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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely have no idea what working single parents with low income do for childcare given how outrageously expensive it seems to be nowadays. Is it subsidized for people with very low family income, or are those people just screwed? And if they are indeed screwed, what, concretely do they do?

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They are screwed. But this isn’t why - even with high enough income it would not be great as a sole parent. Raising children is incredibly difficult - a lot more difficult than people think until they go through it themselves. That’s if you have two parents with high paying jobs. Even if you have the funds to hire help, outsourcing your children isn’t exactly great. Children need their parents, not just a rotating set of random caretakers who don’t have the same skin in the game. In reality, what’s happening is that most parents are letting one aspect or the other go, in order to make it all work. If you are a single parent with low income, you have to let go of a lot of things where it is guaranteed to result in severe neglect of the child. Having a child at all in that situation is honestly something like a crime against the child. Even in the best conditions, it’s not going to be great for them.

They rely heavily on family and friends

Which, if we're being honest, is not inherently a bad thing. I know people who worry about how much they lean on the grandparents for help, but then walking it back two generations, that's kinda, sorta how it always was.

It's hard for American's to understand sometimes, but no man is an island, and it's okay to not be fiercely independent and have fuck-you money for everything. Sometimes you're gonna just have to depend on other people to help you.

It’s very situational. Not everyone has this option, or this option isn’t reliable or available daily, and often times people end up not working because child care is so expensive.

Childcare is just one of the ways low-income people (single or not) are "screwed."

Completely screwed, mostly. Unless they come from a culture with very strong extended family and thus have grandparents, uncles and aunties, etc. who help for free. and they specifically make sure to live all close together.

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