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.