Blog #7

The biggest factors that contribute to the instability of child care that Jaqueline and Julia experienced included inability to pay and work and class/internship schedules. Julia was not by any means a lazy poor person who just didn’t try. As a matter of fact, she was trying very hard to find adequate child care arrangements as any mother would do for her child so that she could go to school and work to enable her to provide for herself and Jaqueline. The inability to pay was a major factor affecting the stability of Jaqueline’s quality of care because although the arrangement with Sonia was working out well in terms of a safe and stable environment, Julia was forced to end the arrangement because she could not afford to pay for it.
As seen on the slides, in Arizona for example there is a greater number of women compared to men living in poverty. If the women are mother, they face even greater challenges when attempting to enter the workforce given they to make additional arrangements and sacrifices so that they can work. Minimum-wage jobs are usually accompanied by minimally tolerant absence policies that do not offer paid time off which means that if the nanny/sitter becomes ill and is unable to care for the child or if the child becomes ill and needs to be taken to the doctor, mom is not only going to make less during the pay period but she will be at risk of losing her job for having to take time off.
Also, most people employed at minimum-wage are unable to afford adequate transportation or health care making them more vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances that may cause them to lose time away from work thus translating that into the inability to make ends meet.
Once again, it is the children that ultimately pay the price of poverty because if the parents are having to work more than one job to adequately provide for the family and if you add to that the need to use public transportation, the children miss out on the opportunity to build a bond with the parent because the parents are too busy “taking responsibility” and the result could prove to be devastating particularly for the children to have the parent(s) around.