According to the National Center for Children in Poverty there are 1.3 million MORE children living in poverty today than in 2000. Low income families are classified as earning less than $40,000 a year for a family of four. In 2005 there were 28 million children living in low-income families; almost forty percent of all children! Arizona is included in the states where child poverty is over twenty percent and minorities are the group hit the hardest. Overall, twenty eight percent of Latino children live in poor family’s nation wide but Black children suffer the worse; thirty five percent or 3.7 million are poor.
The mothers that Chaudry interviewed know about these statistics all too well. One woman lived with her mother in Ecuador for a year after she had her daughter but chose to come back to the US to raise her instead. For her, it was more important to take care of her child herself even if it was in a shelter and be independent than to live under her mothers rules. While getting place from shelter to shelter, she had to wait long lines, unable to change her daughter’s diaper. Some of the places offered horrible food that made them sick and at other places she wouldn’t sleep all night because the room she was offered didn’t have a lock.
One day she went to find out if she would be placed in a better place and found out she was denied. She was only gone for a few days, but the shelter she was at before threw all of her and her baby’s clothes out. Now she lived with the fear of having her child taken away from her by the Child Protection Services because she was homeless and had nothing. She was lucky to be placed in a shelter not too long after, where she remained for 8 months after that moved into public housing. She was finally stabilized and for many mothers the instability is the toughest condition about being in poverty.
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The increasing number of children in poverty leaves working mothers at the mercy low quality child care arrangements in order to keep a job. What is even more alarming is that although the women are working, often times the majority of their income goes towards child care thus rendering them unable to afford something like reliable transportation so that they can seek better employment. In the videos, many women particularly women of color were working two jobs and still having difficulty providing for their family becaue they lacked paid days off and health care. Any savings they managed to put away were easily wiped away after an illness or unforseen emergency.
ReplyDeleteI can understand why some of the mothers prefer to care for the children themselves because it is very difficult to find a loving and caring provider that will care for your child as your own. In the real world, employers are not willing to wait for a struggling mother to find adequate child care arrangements thus leaving single moms without the opportunities for growth in the work force.