🧸 Imagine... A Pacific Where Every Child Can Be Cared For🧸
💡 Imagined Endstate:
A future where affordable, accessible, and culturally grounded child care is a right—not a privilege—for all Pacific Island families, ensuring that parents can work, economies can thrive, and children can grow with safety and aloha.
📚 Source:
Economic Policy Institute. (2025, April 10). Child care is unaffordable for working families across the country, including in New Mexico. https://www.epi.org/blog/child-care-is-unaffordable-for-working-families-across-the-country-including-in-new-mexico/
💥 What’s the Big Deal:
Child care is the backbone of working families and local economies. But today, it has become a luxury—unaffordable for many and unavailable for even more. 👶 The EPI report highlights how states like New Mexico are facing this crisis, but for Pacific Island communities, the challenge is even steeper. 🏝️ With high costs, few providers, and limited infrastructure, working parents across the Pacific face impossible choices: Do they leave the workforce? Do they settle for unsafe care? Or do they sacrifice basic needs just to afford child care?
This isn’t just about convenience—it’s about equity. 💸 Families shouldn’t go bankrupt to raise children. And children shouldn’t be left behind because they were born into systems that neglect them. For Pacific communities, where multigenerational households and cultural caregiving are common, investments in child care must also honor local customs and support extended family networks. 🌺
Supporting child care is not charity—it’s strategy. It’s economic development. It’s workforce stability. And above all, it’s the moral obligation of a society that claims to value its children and working parents. 🛠️ Without child care, everything else collapses.
#ChildcareCrisis,#PacificFamilies, #WorkforceJustice, #AffordableCare, #Neglect, #InvestInChildren, #EquityInCare, #IMSPARK
