Student Parents Need Child Care to Increase Retention

Today I have a piece in The American Prospect on student parents. Check it out:

Each morning, Sherita Rooney wakes up around 6 a.m. She gets her 14-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son ready for the day. She makes breakfast and gets her children to school before driving an hour to West Chester University outside of Philadelphia, where she recently transferred after graduating from Montgomery County Community College.

Every day is difficult, but Tuesdays are especially so. She works from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. before class from 2 to 7. She picks up her kids, then brings them home and puts them to bed. As a math education major, she takes challenging classes that keep her up late studying. She goes to sleep around 2 a.m. each night. The next day, she gets up and does it over again.

Without the child care scholarship she found through the Philadelphia-based nonprofit, Family Care Solutions, Inc., Rooney says, she's not sure what she would do. She'll find out this summer, when she's signed up for classes but won't have the scholarship.

Student parents like Rooney make up about a quarter of all postsecondary students in the United States, according to a new report released by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. The report estimates that of the total of 3.9 million student parents in the country, more than half are low-income. About 12 percent of all undergraduate students in the United States are single parents, and of those more than three quarters are low-income. The vast majority of them are women.

Read the whole thing.

Survey on Working Moms

A new survey sponsored by TheBump and ForbesWoman, a site I just recently discovered, has a lot of things in it, but the press release highlights a few things in particular:

- More than a third (35%) of moms who had their first child at 30 to 34 wish they had their child at a younger age, and 57% of moms who had their first child at 35 to 39 wish they had their child at a younger age.

- Fertility is not a top reason when choosing an “ideal” age to have a baby. In fact, financial security and being emotionally “ready” to become parents were the top two reasons.

- 62% of women surveyed feel that motherhood negatively impacts a woman’s career. Yet, working moms didn’t feel as strongly about this when it came to their own career.

- Negative feelings dominate when returning to work post-baby. Top five feelings were guilty, overwhelmed, stressed, sad and anxious

- 59% of working moms no longer cared as much about work post-baby.

I would say that those first two things contradict each other. If you wish you'd had your children younger, but your ideal time to have a baby is largely determined by your financial stability, then you're stuck. I'd also like to know why women feel that motherhood negatively impacts a career. Does that change if the father also makes sacrifices for the children?

Great Parents, Boring Television

I normally enjoy reading Lisa Belkin's blog at the NYTimes, but this post is weird. She asks, why are there no good parents on television these days? Then she compares the fictionalized families of the past portrayed on The Cosby Show, The Brady Bunch, the Partridge Family -- I'm surprised she didn't throw in Leave It to Beaver -- with today's reality TV shows like The Real Housewives of Orange County, Supernanny, and The World's Strictest Parents.

The first and most obvious answer is that bad parents just make better television. Rather than looking at television as a cultural teacher, we now look at it as a modern-day freakshow of the weirdest people out there where we can exercise our judgments on them in the comfort of our own homes. Good parents are boring. They resolve conflicts, set boundaries, and reward their children for good behavior. It all makes for pretty vanilla television.

But that leads to the second answer to why modern reality television doesn't depict perfect parents: it's because they don't exist. No matter how awesome your family is, no one has it perfect. Parents yell when they shouldn't. They have bad days. They forget about their kids' soccer matches. Life isn't perfect. We shouldn't depict it on television that way.

The "Push-Out" Revolution

There's a story in Women's eNews that seems to be worried about the married middle class mommy. The story starts with the anecdote about Lisa Seftel, who was given an ultimatum after giving birth of working five days a week full-time or a part-time position that would have eliminated her benefits. What Seftel had originally envisioned was a full time week where she split her time between the office and home. So Seftel says she was "pushed out" and became a full-time stay-at-home mom. Author Sharon Johnson calls this the "dark side" of the workforce today.

To be clear, I think it's absolutely important that parents of young children get flexibility in their jobs. But the thing is we didn't see Seftel's husband asking for a flexible work schedule. In fact, the article doesn't interview any men at all. The choices for Seftel was apparently flexible work or stay-at-home. There are many women out there that just don't have such options. Many women just can't afford to stay at home, either because they are single mothers or because the family needs both incomes to survive. I hope one day all parents have the option to accommodate their family needs, not just middle class mommies.