Child care expansion takes a toll on poorly paid workers, By Patricia Cohen, July 12, 2016, New York Times: “Carmella Salinas has worked steadily for 14 years as an early-childhood-education teacher, taking care of 4- and 5-year-olds at the nonprofit Family Learning Center in the hardscrabble community of Española, just north of Santa Fe, N.M. Even so, she rarely earns enough to cover all her bills, and has more than once received a disconnection letter from the water, gas or electric company. A few months ago, she arrived home with her 10-year-old son, Aaron, to find the electricity shut off. ‘But Mom,’ she recalled Aaron saying, ‘don’t they know it’s your birthday?’ While the scramble to find affordable child care has drawn a lot of attention, prompting President Obama to label it ‘a must-have’ economic priority, the struggles of the workers — mostly women — who provide that care have not…”
Month: July 2016
Childhood Literacy
Where books are all but nonexistent, By Alia Wong, July 14, 2016, The Atlantic: “Forty-five million. That’s how many words a typical child in a white-collar familywill hear before age 4. The number is striking, not because it’s a lot of words for such a small human—the vast majority of a person’s neural connections, after all,are formed by age 3—but because of how it stacks up against a poor kid’s exposure to vocabulary. By the time she’s 4, a child on welfare might only have heard 13 million words. This disparity is well-documented. It’s the subject of myriad news stories and government programs, as well as the Clinton Foundation’s ‘Too Small to Fail’ initiative, all of which send the message that low-income parents should talk and read to their children more. But these efforts to close the ‘word gap’ often overlook a fundamental problem. In high-poverty neighborhoods, books—the very things that could supply so many of those 30 million-plus words—are hard to come by. In many poor homes, they’re nonexistent…”
Child Well-Being in Wealthy Nations
Report: U.S. is lagging in child well-being, By Karina Shedrofsky, July 22, 2016, USA Today: “The USA ranks ninth among the world’s 19 wealthiest nations in terms of overall child well-being – despite having the world’s largest economy, according to a Save the Children report released Friday. The Child Prosperity Index looks at indicators in eight areas affecting children around the world, including health, education, income, safety, employment, gender equality, infrastructure and the environment…”