Remember Shanesha Taylor? She’s the Arizona mother who was arrested for leaving her children in the car while she went to a job interview.

Ms. Taylor, who was homeless, said her babysitter flaked on her, and she didn’t know what else to do while she went to a job interview for a position that would have significantly improved her family’s financial situation.


You also may have heard the name Debra Harrell. She’s the South Carolina mother recently arrested for letting her 9-year-old daughter play in a park alone while she worked her shift at McDonald’s. Ms. Harrell had had her daughter play on a laptop at her McDonalds location while school was out, but the laptop was stolen from their home. So she let her daughter go to the park with a cell phone for emergencies.

These are potentially risky situations for children, and for many of us it was too easy to point the finger of blame.

But this, sadly, is a familiar story to all too many poor single women in Richmond and elsewhere who do not have family support, but who are trying to do their best.

These mothers are not drug addicts or criminals. They are just women stuck in a swirling Catch-22: They can’t work or interview without child care, but they can’t afford child care without a job that pays enough to cover the ever-increasing cost.

We need to shoulder some of the blame for, in truth, the haves not keeping the deal with the have nots.

Welfare reform in 1996 ended the dole for mothers raising children. Instead, public support through Temporary Aid to Needy Families is limited to a total of five years and comes with a requirement that an able-bodied parent seek work or be working.

The implicit promise was that the parent would receive subsidies for child care in order to work.

Alas, that promise has been broken. State and federal child care spending last year fell to the lowest level since 2002, government data shows. Much of the money available for child care comes to states from TANF, but TANF hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since 1996.

The result: TANF child care money has eroded in value by one-third in that 19-year period. Add to that the impact of the Great Recession that led states to cut back on child care spending. Such spending has dropped from $4 billion in 2000 to $2.6 billion in 2013, government figures show.

That means fewer children can get subsidized care. We’ve also pulled the rug out from under any mothers who can’t find work or must take work that doesn’t pay a living wage. In 1996, welfare reached 72 percent of poor families with children. That dropped to a mere 26 percent by 2012.

The message we send to women like Ms. Taylor and Ms. Harrell is that they are bad mothers because they tried to get and keep jobs without babysitters they could not afford.

Instead of casting blame, we should do better by these mothers and children. One good way would be for the General Assembly or the governor to set up a review commission to consider the roadblocks we are setting up for low-income mothers who need to work and consider some creative solutions to ensure that these mothers do not have to make choices that no one likes.