Is the lack of affordable child care the real problem?

2013

The following excerpts are from a Washington Post article May 16 about the difficulties low income women the Washington, DC have paying for child care.

Without the subsidy, Swanson, a 23-year-old single mother, would have to pay nearly $40,000 a year for child care for her infant son and her 2-year-old daughter, according to a new survey of the city’s child-care rates by the University of the District of Columbia. She makes barely half that. As a newly minted advocate, she said she hopes to document for city leaders just how many other women are in her predicament.

In front of Swanson at the Congress Heights Service Center was Siobhan Moore, 22, who said she had to stop attending the Ballou STAY High School program in February because her son lost his spot in a child-care center. It took three months to find another spot.

The single mother of three has been on welfare for three years. With only two years left before her benefits are cut off, she’s struggling to get her high school diploma.

Getting a subsidy is “like having a full-time job,” another mother, Lakeia Peay, would say later. But, added Peay, who has four children and is in a job-training program, “I need it so bad if I’m going to get back on my feet.”

By the accounts in this story these women are trying to better themselves; hold a job, go to school or job training. But how much different would their lives (and taxpayer costs) be if they had made better life decisions? The bottom line is they got themselves into their current predicament and they assured a rough start in life for several children. How is that not irresponsible?

We can have all the compassion we want for their current state, all the admiration we want for their efforts to cope, but both are quite irrelevant if fundamental behavior by both men and women does not change. All we have is a vicious cycle of poverty and increasing costs.