Understanding the Issues: Education

[onlydarksets]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

Good question. I assumed it was for high-school aged kids, similar to programs run by PAL and YMCA, designed to keep them out of trouble.

If it's for little kids, and both parents work, I'm not sure why parents would need funding for after-care? Seems like two working parents can handle the cost of those programs, they're only a couple hundred a month.

Which of course brings up a whole other issue... single parents. That's a group that needs the after-care help. But I've got a personal moral issue with lending support to single parents when most of them are single parents as a result of their own misjudgments. Of course their kids can't help being born into a shitty situation, so in that sense I can see the logic in helping them. But still, it doesn't taste good because their parents (most, not all) should have to struggle.

(sorry for the opinionated opinion)

I couldn't disagree more on single-parents - who deserves help more than a full-time working mother or father? What does the reason why they are doing it alone matter? Now, if they aren't working full-time then, of course, I would agree. I think that criteria would weed out a lot of the bad apples. (one opinionated opinion deserves another, right?)

As for families with two parents, $200/kid (which is not the uniform cost, of course) can be prohibitive if you have a household income of $20k (which accounts for 20% of the US households). Now, I would agree it's a murky area if you have 8 kids. But for those with even 2 kids, there just isn't $4800/year for the care they need.