Matthew Rodriguez, 4, left, and Alison Rodriguez, 7, play on top of a car as their mom, Perla Ortega, looks on in the background on Dec. 13, 2023, in Boyle Heights, California.
Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times/TNS
LOS ANGELES — Just looking at the winter calendar sends Michelle Homme into a panic.
Monday marks the start of 2½ weeks with no child care, when her 3-year-old son’s Pacific Palisades preschool shuts down for the holidays. For Homme, a single mother and self-employed interior designer, that means 18 days of almost no time to earn the money she needs to support her family.
“You cannot work with a preschooler at home. It doesn’t matter if there is one parents or two parents,” said Homme, who has neither help from extended family nor an employer that provides her with vacation days. Work has been slow this year and money tight. She looked for temporary care, but cannot afford the $100 a day it would cost.
“I dread it whenever I see these holidays are coming up,” she said.
For school staff and parents with flexible schedules, the winter break offers a much-needed time to recharge, reconnect with family and even take a long-awaited vacation. But for parents like Homme who cannot take time off, the winter holidays represent a time of hardship, as they struggle to make up for the loss of child care and often the free meals that school usually provides. L.A. Unified schools close for three full weeks, from Dec. 18 to Jan. 5.
“Access to child care is really fundamental for most parents’ ability to go to work,” said Maureen Coffey, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress. Yet school schedules were built decades ago around a single-earner family where one parent stayed home and could manage early pick-ups and long vacations. The world has changed, but school schedules have not, said Coffey.
While the pandemic brought more flexibility to some white-collar jobs, that is not the case for many lower-wage workers in the service and retail sectors, further widening the gap between families with resources and those without, she added. “At the end of the day, even in 2023, the people making the sacrifices in most cases are mothers. It’s a pretty disproportionate burden of caregiving, even today.”
Many depend on a network of family support — especially grandparents — to fill in when schools close. But for those without this support system, the holidays can be particularly stressful.
In San Diego, Michelle Galindo, the working mother of an 8- and 6-year-old, has built a network of neighborhood moms who step in for each other when needed. “It’s beautiful, but it’s not always reliable,” she said.
In Palms, Bruna Pedroza Martins, an executive assistant, has to bring her 5-year-old son to work with her and is grateful for flexible bosses who approved it. “I really don’t mind the three-week break,” of Los Angeles Unified, she said. “I have a really soft spot for teachers and school staff.”
Earlier this year, L.A. school Supt. Alberto Carvalho proposed shortening the length of the district’s winter vacation from three weeks to two, but the plan faltered amid push back from teachers and many parents. At the time, school board president Jackie Goldberg, who supported the proposal, said that while surveys of district parents suggested widespread support for a three-week vacation, the quiet minority of parents struggled with child care and work demands over such a long break.
She said she thought of “the parents last winter who said to me: ‘I don’t know what to do with my kids a third week. There were some parks stuff for the first two weeks because all the schools were out, but I didn’t know what to do with my kids… I have a job where if I miss a day I’m fired.’”
For parents like Perla Ortega in East L.A., that struggle begins on Day 1. A single mother with three children, ages 10, 7 and 4, Ortega works full-time as a certified nurse assistant, sometimes pulling double shifts that take her out of the home for 16-hour stretches. She pays her mother $800 per month to provide needed care for her children, all of whom attend LAUSD schools.
Because Ortega recently started a new job, she said she does not feel comfortable asking for days off, so her mother will care for them the entire time. But she said the additional expenditures for care and food diminish her paycheck. She plans to rely on coupons, look for deals on modest gifts and visit a food pantry to get by.
There are winter camps run by teachers, nonprofits and tutoring centers, but they can cost from $200 to $500 each week per child. For a family of three children, that can mean an extra $1,200 to $4,500 in fees over a three-week vacation.
But the worst part, Ortega said, is not being able to spend the time with her children. “I wish I could be with you guys, but I’m not able to,” she tried to explain to them. Ortega said she wishes schools would offer more enrichment programs over the break.
