Our welfare system forces poor parents to work without providing adequate childcare. The city of Portland, Oregon, is pioneering an alternative model.
(Photo by Tanaphong Toochinda / Unsplash)
In this excerpt from “Getting Me Cheap: How Low-Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty,” sociologists Amanda Freeman and Lisa Dodson examine how the country’s broken childcare system leaves poor mothers struggling to find any form of childcare in order to work – let alone the high-quality, affordable childcare that they were promised.
A key part of the national plan to end welfare was, according to then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton, the promise to “empower people with the education, training and child care they need” to move up and out of poverty. Politicians promised high-quality, subsidized childcare to enable poor mothers to discover the “dignity of work,” because suddenly the work they were doing in their homes, caring for kids, no longer counted.
But the availability of childcare has never come close to meeting the need. Today, most states serve only between 5-25% of eligible families who qualify for childcare subsidies. Sheila Katz, a white professor at the University of Houston and an expert on women’s poverty and social welfare, explains: “With welfare reform, the politicians became much more interested in forcing women to work, and then kind of offering child care while they worked, but that child care was never comprehensive enough to care for their kids.”
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