Childcare Crisis

Two beautiful children are dead because a young mother couldn’t find a babysitter.

The tragic story of one-year-old Triniti Campbell and her four-year-old brother, Shawn Campbell Jr. dying after being left in a hot car when their mom couldn’t find someone to look after them while she went to work shines a truly hideous light on the childcare crisis in America today. This may be an extreme case, with a mentally unstable woman making an unusually deadly mistake, but often it takes something this dramatic to get people to sit up and take notice.

I can picture the beleaguered young mother as described in the Associated Press report, and my heart breaks for her and the children. Police found her crying and yelling, "Oh, my babies" and said she stated she wanted to die and asked officers to kill her.

I’m sure if her employer had to choose between giving her a pass on work that day or having her children dead, he or she would have made the right choice. Of course, the mother is responsible for her actions, certainly not the employer, but to a troubled single mom the choice may have been to lose a job that fed and housed the kids or take a chance and hope they’re OK in the car for a while. Was she not sane? Was she temporarily flustered? Where was the father? The grandparents? It’s clear she’s remorseful and as the case unfolds in the media we may learn more about her and what really happened. It’s also clear that she needed a little help.

Most people will probably sit back and say what a monster she was or how stupid, but instead I would encourage them to check out MomsRising, a grassroots, online effort to mobilize people to build a more family-friendly America, together as a non-partisan force for 2008 and beyond. As Illinois Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama said, “Despite all the rhetoric about being family-friendly, we have structured a society that is decidedly unfriendly... What's missing now is a movement. What's missing now is an organization. That's why MomsRising is so important."

Today, I ordered their book The Motherhood Manifesto and will begin my journey to try and do something about the poor way mothers and children often fare in our contemporary culture.