Sadie Atwell Laments ‘Navigating Childcare Within Childcare’

Story By: Bruce Poinsette

Illustration By: Desarea Guyton

For Sadie Atwell, not much has changed when it comes to childcare since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s not because she’s been blessed with extensive childcare resources. Rather, she’s just been operating without that stable infrastructure the whole time.

“I’m not going to pretend working from home and having kids is easy,” says Atwell. “It’s not.”

Atwell has two children, a 2-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. The children go back and forth between Atwell and their father and the pandemic has put a particular strain on this small, family network.

This has meant constantly juggling work and childcare. Sometimes Atwell has to make up work time at late hours. Other times, she has to work with one eye on her meeting and the other keeping watch on her children.

Her son spends 30 minutes for one day a week in virtual school, compared to the 5 hours a day for three days a week he was spending in daycare prior to the pandemic.

Managing her children’s socialization has also been a challenge for Atwell. She has made a point of taking them to the park, where they naturally gravitate to other children, but that has also brought anxiety around lack of mask-wearing and other safety precautions.

Furthermore, Atwell also has to navigate the lack of diversity in her community and how it might affect her children. She says she has to be very intentional about cultivating social norms, especially with her son at the age where he’s beginning to notice the lack of other children who look like him.

This reality differs from how Atwell grew up. Going back and forth between New York and Portland, she had multiple siblings and retired grandparents who spent much of the time looking after her.

“[You] always had that elder that watched all the kids,” she says.

In total, she estimates she had 5 or more people looking after her and her siblings, while her children rely on a network of 2-3.

The pandemic has made Atwell particularly appreciative of the models exemplified by Kairos PDX and Portland Head Start. In an ideal world, she would love to see more programs with Black teachers and Black children that provide full daycare. She also wishes employers would provide more support for parents, especially those of young children, with services like on-site daycare and childcare stipends, as well as more remote working options.

Right now, even if she did have her children in a well-regarded program, she believes she’d most likely have to make the choice to accept the lack of diverse teachers and students, as well as available hours that put more stress on her work.

In an ideal world, Atwell would no longer feel as if she’s still “navigating childcare within childcare.”