Being paid to stay-at-home
Montana Women Score Victory on Valuing Caregiving: Montana women who have incomes 150% of poverty level were able to get up to $384 a month for staying home with their infant children. It’s a small victory but important. I think $384 is how much a mom of one gets for welfare but the difference here, I believe, is that this isn’t considered welfare. It’s actually considered payment, honoring that mothering is valuable (well, that might be too strong a word when you look at the salary) and deserves monetary recognition.
At the shelter, we had a lot of moms who had to leave their own children in substandard care while they went to work at institutional childcare centers. Reeks of the old wet nursing arrangements, doesn’t it? Where the mom left her own baby sucking down cow’s milk to go give her breastmilk to a wealthy woman’s child?
I was all for welfare reform (tame the bloated bureaucratic monster) in theory but in reality “reform” was just another word for “screw poor women and their children.” Instead of combing through the needless piles of paper and the needless paper pushers, they shoved women away from their kids without consideration for the problems of real life families. Our clients used to have to go through crazy contortions to find care for their children (often inappropriate care) so they could go to “work training” programs. This included foisting the kids off on abusive ex-partners or crack-addict sisters. How can *that* be good for the country? But at least we got ‘em off the welfare roles, right? I quit before welfare reform hit in earnest (it was practice reform in my last year there) so I missed personally witnessing the results of the full-scale war on poor women.
Thanks to Ideas Worth Sharing for the link. Her blog is pretty damn interesting.
Thanks for the plug for my blog.