If we are focused on the poor, I’d say jobs and access to affordable daycare is the main/easy thing to target.
- low unemployment helps them find work
- affordable daycare helps take the pressure off.
When you look at Govt Pre-school, it’s just expensive daycare. It may be free to the parents but it’s far from cheap.
Cheaper pre-schools would require simplifying the onerous regulations that all but shut out small operators. It’s easy to guess who’s lobbyist wrote the regulations. Yea, the individual operators don’t hire lobbyists.
Making them better parents is the most critical aspect, but also very challenging. Perhaps access to daycare subsidies would come with completing some parent education. Anyway, a daycare subsidy can be done for much less than govt preschools on a per/student cost.
This sort of sounds good, but as a parent who had to look far and wide to find acceptable daycare for my son when he was little, I can tell you affordability will not make things better.
I saw sooooo many horrible daycares. Some were institutions – staffed by people making minimum wage (I was one of them when I was in college). Some were unlicensed home daycares. And some were licensed daycares.
Affordability didn’t matter to me – not that I was making some huge income, but I was willing to cut back on every other expense to make sure my child was well-cared for.
The parents at our school who use the preschools are able to drop kids off and pick them up 3 hours later – clearly it’s not being used as daycare while they work!
I work in a very impoverished area. We also have regular gang and drug violence (same thing usually). There’s rampant homelessness; one year we had 27 families who were homeless.
And how exactly do you propose to help the unemployed/underemployed find jobs that can support their families? Of the families that include two parents (usually our immigrant families), the dad usually works two or three low-paying jobs while the moms stay home to work. In families that include grandparents, both parents will work multiple jobs.
We deal with
real people, not just numbers and theories. And the situations are way more complicated than simply saying “find work” and “affordable daycare.”
If the problem is parents who are distant, uninvolved, self-absorbed, drug-addicted, or similar, then the problem crosses all demographics and won’t be solved by any government intervention.
Yeah, having a job and affordable daycare helps with the material needs of life. But personally, I think the root of our damaged young people is spiritual. And no regulation or legislation can fix that.
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