Motherhood Is Hard. For Some Mothers, It's Harder.
- Backpack Brigade
- May 14
- 4 min read
As every mother will be quick to tell you, motherhood involves a lot of sacrifice. There are late nights, tempter tantrums, sick days, and the trials and tribulations of growing up. There are many needs and no one to fulfill them but mom. This is the bliss and burden of every mother. But for some mothers, sacrifice goes a lot further. Mothers who are working two or three jobs to keep food on the table. Mothers who have no partner to take up the burden when she is so tired. Mothers who struggle to make ends meet and, when they don’t, sacrifice their own well-being for their children. These are the mothers we keep in our thoughts as we pack weekend hunger bags for their children. Because we know that mothers suffer disproportionately from poverty in this country, and we know how unfair that is.
It's not news to point out that women are economically disadvantaged by virtue of the gender wage gap that persists in the United States. According to the Center for American Progress, the wage gap widened between 2022 and 2023, and women now make 83 cents to every dollar a man makes.[1] The wage gap is even higher for older, Black, Hispanic, and Hawaiian/Pacific Islander women.[2] This unfair discrimination in compensation impacts both single- and dual-income households, since their ability to generate income is degraded by hundreds of thousands of dollars over a 40-year span due to women’s reduced earning power.
And this is for women who are working! So many women aren’t able to work, or work as much, because the lack of affordable childcare makes it impossible for them. Children, elderly parents, or disabled family members demand time and attention and effort, and women are disproportionately asked to give that care, uncompensated. SDG Action rightly points out that, “Care work, essential for keeping the economic system afloat … is almost always undervalued and subordinate to men’s income-earning role. Unrecognized and unsupported, women’s prominent role in unpaid care is a key contributor to their greater propensity to poverty.”[3]
For single mothers, especially, the burden of care can keep them permanently stuck in the cycle of poverty. Women are disproportionately heads of single-parent households; in fact, the most recent U.S. Census data shows that a whopping 80% of single-parent households are maintained by a mother.[4] And according to the data from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, in 2021, 9.5% of children living with two parents lived below the poverty level, compared to 31.7% of children living with a single parent. But children living with only their mothers in 2021 were more than twice as likely to live in poverty than those living with only their fathers (35.0% vs. 17.4%).[5]
Unequal wages, unaffordable daycare, unequal burdens of uncompensated care, inadequate social support structures, ever-increasing inflation – what is a mother to do when trying to raise kids in a country that doesn’t support her or her children? While we serve food insecure kids here at Backpack Brigade, we know that many of them live with mothers who are struggling and sacrificing more than others to bring them up. Mothers suffering from food insecurity frequently go without food so that their children can eat; they go to work with their hearts in their throats, hoping their children will come home safely from school; they spend nights making the hard choices: pay the medical bill or buy the groceries? Pay the rent or pay the electric bill?
This life is hard: hard for mothers, hard for children. By providing weekend hunger bags to food insecure children, we know that we are helping not just the children, but also their mothers, who can rest a little easier knowing their children will have enough to eat.
If you are a mother, you understand how hard it can be, and you know that it takes a village to raise a child. Today, consider becoming a monthly donor to Backpack Brigade. $30 a month provides enough food to take a child from Friday lunch to Monday breakfast, alleviating the stress and anxiety of food insecurity and letting kids just be kids. And you’ll be helping a fellow mother who needs a hand right now. Big societal structures don’t support mothers in this country, but a community can come together to care for its own. Donate today.
[1] Khalique, Amina. “What You Should Know About the 2023 Wage Gap,” Center for American Progress, October 22, 2024.
[2] Ibid.
[4] United States Census Bureau. “America’s Families and Living Arrangements, 2022,” U.S. Census Bureau, November 21, 2022.
[5] OJJDP Statistical Briefing Book. “Poverty Status of Children By Family Structure,” Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, April 18, 2022.
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