Indiana keeps a baby in foster care rather than pay for the childcare it requires.
This is not an aberration. It is the federal-state childcare apparatus working exactly as it was designed to work, for the people it was designed to fail. The Associated Press analysis Moriah Balingit published this week — which we reported on in August — found that hundreds of thousands of children sat on childcare assistance waitlists in 23 states and the District of Columbia this spring. Three additional states turned eligible families away rather than place them on a list. In Indiana, where the program ran short on funds and began waitlisting families who had already qualified for the subsidy, a mother completed the state-required steps to bring her son home: she got a job, as the state required. She could not afford his childcare. The state is keeping her son because Indiana will not pay for the care Indiana demands she arrange. The program is the harm.
The other cases Balingit documented are the same case in different uniforms. A medical technician in Indianapolis stopped buying groceries and turned to food banks to pay for her infant’s care. She is doing what Taylor Swift named in three minutes on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” — she is miserable, she is performing the labor of providing for her child, and she is the best at it. The lights are on. She is doing this for the kids. The kids are also a mother going hungry in a county where the state has decided that her paycheck, her tax contributions, and her infant’s first year of life are not worth the funding it would take to keep them together.
I think about the kitchen-table math a lot these days. David and I have two children under five, a combined net of $8,800 a month after taxes, and a childcare bill that runs $2,400. That is the household version of the same arithmetic the AP ran on families in 23 states and the District of Columbia. The Center for American Progress analysis of the Build Back Better childcare cap — the one Congress passed in the House and walked away from — found that the typical family in 32 states would have saved more than $100 a week, or $5,000 to $6,500 a year, on a single child. Quality childcare cannot simultaneously be affordable for the worker, decently paid for the provider, and profitable for the operator without a public subsidy; that triangle isn’t ideology, it’s arithmetic. The Trump administration froze child care and other social-service funds in five states back in January. The funding design exists. The political choice not to fund it exists too — and that choice has a baby in foster care in Indiana tonight.
The choice to forgo funded childcare is, at this point, a stable American policy configuration — one that lands babies in foster care rather than fund the care their mothers need to work. The federal-state apparatus has multiple ways to fund the gap. It does not use them. Every winter the appropriations cycle comes around, and every winter the Child Care and Development Block Grant — the primary federal vehicle for these subsidies — is allowed to fund only a fraction of the eligible families. The states close the list. The families move down the budget. The medical technician stops buying groceries.
The older vocabulary for what is being denied here is the corporal works of mercy. Feed the hungry. Shelter the homeless. Visit the imprisoned. The Indiana mother is, materially, being refused all three. The foster system has absorbed her son while the subsidy remains unfunded. Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement built itself on the refusal to sort the poor into deserving and undeserving. Indiana’s apparatus is making that distinction now — it has decided this mother is the wrong kind of poor, the kind who got a job and still can’t afford the care the job requires.
Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé asked why French mothers do not experience the constant-service expectation American mothers do. The supports French mothers get are paid for by the same public subsidies American policymakers have, every year for forty years, declined to fund — and the deficit is what lands an Indiana baby in foster care.
The generational frame is the part the editorial page keeps skipping. Pew has been measuring this since before some of these kids could vote, and the line keeps going the same direction: about 4 in 10 Gen Z adults and millennials say it is harder for them to feel financially secure than their parents were at the same age. A medical technician skipping groceries in Indianapolis is not making a moral claim. She is collecting on a debt the country decided not to pay.
I want to flag the part I do not occupy. My household has two earners with college degrees, a grandmother’s estate that helped with the down payment, and the cushion to absorb a $2,400 monthly bill without turning to a food bank. The Indiana mother has the same job requirement and none of those things. The waitlist is the same waitlist. The baby in foster care is the same baby. The difference is what was already in the kitchen before the math ran out — the same arithmetic my parents never had to run on my behalf, because the parish school and the postal salary and the one week at Wildwood added up to a household they could afford.
The AP itself calls this “hardly news” — an affordability problem straining the budget of even middle-class parents. What it is, in plain English, is a state-administered program that takes children from working mothers to enforce a cost the state refuses to cover. The mother in Indiana did what the state told her to do. The state is keeping her son.
The state requires the job. The state refuses the care. The state keeps the baby.
You’re on your own, kid.