It was 2016. I was holding my one-year-old daughter on my lap, seated in the cafe of our public library. The mom blog I worked for making $10/ hour, five hours a month (my only contribution to our family income at the time), was hosting a Mom’s Group Meetup.
A nervous-looking woman walked over and joined our table. We turned to face her, doing our best to radiate welcome and warmth to this clearly exhausted young mother.
“I’m just so happy to be here.” She said. “My husband has the car for work, but I got a friend to drop me off. I’ve been reading the blog, trying to make it to one of these things.”
Her story unraveled in my mind: Working husband gone most of the day (with their only car) in order to provide for the family. New mom stuck at home, in our triple-digit hot South Texas town, for hours and days on end – with a baby and a tight budget.
That’s probably an eighth of her story. Right or wrong, it struck me how universal it must be. Between extreme poverty and excessive wealth, there are millions of parents who carry on, unnoticed, with their basic parenting needs unmet.
What are these basic needs? Here is a visual I made. By myself. Based on zero research and 100% lived and observed experience. Using paper and a Sharpie.
Take a look and tell me it’s not (mostly) true:
At the bottom: Money; Time; Transportation
At the top: Health and Happiness; Progress and/or Success
Why these specific needs?
Money: It’s at the bottom because it’s what you need to make everything else possible. Money equals food. It equals time. It equals childcare.
It equals enough disposable income to “treat yourself” to a good cup of coffee or a comfortable nursing bra. To baby-and-me classes or a full tank of gas to visit a friend.
Plus, financial stress and its related stressors (see: food insecurity) impact the mental and physical health of both the parent and the family.
Time: A limited resource as necessary as money, yet impossible to access without it. Time covers time to brush your teeth. Time to do your paid work. Time to care for your kid(s). Time to enjoy your kid(s). Time to process. To relax. To connect. To think. To pursue. Time with and — most crucially — without your children present.
Transportation: I debated this one. There are so many other seemingly vital needs. But I kept coming back to it. Without transportation, without freedom and mobility, it is impossible to make it to your doctor’s appointment, show up to class, get to work on time, pick up your kids, run an errand, meet a friend, leave a bad situation, and all the other things a parent must do.
The mother in the cafe that day reminded me the freedom my own scratched up sedan provided me. We all need something to move is from A to B and back again: A nearby bus route. A reliable train schedule. A hopped ride. A borrowed car. A used car. A reliable used car. A brand new minivan. I was lucky to fall on the car-owning end this spectrum. Because that’s a really big spectrum.
In conclusion, every parent needs some combination of time and money in order to move up the pyramid. You can’t utilize transportation until there is (time + money) to go where you need to go and do what you need to do. And, without all three of these basic needs, there is no moving up. We (parents and caregivers) lose the ability to achieve or maintain health, happiness, personal progress, and success.
I’m writing this because I have the time (between work and parenting), the money (for a home, a computer, fresh coffee, a medium subscription), and the transportation (a car to drop off and pick up my kids, on my own schedule) to do so.
I write this because it’s true. There are three fundamental needs that must be met for parents to be stable and present enough to do their most important job — to parent.
I write this because paid caregiver leave is just the tip of the iceberg of what parents deserve. Or, as I see it, a fulfillment of our two most basic needs: time + money.
