‘Let the little children come to me’: SC moms lack childcare options

I spent an afternoon calling more than 50 childcare centers in one Sumter ZIP code. I called every single one.

A mother we were trying to help had an infant and a school-age child, whose father had been deployed. She needed care for both children on a schedule that didn’t align with 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Her job, like so many available to mothers here, needed her some evenings and weekends, not the typical daycare center’s hours.

Fifty-plus calls. Not one center could take both children.

I hung up the phone feeling like a failure. One number at a time, I had personally confirmed that Sumter did not have a place for her children to be cared for while she went to work.

For mothers raising children alone, work is an economic necessity, and for many families receiving public assistance, it is also a condition of receiving help.

Parents receiving temporary cash assistance must work, seek employment or participate in job training. Food assistance has similar requirements if their children are older than 13.

Even childcare assistance is largely tied to employment.

The logic makes sense: help families while parents work toward greater stability. But it creates an impossible equation when the childcare required to go to work is unaffordable or simply doesn’t exist.

SC legislator left the child care business. She hopes to help others keep operating.

We can require a mother to work. We cannot require a childcare slot to appear.

I am a working mother of four. I have not worked full-time since we had children. Even with a spouse, grandparents and neighbors who help, a church preschool program, in-home daycare,
a stretch of years as a stay-at-home mom, and for a while, a part-time nanny, it has never stopped being a juggling act.

Today it’s afterschool care, summer camps, and backup plans stacked on backup plans. And I am, by any honest accounting, one of the fortunate ones.

If it takes that much outside support for someone with every advantage stacked in her favor, what does it mean that the mother I was calling on behalf of had almost none of it?

I’ve since learned that some local mothers are selling plasma to pay for childcare. I heard that at a listening session from a provider watching families leave her program after eligibility changes cost them the childcare scholarships that made care affordable. Nearly every child in her care depends on financial assistance.

Parents are scraping together tuition from grandparents, friends, and their own blood.

Everyone loses. Without subsidized care to fall back on, the mother often loses her job and with it, any stability she’s built for her family. The provider loses enrollment and may have to close her doors.

Childcare disruptions cost South Carolina an estimated $997 million annually in employer costs and lost tax revenue, according to a survey released in August 2025.

Lack of affordable child care costs SC economy $1B annually, chamber study finds

Childcare workers lose, too, earning an average $13.34 an hour as of May 2023. That’s far less than a living wage. Center-based care for two children now costs more than average rent in every state, and help is disappearing.

South Carolina has paused new and renewal applications for its Working Families childcare scholarship, citing insufficient funding.

Children lose the most of all.

High-quality early care strengthens language, social skills, and school readiness, particularly for children from low-income families. Statewide, fewer than 4 in 10 South Carolina kindergartners arrived ready for school in 2024, with children who lack access to quality early education facing the greatest barriers.

According to an often cited (but outdated) statistic from 2018, 42% of South Carolinians live in childcare deserts, where there are more than three young children for every licensed childcare slot. Availability could be worse today.

I didn’t need that statistic. I’d already experienced it.

When the disciples tried to turn children away, Jesus stopped them.

“Let the little children come to me,” he said.

Children belong first to their families, but they also grow up within communities.

What happens to them matters to all of us.

That conviction runs through the rest of Scripture too. Widows and orphans are named again and again as a community’s responsibility, not a private misfortune for one family to bear.

A single mother raising children alone occupies much the same place today. Yet, we often leave her to figure it out by herself.

We say we value families, yet we have built a system that makes it nearly impossible for many mothers to care for their children and hold down a job. The mother I called on behalf of is still cobbling something together out of friends, luck, and an employer’s patience that could run out any day. I don’t know how her story ends. Neither does she.

What would it look like if we meant “let the little children come” — not only as something we say, but as something our systems made possible?