I am the mother of a 10-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl. I know firsthand how difficult it is to get childcare and how much it costs. . One can easily spend between 20 and 30 percent of take-home pay, which is an unsustainable figure for most companies. families. That is why, like many mothers in our communities, I have depended to a great extent on the help of my relatives, mainly my mother, who helped take care of my firstborn. If I had to pay for a daycare center for my child, I would have had to give them my full monthly salary and destabilize my family’s economy.
During the pandemic, many childcare centers closed their doors . The educators – who are mostly women and many of them Latinas and immigrants – do not earn living wages. Meanwhile, mothers can no longer deal with the high costs of caring for our children in order to go to work.
For these and more reasons our child care system is in crisis even long before the COVID-19 pandemic. We all need to keep our eyes on what is currently happening in the state legislature.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul knows very well closely this problem because she experienced it firsthand. Now, as a leader and an elected official, she is in a position where she can help us and do something about it at the government level. There are proposals in the state legislature to invest historic sums in child care. This could put us on the path to universal child care; that is, free child care for all.
However, the governor has offered only a fraction of what is needed to achieve it: 1.2 billion dollars. For any proposal to really benefit our families and communities, three conditions must be met: an investment of at least 3 billion dollars; adequate salaries for educators in the child care sector; and include all children up to the age of twelve, regardless of immigration status, including those enrolled in after-school care.
New York State has an opportunity to be a leader in the country in creating a system where every family has access to quality child care and early education at a fair price and that is educationally, culturally, and child developmentally appropriate. Now is the time to invest in New York families, in economic development and, even more importantly, in the future. Our children. Without child care, the state will not fully recover from the ravages of the pandemic.
Let’s make universal child care a reality in New York.
Diana Limongi is a mother, activist, and campaign manager for Mamas con Poder / Moms Rising who lives in Queens. To join Moms with Power, she visits http://www.momsrising.org/McP.