The Distance Between a Snow Day and the Statehouse… and Why It Matters
- On Key Strategies
- Dec 3, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 13
This morning, as I sipped my coffee and glanced at the news ticker scrolling across the bottom of my television screen, I saw the familiar list of school closures. Even now, years after my children have grown, the sight of a snow day announcement still sends a small jolt of panic through me. For working moms, nothing quite disrupts the fragile order of a day like an unexpected school closure or a child’s fever or stomachache. It did not matter how well you planned. The universe had other ideas.
That feeling—the sudden recalibration of an entire day or an entire week—was the backdrop of much of my career. When I was first elected to the Ohio General Assembly, my children were young, and my service often required me to stay in Columbus several days a week. Our family built a schedule that looked tidy on paper: from Tuesday through Thursday, my husband was on point at home; from Friday through Monday, I was. But as every working mom knows, life does not care about our organized spreadsheets. One call from the child care center could undo the best-laid plans.
We were fortunate. We had nearby family who could help in a pinch. We had employers who were accommodating. We had flexibility and margin. And even with all of that, it was still hard.
What became clear during my years at the Statehouse was not simply that working motherhood was demanding. It was...
...how rarely the realities facing working moms were reflected in the halls where policy was made.
In a caucus of twenty-three, only three of us were women, and the other two, while supportive and empathetic, had long since raised their families. And although many of my male colleagues had young children, most also had spouses who shouldered the day-to-day caregiving. There was nothing wrong with that family structure, but it meant the challenges most working parents faced barely surfaced in our debates.
Yet, throughout my Senate district, I routinely heard from working women who were juggling the high cost and limited availability of child care, the absence of paid parental leave, and the lack of basic family supports that made staying in the workforce feel precarious at best.
I remember one conversation with a colleague who confidently dismissed the high cost of child care. He was emphatic that his part-time care bill was reasonable, a testimony inconsistent with my own personal experience and that of many families I represented. Only later did I learn that his children’s part-time care was generously subsidized through his wife’s employer. That is not the norm for Ohio families. His certainty was sincere, but it was not grounded in the lived experience of most working parents.
And that is the real problem.
We continue to design policy around a version of family life that has all but vanished.
Some continue to argue that a parent should simply stay home, as if the world still ran on the model of Ozzie and Harriet. It is a comforting idea for those who can afford it, but it bears little resemblance to the economic realities most families face. Today in Ohio, hundreds of thousands of young children live in households where all available parents are working (1). Nationally, nearly seven in ten mothers whose youngest child is under six are in the labor force (2). And in Ohio, the cost of infant care now exceeds the price of in-state college tuition (3), a staggering mismatch between what families earn and what care requires.
For many families, especially those living closer to the financial edge, there is no real choice between staying home and working.
After all, rent, groceries, utilities, and other bills all demand payment no matter what.
Meanwhile, children under six in Ohio are more likely to live in poverty than any other age group (4). These families do not need nostalgic lectures about how things used to be. They need systems capable of supporting the conditions of their lives and recognize how a single snow day can turn into a missed shift, a lost day’s pay, or a child care scramble without a safety net. The absence of reliable early childhood supports is not merely inconvenient. It is destabilizing.
What my years in public life taught me, and what that small jolt of recognition reminded me this morning, is that:
the pressures working mothers face are not personal shortcomings. They are structural failures. And those failures ripple outward, affecting employers, communities, and families alike.
As a working mom, I was lucky. But even then, the struggles often felt like survival, not stability.
But luck is not a strategy. At least not a viable one.
Ohio’s families deserve a system grounded in real life, not the rose-colored memories of days gone by. A single snow day shouldn’t be enough to send a working parent into crisis or reveal how few supports we’ve built for modern family life.
We know it takes:
quality, affordable child care,
paid parental leave,
and other policies aligned with the economic realities of today’s workforce.
The question now is:
Are we ready to build it?
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Data Sources & Facts:
1.“Hundreds of thousands of Ohio children live in households where all available parents are working.”
2.“Nearly seven in ten mothers whose youngest child is under six are in the labor force.”
3. “In Ohio, the cost of infant care now exceeds the price of in-state college tuition.”
4. “Children under six in Ohio are more likely to live in poverty than any other age group.”
Additional insight:
“Nationally, child care now costs more than in-state tuition in most states.”
“For many families, infant care consumes far more than the ‘affordable’ share of income.”
