Plea for affordable childcare in the north

A hundred dollars a week. That’s what it costs Annie*, a single mother of three, to send her youngest to daycare. 

And every Friday when the envelope is sealed, it feels like another meal shaved off the grocery list.

“Some weeks, it’s food or daycare,” she said bluntly. 

“But I have to go to work and the baby can’t stay by himself, so something has to give.”

Annie lives in St James North, where the absence of government nurseries is a quiet burden for working mothers trying to make ends meet. 

She says the state-supported options are too far south, and private daycare fees are just too steep.

“There’s not one government nursery in the north,” she told Barbados TODAY as she handed her year-old son a bottle of milk. 

The mother was spotted making her way to the polling station at St Alban’s Church to cast her vote in the St James North by-election, work bag and baby necessities in one hand and her son hoisted in the next. 

“We out here struggling. All the nurseries are in town or out of reach. They don’t build these things for us.”

She isn’t alone. 

Thirty-two year old Stefanie Young, another St James North constituent, echoed the concern while cradling her seven-month-old son outside the polling station at the Gordon Greenidge Primary School.

“To be honest, there are no daycares in close proximity,” she told Barbados TODAY. 

“The nearest daycare is Speightstown. The other one, maybe, is in Porters. So, it would be nice if they have something closer in proximity from where we live.”

It’s a conversation often buried beneath the more high-profile campaign promises of better roads, cleaner water, more  jobs, but for some mothers, affordable childcare is a lifeline they feel has been forgotten.

“You give me one government nursery in the north,” Annie said, “I’d pay twenty dollars a week. That would help. That would keep food on the table.”

She paused, tending to her son as he handed her back the half-drunken bottle of milk. 

“We just want to work and not feel like we’re failing our kids at the same time.”

As the dust settles from Wednesday’s by-election, Annie and other mothers say they hope the next representative puts real childcare support on the table.

“Don’t just talk development,” she said. “Build something that actually helps real people too.”

shannamoore@barbadostoday.bb