A young girl of four or five-years old watched as her mother studied. Her mother scheduled her studies around motherhood. She studied after meals and bottles. She studied during the midafternoon nap time. She studied late into the night after she had put her children to rest. She studied around her class time. She studied around the young girl’s preschool pickup.
The girl curiously became an active participant in her mother’s studies. She inquired about the anatomical pictures in her mother’s textbooks and took her crayons and construction paper to replicate them. She’d sit on the carpeted floor of her mother’s bedroom and play with the small stuffed red blood cell, white blood cell and platelet her mother had acquired.
The girl was blissfully ignorant of her parents’ struggles to make a better life for them. Her father worked from sunrise to sunset, sometimes through the night to help her mother pay for her accelerated nursing program. Her mother had to balance her life as an adult student and motherhood. When it was impossible to do both, her grandparents would take the children on a grand adventure to Wendy’s.
Later in life, the girl wondered what might have been different if her grandparents could not lessen the burden. Would her mother have finished school? Would she have ever gone back if she didn’t? How would their life have changed?
This story is not a hypothetical experience. It is a real experience, and it is mine.
April 1the Ohio University Faculty Senate introduced a revised resolution to support students who are caregivers to a minor child. The resolution created multiple questions for the faculty members. How would this resolution be practically implemented? Would faculty be liable for the children in their classroom? Would it cause a distraction for the other students in class? These questions are valid, but as a college student and former child to a caregiving student, I have two cents to lend to the issue.
First, childcare is extremely unaffordable in 2024. According to the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute, the average cost of licensed child care is $1,300 for infants and $1,096 for toddler child care. That means a caregiving student would need to pay an average of $13,152 to $15,600 annually for licensed child care.
As a student myself, that cost is horrifically insurmountable. The resolution would allow students to bring their children to class in emergent situations. However, with these costs, a lack of child care is not an emergent situation: it is an epidemic in America.
Furthermore, Ohio University’s Child Development Center may lack affordability for students needing child care. Under the average rates above, the CDC’s fee scale remains inaccessible for some. From August 2022 to July 2023, the base monthly tuition for an infant whose household income was $9,999 was $434 per month. Therefore, the annual costs were $5,208, or 52% of the total household income.
Second, college classrooms are already full of distractions for students. There are many times a semester I sit in class and watch other students play bootlegged Tetris or Snake on a shady website. The classroom itself, such as layout or climate, may also be distracting.
A parent trying to get a college education who does not have access to child care is the least annoying of these distractions. These parents need grace and compassion because they’re probably mortified when their child fusses during a lecture. The student watching TikToks during class likely has no such inhibition.
Third, allowing students who don’t have access to childcare to bring their children into the classroom aligns with Ohio University’s new mission statement, which will be finalized in June. As I criticized in a previous column, the university’s actions (or lack thereof) on policies, such as those pertaining to diversity scholarships, contradict the new mission to the detriment of its students.
The mission says OU will “hold the door open to higher education so that all those eager to solve humanity’s most urgent challenges might enter to learn, connecting them with experiences and discovery that will help them think critically, care deeply, lead boldly and ultimately depart to serve.” The door has to be held open for parents who don’t have access to childcare. The university can start by holding the door open for their children.
Taylor Orcutt is a sophomore studying journalism. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to talk more about it? Let Taylor know by tweeting her @TaylorOrcutt.
