Blog 7 unpredictability of children

Children as well as life are unpredictable, even when they are young adults. My junior year of college I got very sick and my mother who was the only one around (it was summer so most people had gone home) had to drive down from Colorado to take care of me for a week. This was only a week and she has job security now, most mothers’ especially low wage and single have the issues of missing more than a week of work because a child is sick. A lot of the stories involving the single mothers deal with children getting sick – a lot of the time it is due to asthma caused by inadequate housing. Children make it hard to reach consistency especially when their parents can’t provide for professional child care, consistency is what employers look for especially in low wage jobs. When a single mother cannot show up all the time, she gets fired because it is easy to replace her. Also since many low wage jobs require a multitude of hours and some require evening hours it is harder to find childcare that is willing to keep up with those hours and it is impossible to pay someone to. Again, it is a vicious cycle, without child care women cannot find or keep a decent enough job to improve the quality of life for her child and herself and without a decent and stable job a woman cannot provide income for child care. Julia and Jacqueline as well as a number of other women in this book provide prefect examples a lot of their stories have to do with job hopping because they couldn’t find child care. Brittany as well she had to juggle work and Bethany and work two different jobs to pay for child care and get grants for day care. There was no stability for anyone involved especially the child and mother but the employers also had a rough time. You would think that the government or corporations would be more willing to help employees with child care if it meant more productive and loyal employees.

Consistency blog 6

Although families no matter their economic stance have been patching their child’s care together for years the only difference is that low income families don’t have many choices. Low income families use day care centers but they are expensive and sometimes they have grants and scholarships for them, they use friends or friends of friends and family or neighbors. There isn’t anything wrong with this but the independent child care givers do not give consistency or work on education. There isn’t any structure and no way of telling if the child is getting what they need out of their care. Though mothers have different preferences many of the moms liked the structured day care that was expensive they felt it gave a constant to their child’s lives and was dependable others liked having children at their parents or friends because it was familiar faces taking care of their children. Consistency seemed to play a large part in any of the decisions, many of the problems with using non contract child care is that the provider doesn’t have the training or they will start making requests that are unattainable (like in Brittney/Bethany’s situation) or they become unreliable which can be harmful to the child and put their mother’s job at risk.

What is sad is those actual childcares providers won’t take the child care welfare vouchers mostly because the paperwork is tedious. In my opinion day care schools are for education and to make sure children are being provided for when their parents are working. This oddly enough resembles the poor education low income children get when they become older. Its discriminating and classist which harms not only the child and the family but our economy, every child needs child care and as a country we can’t force someone to work without presenting aid for their families they need more than a job to pull themselves up and out of welfare.

working doesnt always work blog 5

The videos all have the same theme; the poor are staying poor because of the vicious cycle of poverty. It is almost impossible to save when you are making minimum wage and working paycheck to paycheck. The collective stories we heard in the videos are gauging poverty and its extremes the food stamps, the minimum weekly pay, a family of four living on less then 21, 0000 dollars a year. Not only does the salary hurt these families but their children will grow up in poverty they will not get the same nutrition, the same education, they’ll grow up in unsafe neighborhoods with stressed out parents who probably will not be around enough because they are constantly working. What is an awful fact is that many of these parents have no education so yes, they may work several hours a week taking them away from their children but they aren’t in good paying jobs because they aren’t educated. Why aren’t they educated? Because public schools where they grew up offer them nothing in the sense of education, we are keeping the working poor, poor because we refuse to set up more education opportunities for their children and the neighborhoods they live in. Why do we tax low income families more when we provide them less in the long run, I think it’s great that Clinton urged and required parents to work to get assistance but it has gone too far. If you require them to work, they require you to provide education and child care. If you provided education chances are the need for public child care would go down, the economy would go up and less people would need to be on welfare. Most people in the videos talk about themselves as the working poor or do not classify them as the working poor but all the people in those videos had something to say about low income and work how the government could improve the quality of life for low income families and workers. Every single person who offered a solution said the word ‘government’ and even some said ‘tax wealthier people’. I idea that we take more from poor workers because they use the assistance which is not that good more than wealthy people do, it is a backwards way of thinking honestly and what is the point of taking more money from the low income workers just to give it back to them in the form of food stamps?

Blog 4 children first

There is millions of different family set ups around the world or even in one city. Not one structure is good or bad but should be defined as such by the happiness and health of each family member. A good family life, have the family members healthy, happy, and well connected as well as stable. Children should feel safe and secure with their family and adults should be able to connect well with each other while providing for their children and their spouse (both adults not just one or the other). The mother who describes career and children in the film says there is guilt and hectic schedules that are hard to balance, she also spoke about sacrificing different aspects of life sometime the children don’t have mom at a school meeting but they have their attention at home which is more important in the long run. Sure sacrifices for the children and also regarding the children will come up but when you balance a career (that may be putting food on the table) and your children you have to figure out what is more important and what can fall by the wayside. Growing up with two working parents I got to bond with my grandparents more than the average child does and I also had a sense of logic, self efficiency, and independence instilled in me as well as appreciating the time I did spend with my parents every night or early mornings.

We have all seen the movies where there are children racing around the kitchen shoveling food into their mouths while mom in business attire cooks and dad in a suit drinks his coffee the hectic life style of having children plus a career is often depicted but it also shows the mother doing domestic roles that are ‘expected’ of her. Movies like Mr. Mom show how ridiculous it is for a man to take on the female housekeepers kind of role within the family it is so out of the ordinary that we made a movie about it…how very telling. These different aspects of life can be hard to handle successfully if one of the family members or an employer refuses to be flexible when it comes to schedules. If the mother doesn’t help the children with homework the father can feel overwhelmed or if the father does no housework and leaves it to the mother, also if the children or other people who live in the house don’t help out nothing is going to get done in an orderly fashion. Households are a team, and a team doesn’t succeed if only one person is doing the work. Employers who have a right to expect certain things from their employees also need to assume that people have families that need their assistance from time to time and should be willing to bend when necessary to the influx of mothers and father in the work place.

In the United States we still very much adhere to the traditional gender roles, women cook they clean and usually they take care of the children more than their husbands do. It’s what most of us have grown up seeing and these gender roles are passed along to various generations because monkey see monkey do. Because of these roles that have been passed onto our generations men make up a large part of the supervisor branches in the work place and do not see why women need to either break that glass ceiling and at the same time run home once in a blue moon to pick her kid up from school because he has chicken pox. With the changing times it is hard for everyone to be on the same page when it comes to gender in the work place and gender roles at home. Some women may not want to give up household chores but others are simply afraid to demand help. It isn’t normal to see a stay at home dad as it is to see a mother staying at home to raise the kids and keep house. Employers that are family friendly aren’t hard to find, many have day care services within their buildings, some offer different lunch hours to pick up children, some work in teams so all team mates can have a flexible schedule but still meet deadlines businesses like parents have gotten creative over the years to accommodate working parents. Unfortunately I have seen bigger companies like chain stores offer less flexibility to their staff which in some cases have children and cannot afford daycare because of how their low income. These are the mothers and fathers that need the most flexibility.

Supportive family members and family friends are how I grew up and how many of the children on my block grew up, sure we lived in a kind of ‘slummy’ district of Virginia but the families where nice and made sure the kids didn’t burn the place to the ground. I was lucky enough and my parents were lucky enough to have outside support from their parents and I wish every kid had their grandma as a babysitter but the reality is not all of us can. Day care businesses like KinderCare need to become more affordable or more accessible, businesses need to make an effort to work with parents and start putting children first.

Blog 3 change starts with the family

Care work is bound to hit someone at any point in their life, especially when they have elderly relatives. Many families, like mine could not afford nursing homes, or in home nurses and assistants and many simply do not want to send their grandparents, mothers, fathers, or spouses away. Living in a three story house was one heck of a workout during 2006 for me, my grandmother who was around 83 lived in the finished basement and I was upstairs. Many time I would hear her call or just hear a loud noise and rush from the upstairs to see what she needed or what happened. My parents also took care of her obviously, we took shifts. My mother who worked during the day would take care of her in the evenings and at night, while I took the smaller shifts during the afternoon after school so Mom could have some private time. Dad took the day shift since he worked night shifts at the hospital. We had our own chores around the house and involving my grandma (who cooked a lot given her health issues) we made it work but it was a stressful and hectic time for all of us. Many families do not have the luxury of the situation we did with different work shifts and willing children plus my parents both worked in the medical field which helped tremendously. My personal experience wasn’t a bad one actually it was good in the fact that my grandma and I bonded. While I did laundry she would talk to me, and I would help her cook or we would watch Murder She Wrote (sounds lame but it’s a great show). My parents have often said that year has been the most organized and efficient year of their lives and while we all know that most of these situations don’t work well or they are stressful (trust me it wasn’t a cake walk all the time) we feel grateful that ours worked out well.

Society will not change, but individual families do need to make the necessary changes for women in the workplace and at home. By having businesses be more flexible with schedules and having different methods of managing and working they have cut back a lot of stress and have increased production in the United Kingdom. Women’s work has been limited to homes but some of the most stressful and necessary jobs are technically ‘women’s jobs’ like nursing, and teaching plus being someone’s secretary stinks (I did it for 4 years). It is strange how these jobs which are important and crucial to our society are labeled a woman’s job but women aren’t necessarily welcomed in the working world outside these few professions. Personal situations within the family is where change can really make a difference, by allocating different chores to husbands and even children women can make a bigger impact on the workforce while possibly increasing their wages and breaking through more glass ceilings. Society is not going to be making changes any time soon the majority likes the way things are (Silly men) for the most part so it is our jobs as wives, girlfriends, mothers, fathers, boyfriends, husbands, daughters and sons to make sure we take on responsibilities so mom and dad can help pay the bills and have equal footing in the workplace and that for generations to come women will be able to expect more from their husbands/spouses.