Mothers are Already the Safety Net. Now We Must Be a Firewall.
Basic childcare for working parents must be treated as economic infrastructure, not as a high-stakes Powerball drawing.
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I am very angry right now. In my community, I’m witnessing a fixable systemic childcare problem be cemented squarely on the shoulders of individual families, rather than those with power and resources collectively addressing a real need.
My beleaguered public school district is waving the white flag of surrender to its working parents over our afterschool program. This email arrived on February 28th about the 2024-25 school year.
Dear Durham Public School Families,
We are excited to share that due to continued high demand for our elementary afterschool programs, we will launch a new lottery system for our elementary programs for the 2024-2025 school year to ensure equitable access to afterschool care. (emphasis mine)
My community is entering our third year of an elementary school aftercare crisis where hundreds more kids need care after school than there are slots for them. School ends at 2:15 pm and the district is declining to meet the demand for afterschool programming. This is a fee-based program parents are lined up to pay for because we need it to send our kids to public school while also having jobs.
This lottery announcement, although a minor improvement in some ways over how they’ve handled the huge demand in past years, in other ways ways it is a big step backward. This is not a victory for equity. This is admitting defeat by those who hold the keys to this public-adjacent program and have neither the will nor the intention to meet the true childcare needs of a community. Equity would be ensuring that everyone who signed up for a slot before a certain date would get one. Equity would be instituting sliding scale fees. Lotteries are for the lucky. Lotteries socialize us to believe we probably won’t be chosen. Lotteries should be for windfalls, NOT essential services.
I could say a lot about how Durham got here, but the bottom line is that it isn’t directly a funding issue. It’s a staffing issue, and an inability to think creatively, work on larger partnerships, and build collective solutions with stakeholders to solve problems. Before the 2022-2023 school year, the waitlist topped over 600 elementary kids, with parents only notified that they didn’t have a slot a few weeks before school started. This is one of the many examples of why our working conditions as parents are unacceptable. On the local level, I believe it's one of the reasons our school district is hemorrhaging in student enrollment numbers even though Durham’s population is exploding.
What is happening in Durham is one example of a failure we’re seeing across the country to treat childcare as a public good. Afterschool care in particular is a notoriously under-addressed afterthought of America’s childcare crisis. Public schools essentially function as one of the only safety nets for families, so under-resourcing or dismantling what little public school-adjacent childcare infrastructure we have left is particularly painful. But rarely are these failures as simple as finding a single villain everyone can point to. It’s more insidious. It’s letting funding expire. It’s apathy to the lived experience of working caregivers. It’s those with power taking easy routes rather than solving problems because they think no one will complain. It’s inoculating parents to a culture of childcare scarcity. It’s telling parents to shut up and be grateful. It’s a school district in the bluest area of North Carolina slowly collapsing under its inertia and mediocrity.
Versions of this kind of childcare infrastructure collapse are happening everywhere. Longtime childcare centers are closing their doors. Private equity firms buying up locally owned businesses and raising rates on families while keeping worker pay low. Centers have long waitlists but closed classrooms because they had to cut teacher pay. These are small, preventable tragedies, that culminate into a throbbing crisis, especially as pandemic-era federal school funding and childcare supports are expiring. I am tired of mothers (who disproportionately take on childcare-related work disruptions) being America’s safety net. And now we must also be a firewall against all of the forces attempting to chip away at the institutions we desperately need to work so WE can work.
So let me tell you, being a firewall by standing up to program cuts, inaction, and apathy is also hard. Staying on top of what is happening, speaking up, lobbying elected officials, going to rallies, and organizing people takes time (something few of us have a lot of) and can often feel futile. Specifically on this aftercare issue, I’ve given public comments at school board meetings. I’ve attended a community brainstorming session. I’ve met in small groups with school board members and a county commissioner. I’ve started a petition which garnered hundreds of signatures asking the school board to address this shortage. I’ve spoken about the aftercare crisis on local TV news twice. Some of this was during years when I wasn’t personally impacted by the outrageously long waitlist, but it was still a cause I saw as worthy of my time. But three years in, I along with other parents who’ve advocated on this issue, don’t have much meaningful progress to show for it. Partially because we are STILL explaining to people in power why childcare matters and it’s so, so frustrating.
For the 2023-24 aftercare program, the district used a horrible, glitchy computer program that was first-come, first-serve, and waitlists started two minutes after enrollment opened. When questioned by the school board about why the slots had gone so quickly, Dr. Dietrich Danner, who oversees the aftercare program, seemed unbothered by how competitive it was to get a spot. He told the board:
“This has happened to me on many occasions. I’ll give you an example. I wanted to ride one of the new rides at Disney and I got up at 6 am, trying to get a ride on just one of those new rides. And at 8:01, all the tickets were gone.”
Well, Dr. Danner, I wish the consequences for not getting an aftercare slot were the same as missing out on a new Disney ride. I would love nothing more than to NOT have to explain to you why this analogy is deeply insulting. But I am tired. I’m tired of years and years of childcare stress, which can have a long-term toll on maternal mental health. I’m tired of being expected to gamble with my access to childcare, and it makes me want to spit fire that our school district is socializing the community to treat public school aftercare as a rare privilege. We are not losing out on a chance to ride the new Star Tours ride. We are losing our sanity, stability, ability to plan, and ability to have a safe, affordable place for our kids to be while we work.
I like to focus on solutions in my work, and there are available solutions to this specific perma-crisis. Here are a few: public-private staffing and funding partnerships, creating pipeline programs between local community colleges and the aftercare program. Offering scholarships to graduating seniors who spend a year working in public school aftercare, creative recruiting strategies like reaching out to retirees or stay-at-home parents. But right now, it doesn’t feel like anyone with power cares enough to try to solve the problem. And I’m just an angry firewall, refusing to collapse under this unacceptable status quo.
So for everyone out there reading this who can’t get afterschool care, who can’t get into summer camp, who has been told there’s a two-year-long waitlist for childcare, and by the way, the fees are skyrocketing, know that just because this is becoming more and more common doesn’t mean it OK. These aren’t personal problems, they are systemic choices from a society that disdains families. So don’t stop speaking up about why this is unacceptable. So much of this feels outside of our control. And it is. Sometimes the only thing we can control is our refusal to be complacent. So let’s be firewalls together.
WHEW! Now, I want to know in the comments, what’s a situation around families, childcare, etc, in your life that you are refusing to be complacent about? What are you speaking up about or do you want to speak up about? Let’s encourage each other that speaking up is worth it. I want to hear your stories in the comments.
Now I want to change gears from fire breathing to recommend a few Substacks to you:
I love the Substack from Lindsey Stanberry called The Purse. She gets personal with the people she interviews and it’s so illuminating. My favorite one of her series is Home Economics where people share al the nitty gritty details about what they spend money on in a month. Also has a Division of Labor series about household responsibilities among couples I think Double Shifters will love.
Also, definitely check out I’m Walking Here by Liz Gumbinner. She’s one of the original tastemakers in the mom space looong before momfluencers were a thing, and her newsletter is a great mix of common sense advice, analysis of current events, observations on parenting and parenting culture, pithy media commentary, unabashed feminism, GenX nostalgia, oddly persistent optimism, gift guides and recommendations.
Members-only Hangout THIS FRIDAY!
I can’t wait for our Members-only hangout on March 15th at 3pm EST! I’m thrilled that two long-time Double Shift members will join me in conversation about how creativity and caregiving intersect, overlap, conflict, and interplay. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as my “day job” requires "creativity.” But writing doesn’t always feel “creative” for me when it’s part of my “work.” I will be joined by musician Jaspar Lepak and visual artist Ilyse Iris Magy. Whether you are also a professional creative, someone who explores creativity through hobbies, someone who’s shelved creativity because of your caregiving duties, or someone who thinks they don’t have a creative bone in your body, this will be an enriching discussion for us all!
Such an excellent distillation. Even when childcare is available, the skyrocketing fees are shameful. I live in Southern CA, where I grew up. Many of the problems you cite are with me now as a mom, and were around when I WAS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. In the 80s. To have made so little headway in 40 years is a bummer an I appreciate you continue to shine light on this even though it is so wearying. I wish I could make it to the Zoom hangout on Friday! Looking forward to the next one.
Yes to all of this. The solution has to be a radical shift. I wonder if part of being the firewall instead of safety net is decreasing the need for care (here on women’s equal pay week), that is, how do we create less need for patchwork and less need for working moms to fill all the gaps?