Many factors played a role for Jacqueline and Julia when it came to childcare in the book Putting Children First. Soon after Julia had her first child, her family moved to their first permanent residence. Julia’s first type of childcare that she used was father care, which is a type of home-based care. The father, while he was still around, watched Jacqueline while Julia was attending community college to give her better career opportunities down the road. Not long after having her first residence, Julia and the father broke up and the father was incarcerated. Once she no longer had the option of having father care she still used home-based childcare and had her sister take care of her child while she attended school and began internships. This arrangement lasted briefly as it began to conflict with Julia’s sister’s work schedule. At this point Julia got on the waiting list for subsidized child care and provided primary care to her daughter for a short period of time until she was accepted to the work experience program that provided child care benefits for her. With these benefits she was able to place Jacqueline and her sister in a family day care center. Due to late payments by the welfare Julia was forced out of that family day care after a short stint. Julia next resorted to home-based care through her cousin, who she knew would be more accepting to payment errors from the welfare system, but again, there were paperwork problems and her cousin would no longer watch them for free. Julia next resorted to a family day care center with a woman named Sonia. She was pleased with the environment Jacqueline was in at this center and liked the development her child was receiving at that center. Her next obstacle came when she started getting better work opportunities. These opportunities affected her schedule and she reached out to Sonia to extend the child care for longer than the center was scheduled to. Sonia had to pay extra for this service, as well as pay her cousin to watch her other daughter. The next dilemma arose when she had to be reviewed for the ACD family child care program. She now showed wages being earned and would have to make co-payments on the child care on top of the extra that she had to pay to enable her to work. Shortly after that she lost other benefits like food stamps. When this took place she had to leave Sonia’s family day care and go back to home-based care in which her mother would watch Jacqueline.
There are several issues that Julia had to face. One of the major problems she has was with the benefit programs not making payments and having paperwork errors. This resulted in her having to switch child care centers, and the types of child care she would use. Another issue was the instability with having to leave her with family members. From many of the books and videos it very apparent that most home-based care by family members are of a “quick fix” nature. It is often a temporary solution to figuring out how to afford a different type. Also, the friends or family members may not be as dedicated to what is best for the child or may not be physically suitable to take proper care of the child. The last issue that came about for Julia was when she finally was able to get decent work. Her jobs would have scheduling conflicts with a lot of the child care options that were available. Then on top of that, the benefit programs essentially punish these mothers or parents when they are able to find steady work and start getting on their feet by reducing the benefits that were previously available to them.
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Sad thing is that we hear about this sort of thing all too often. One point that I would like to bring up is the amount of times he hear about stories like this. You know the kind of the father not working, being at home taking care of the child, while the mother goes to school trying to better her career. Unfortantly when you hear the story start like this it usually leads down the path to the father usually getting put in jail. Its a sad situation. However, when are we going to become responsible for our actions right? Nice post though, I like all the different points you touched on.
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