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BALTIMORE - With states under pressure to cut their budgets and federal stimulus money gone, low-income working parents are facing a paradox. Just when they have to work longer hours to make ends meet, they are losing access to the thing they need most to stay on the job: a government subsidy that helps pay for child care.
The subsidy, a mix of federal and state funds that reimburses child care providers on behalf of families, is critical to the lives of poor women. But it has been eaten away over the years by inflation and growing need and recently by state budget cuts, leaving parents struggling to find other arrangements to stay employed.
"States have dropped their investment in child care substantially," said Linda Saterfield, vice chairwoman of the National Association of State Child Care Administrators, who oversees child care for the state of Illinois. "We're being expected to do more with less." Her state has toughened eligibility for the subsidies and raised co-payments from families to cover the growing demand.
Sheontay Smith, a single mother in Baltimore, and her son are among nearly 8,000 families on a waiting list for the subsidy in Maryland. Pennsylvania's list doubled since last year to more than 10,000 children, and Arkansas's quadrupled to 11,000, according to the National Women's Law Center.
At least two states, Arizona and Utah, are no longer appropriating state general funds for child care at all.
According to a recent report by the law center, families in 37 states were worse off this year than last year as waiting lists grew, co-payments rose, eligibility tightened and reimbursement rates for providers stagnated.
"We recognize that this is a tough time for states," said Shannon Rudisill, who oversees the subsidy program at the Administration for Children and Families, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. "They have a hard set of choices that they have to negotiate."
She said that President Obama had recommended an increase in the subsidy in the 2011 budget, but that it had not been approved by Congress. Stimulus money, which had raised financing by a fifth in 2009 and 2010, is now gone.
Christian Griffith, chief consultant of the California Assembly Budget Committee, said the state cut $335 million in child care financing this year, and with hundreds of millions in cuts to other public services - courts, schools and the public university system - "there aren't many good options at this point."
The nonprofit Child Care Resource Center, which determines eligibility for the subsidy for thousands of families in northern Los Angeles County, said it had noted a 13 percent decline in licensed child care centers since June 2010 as budget cuts reduced the numbers of families on the subsidy.
The reduction is prompting advocates for poor women to question whether the implied social contract that emerged during the federal welfare overhaul in the 1990s - that women go to work in exchange for help with child care - is fraying.
"There's a long history of recognition that child care is essential to helping low-income women work," said Helen Blank, the director of public policy at the National Women's Law Center, who helped shape child care policy in the 1990s. "That commitment is being eroded."
For children in families waiting for the subsidy, life becomes a kaleidoscope of caretakers. Women interviewed for this article said they left their children with grandparents, neighbors, cousins, siblings, and colleagues at a nail salon. Such ad hoc arrangements hinder early-childhood development, state administrators say, just as states are trying to make it a priority.
-reprinted from the New York Times