
Photo courtesy of Pexels
When Elisha Aguilar began looking for childcare for her toddler in San Antonio, it wasn’t as easy as calling up a few daycares and taking tours. There were applications, waitlists, and the cost—Oh my God, the cost.
As she searched, finding the right location, the right timing, and the right hours to balance two working parents and two young children felt impossible. Ultimately, it just didn’t make sense for Elisha, a massage therapist, to work full-time. “So I did what many women do,” she says. “I took fewer clients and worked less.”
How is it that—in a nation that prides itself on innovation, choice, options, and opportunity—affordable, workable childcare is so difficult to find?
While I speak with Elisha on the phone, her toddler eats lunch. In the background, I can hear a small voice (“rice! rice!”) and Elisha has to stop our conversation every so often to convince her daughter not to drop the rice on the floor.
Listening to her and imagining the mid-day scene of a toddler in a high chair, brings me back to the long, sweet days and precious, short years when my child was little. It also brought back the memory of living in significant poverty because while I worked full time, more than half my paycheck went to childcare.
We’ve long known there’s a childcare crisis in the United States. It’s a double-edged emergency, with astronomical costs for working parents and excessively low pay for childcare workers. In North Carolina where I live, infant care on average costs a family $13,000 a year—or the same as a year at our state’s flagship university, UNC-Chapel Hill. However, 40% of childcare workers make so little they qualify for public assistance, such as food or housing subsidies.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says affordable childcare should cost around 7% of a family’s income. In Texas where Elisha lives, only a quarter of Texas families can afford infant care by this standard.
Despite all this, we treat childcare as a personal problem that deserves private suffering instead of political action. I spent years thinking that it was my fault that I had a child too young, that I didn’t have a lucrative enough career, that I chose to be a single parent. Elisha echoes this: “It feels like I’m the one doing something wrong.”
But the truth is, childcare is a very public concern. The lack of family-supporting childcare policies is an economic problem for our states and our country. A third of parents with young children are putting career plans on hold because of the cost of childcare, and 60% miss work due to the difficulty of finding steady childcare that works for their needs.
It was this understanding of childcare as a systematic issue that brought Elisha and two other San Antonio moms to U.S. Senator John Cornyn’s office this past April. “We had a simple question for him: Since families everywhere are struggling and looking for answers, why haven’t family issues been a part of this administration’s first 100 days?”
They couldn’t get into the building, let alone meet with Cornyn, but were unfazed. To Elisha, there’s success in connecting with other moms and working together; success in talking publicly, instead of in hushed conversations around the kitchen table. Being a mom is hard: It’s days tethered to the home to change diapers and cut up snacks, and nights alone in a quiet house while children sleep. Organizing with other mothers over our shared struggles such as childcare is a way of breaking through the isolating impact of a culture that refuses to see women’s concerns as relevant or family needs as political.
Elisha’s small crew of San Antonio moms are by no means alone. As part of a larger effort conceived of by Mother Forward, moms across the country from Virginia to Hawaii organized actions on the same day, demanding that elected officials prioritize working-class family needs.
In Madison, Wisconsin, Katy Dicks gathered a group of mothers in the party room of an indoor play place. The moms used scripts to call their representatives and demand they move policy around childcare. “One mom came with her energetic two-and-a-half-year-old and could barely make any calls, but she took the scripts and phone numbers home with her,” says Katy. “Moms are angry about this situation and are tired of being blamed. They want to get something done about it.”
In Wisconsin, childcare for an infant and a 4-year-old costs an average of $31,929 a year—59% more than the average housing cost in the state. “I was working to pay for childcare,” Katy explains. Her family was paying 33% of their monthly income on childcare. “I had always been a voter, but my family’s experience with childcare turned me into an organizer.”
What frustrates Katy and Elisha is that there are solutions. Katy points out that many countries have universal childcare and paid leave policies that allow parents to care for children without jeopardizing their careers. “It’s not like models don’t exist,” she says. “It’s just that we refuse to look at childcare or paid leave or any of these family supports as public goods. We should think of childcare as part of our infrastructure, like the roads we drive on, not as something we have to figure out and suffer through alone.”
But by bringing these issues into public space—to a Senator’s office, to a playground, to posts on social media—moms are becoming less alone. They’re building the village that it takes to raise children—and they’re putting action behind their beliefs. Katy says that one participant in the Wisconsin call-a-thon has already contacted her with an idea for the next one, and Elisha’s friend, a single mom who barely has any free time, said confidently “I’ll make time” as they build a Mother Forward chapter together. “I’m sure she will,” Elisha smiles. “Moms always do the impossible.”
I’m grateful. Those lonely days of robbing Peter to pay Paul just so I could work are behind me, but their impact on my small family is still clear. My son and I now are trying to sort out how to pay for college—and I can’t help but think what it would be like now if I hadn’t been left to sort out childcare alone all those years ago. To know that moms like Katy and Elisha are doing what I never thought to do—to be loud and public and demand that government work for our families—fills me with hope. I can see, nearly touch, the better future they’re imagining.

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