What do your children do after school? Many of our nation’s children (including two of mine) head straight from class to school-sponsored after-school programs, where they join organized activities, get help with their homework, and extend the social parts of their day.
These programs aren’t available for every child who needs them, or to every parent who could use them. In 2009, only 56 percent of public elementary schools reported having an after-school program physically situated at the school, and even of those, 38 percent said the cost of the program hindered student participation “to a moderate or large extent.”
“Our country is nowhere close to meeting the demand for after school,” said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance, a nonprofit organization working to ensure that all children have access to affordable, quality after-school programs. Support for such programs, she said, is high, and crosses party lines, but “federal funding for after-school programs has been stalled for years.”
What is the alternative to after-school? For families with a parent at home (the default assumption that underlies our entire educational structure, although the number of families who fit the one-at-work one-at-home model hovers at just below 25 percent), it’s everything from afternoons at home together to sports, music lessons and various other forms of “enrichment.” Many other families find ways to take advantage of the same things, arranging car pools, using babysitter-assisted transport, hiring a college student as a “driver” or even, in some urban areas and with older children, using car services like Uber to move children from place to place.
It’s clear that those options are available only to those who can afford them (the car services, indeed, invite mockery in spite of their obvious practical advantages). But many parents have grown so accustomed to this need to cobble together an after-school plan for children too young to stay at home alone, and to budget for those needs, that we overlook the challenge those hours present to families who are already stretched to the maximum for both time and money. No parent sends her 9-year-old to the park to play while she works if there are other options available.
According to census data, 5 percent of children ages 7 to 11 with a mother in the home care for themselves every week for an average of five hours a week, as do 2 percent of 5- and 6-year-olds. Why distinguish children “living with a mother” (whether married or not)?
Because this is the same census data that considers fathers to be “child care.” That dated perspective reflects our institutionalized national vision of family. As a representative of the census and author of its “Who’s Minding the Kids?” report told me in 2012, a mother (the “designated parent” in their parlance) is “not only caring for the child only while Dad works. She’s probably caring for the child 24 hours and so Dad is able to go to work regardless.”
At some level, we don’t, as a society, think children should need care from 3 to 5 p.m. While there is no objective reason why, having made a commitment to educate our nation’s children, we should offer that education (and its accompanying de facto child care) only from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., and only during certain months of the year, that’s the way it has always been done. Parents, the argument goes, know that going in, and should plan accordingly.
And if we don’t, or if those plans fail? They say it takes a village to raise a child. What they don’t tell you is that you have to build your own.
Where will your children go after school today?