young children. In chapter to of the book it mentions the many constraints that working mothers have on their child care situation. Using friends and family members may still cost money and actually cause a sense of guilt. It also forces that person to be available a minimum of 40 hours a week which many people cannot sacrifice because they have other jobs or responsibilities as well. Some family may also live far away causing a strain on transportation. Day care is not always reliable. In one report they mentioned in California that day cares get inspected only every 5 years. In some states, child care centers are not even required to have licenses. So the woman may be paying a lot of money for childcare that is actually not healthy for the child.

I would say many women prefer child care centers that are consistently close to a preschool set up where there is a structured setting. Women that are in that area of "near poor" who have experienced day cares that are certified prefer those ones because it teaches the children what they need to experience before going to real school. I would say that what happens is they start relying on hodge-podge child care from relatives and friends. Whoever is most available is who they use and they have a few back up people who they really do not want to use but might have to in emergencies. As mentioned before, in California child care centers are only inspected every 5 years. This is not a place that most mothers would want to send their children to. Dog kennels actually get inspected more which shows the widening gap of American concern for the children of the poor and nearly poor. The problem may lie in the fact that there is not a lot of media attention on this crisis. I said it in my last blog, but I really feel it should be the responsibility of the media to report on concerns that truly affect us as human beings. How can a nation survive if we don't protect our next generations?