Daycare Decisions

“Where does your son go to after-school care?” I asked my new mom friend, in part because I was hoping to learn about new resources in the community and partly just to make conversation.

The mom looked down, mumbling the name of a neighborhood preschool and after-school care provider.

“I know there are better places,” she said, quietly, not quite meeting my gaze. “We did our research. We know there are problems there. He could be somewhere better – more academic -- and even safer. But this was all we could afford, so it was what we had to do. We are hoping we can make a change next year, if things work out. For now, we tell him to be careful and make the best of it.”

During the school year, this mom sends her son to an after-school program for at least 15 hours a week, recognizing that it is not as safe or enriching as it should be.

In the summer and on holidays, including spring break, the high-energy boy, who has ADHD and would do best in a calm, structured, predictable environment, spends more than 40 hours a week at the center many in this suburb north of Houston view as substandard.

The difficult decisions working women and families make about childcare have been looming particularly large for Houston area families these past few weeks, since a Feb. 24 blaze at an in-home daycare center in Houston killed four children.

Officials have said in that case, the in-home daycare center owner, 22-year-old Jessica Tata, left seven children between the ages of about one and four unattended and oil cooking on the stove while she shopped at Target.

The truth is, that in daycare, like in most things, you get what you pay for.

And, as author and social justice advocate Jonathan Kozol frequently says, in America we have our “cheap children” and our “expensive children.”

The youngsters that died in the Houston daycare fire were some of America’s cheaper children – a reality some might argue led to authorities dropping the ball and making it possible for Tata to flee to Nigeria before her arrest. (She is now back in custody and in the process of being extradited to the U.S.)

Daycare – good daycare – can be wildly expensive. It is not uncommon for a family with two children in full-time daycare to spend $1,700 or more per month. If a single-parent family is paying the bill, that works out to more than $10 per hour in a 40 hour work week.

Obviously, a federal minimum wage employee making $7.25 an hour would actually be paying to work with these childcare expenses.

That leaves families, particularly women, with difficult choices.

In some cases, women and families can qualify for government-funded vouchers to help cover childcare expenses. But not all childcare providers accept those vouchers. And often, the ones that do accept the vouchers offer programs that are less enriching and, in some cases, including that of Jessica Tata’s in-home facility, far less safe.

That leaves parents like the mother who I spoke to feeling helpless – fearing that their children are not in safe care or receiving the enrichment they need to thrive, but with no way to do anything about it.

In some cases, families feel so financially strapped that they end up leaving children home alone when they shouldn’t or they bounce their children from one friend or neighbor to another, trying desperately to continue working but to avoid paying for care they simply cannot afford.

Surely in America – the richest nation in the world -- we can come up with better alternatives for all children.