Why Do the People Raising Our Children Earn Poverty Wages?
On a spring afternoon, Nancy Jimenez reads to a few distracted toddlers in the basement of her Newark home. My eyes adjust to a brightly hued array of chairs, mats, toys and books. I watch 2-year-old Allison amble from one end of the room to another, sidestepping Gabriel, busy with a dance. Anahi, the observing type, plops onto a caterpillar-shaped pouf.
Jimenez is a wiry, energetic woman with the cultivated patience to calm babies and bake elaborate themed cakes to order—a side business. Sixteen years ago, she left a stable, well-paid post office job to care for her daughter, who’d been spanked at a daycare center. Jimenez wanted a gentler way.
“My mom was a single mom,” she says. “My father got killed. At least I had the Boys & Girls Club. If not, I probably would have been on the corner selling drugs.”
In a sense, Jimenez runs her own Boys & Girls Club. She once had a 2-year-old dropped off in a disheveled state: shoes on backward, hair uncombed, teeth unbrushed and without a coat. “That’s a child I want to have, because I know at least here I can wash his face, wash his hands, fix his shoes, comb his hair, so at least he gets it somewhere.”
On another occasion, she took a “problem child” who’d been kicked out of daycare. The boy, it turned out, was struggling to reconcile three languages—English, Spanish and Creole—that Jimenez and her husband speak between them. As a nationally credentialed provider, she recognized the child’s potential.
The emotional rewards keep her going, but Jimenez bears many frustrations. “The money doesn’t add up. Unless you have a nice, steady flow of kids or a significant other helping you out, it’s not going to work. Programs for Parents gives every subsidy-parent eight hours of childcare—but if a parent works full time, eight hours, how are they going to go to work and come back?”
In fact, New Jersey’s “full-time” subsidy rate is based on only thirty hours per week—“six or more” hours per day—of childcare. This hardly covers the average parent’s workday of eight or more hours plus the commute, but there’s no bonus or overtime pay for anything over thirty hours. The provider either charges a late fee, as PfP recommends, or works the extra hours free. As state officials have pointed out, however, providers do get paid when children stay home sick, and thirty-hour rates are “not outside the standards across the entire childcare community.”
Low rates are also standard. The calculation method is partly to blame: each state conducts an annual market-rate survey of childcare fees and then tries to pay providers around the recommended seventy-fifth percentile (few states do). But the market reflects what parents are willing to pay, not actual costs.
In theory, providers could raise their private-pay rates or impose strict late fees to make up the difference; but Jimenez, like all the providers I spoke with, says this is unrealistic. Her clients are simply too poor—for example, 21-year-old Maria Cordova, who is supporting herself and two daughters on her $7.25-per-hour wage at Dunkin’ Donuts.
“The reality is, they can’t pay a late fee—they can’t afford to. They catch the bus to and from work,” Jimenez says. This goes for private-pay clients as well—those ineligible or on the waiting list for subsidies—whom she sometimes charges less than the public rate. (In February, 210 kids were on the waiting list, reduced, rather inexplicably, from more than 10,000 a year earlier.)
Jimenez cares for middle-class children too. I observed her with Gabriel Velez, a 3-year-old boy with protruding ears and a wide smile. He has been with Jimenez for most of his life, just like his stepsister, whom Nancy cared for some thirteen years before.
It was Jimenez who first noticed a problem with Gabriel’s speech. “Nancy always telling me, ‘Maybe Gabriel have problems in his ear. Talk to the doctor to make a hearing test,’” says his mother, Johana Maysonet, who grew up in Puerto Rico.
When Maysonet, who was working sixty-hour weeks at Newark Airport, took her son to a physician, she was told that Gabriel may be autistic. She and her husband were distraught but promptly sought help: a speech therapist began working with their son five times a week, twice at Jimenez’s house.
Gabriel improved so much with Jimenez that Maysonet dreaded preschool, which is free to 3- and 4-year-olds in many New Jersey districts. “He talk when he wants, so he can’t say ‘help.’ I know when he needs help, Nancy knows—but somebody else not gonna know,” she says.
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