Instead, we ought to be looking at getting fathers back into the home –– that is a proven way to provide stability and bright futures for children. The fact that single-mothers (many of them valiant, caring and conscientious) struggle to get it all done is not new information. They are the first ones to say that one person cannot possibly do it all when it comes to parenting. One person definitely cannot afford the costs of child rearing. Yet, 40 percent of employees say that they spend at least 12 hours finding care for their children when school is out over the summer. Many single parents spend $3 out of every $10 on child care. Thus, the number of initiatives for states to provide free all-day pre-kindergarten programs has increased dramatically as the number of single parent families has increased.
With middle-class families who complain about the cost of child care, the story is a bit different. Young couples sometimes get on a merry-go-round that they cannot hop off when they buy an expensive home, high-priced vehicles and luxury items. When the children come, the wife cannot afford to cut back on her hours or quit work because mortgage and car payments as well as all the other extra payments for television, second car, cleaning service, etc. make the wife's income necessary. Often, child care costs almost equal the wife's income, but even then, the family seldom wants to forgo that extra paycheck.
Our culture has come a long way –– the wrong way –– from when Herbert Hoover remarked, as he did numerous times, that America's children are her greatest natural resource. Too often, children are viewed as a problem that the family must solve whether the family is rich or poor. Far too often the solution is to foist the children off onto a paid caretaker who will assume the shaping of that child's character and future. Too often that caretaker's view of the child is the view that the child absorbs as his self-image.
But, the children are not the only ones who lose in such scenarios. Adults miss out on the invaluable lessons that we can learn from being with our children and seeing the world through our children's eyes. John Greenleaf Whittier captured it when he wrote, "We need love's tender lessons taught as only weakness can; God hath His small interpreters; the child must teach the man." Many of us need to get back to the real world where we learn the lessons that only our children can teach us.