Chapter Six: Excellent Childcare Moms Rising: "In fact, quality childcare without some type of subsidy is unaffordable for many American families. Consider that a full one quarter of families with children under age six earned less than $25,000 in 2001.6 Add that to the fact that only one out of seven kids that are federally eligible for childcare assistance actually gets any help.7 This is a failing system.
In fact, America ranks low in global comparisons of childcare support: The United States ranks twentieth out of seventy-two countries in terms of the percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) spent on early childhood education.8 A report by the Project on Global Working Families out of Harvard University concludes, �Initial inequities across social class are markedly exacerbated by the public policy decisions the United States has made, including, among others, the failure thus far to provide public preschool or early childhood education to parallel public school. . . . In many other nations, working families can count on publicly guaranteed parental leave; and in many, preschool childcare or early-childhood education is already publicly provided.�9"

How many among us are stepping forward with a critical eye to analyze and try to solve this problem like MOMs Rising? We need to. It's easy to say that the children of people who cannot always afford good child care deserve what is happening because they were not responsible--etc, etc. However, our future grandchildren's generations and our future world will be guided and created by the children who are left in a day care system that is overcrowded, filled with underpaid and understaffed personnel and are sometimes neglected, even abused. The parents of these children need support as well to have the incentive to keep going everyday, and to find the answers that they need to lift themselves above and beyond the poverty line.

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."-Frederick Douglas