Men and women who are or want to be parents value, “beyond aid, facilitating the reconciliation of work and family life.” That is the main conclusion drawn by the government team of José Luis Martínez-Almeida after the latest study on the matter carried out by municipal services.
For all these reasons, the mayor has demanded speed in the implementation of a new Birth Promotion Plan that will allow reversing the accelerated aging of the city. According to official data, during the year 2022 there were 24,000 births in the city of Madrid: “A figure that should concern us as a society,” admits the delegate of Social Policies, Family and Equality of the Madrid City Council, José Fernández.
The City Council has announced the construction of five new nursery schools that will be added to the 74 that are already open today, with 72 under indirect management and two under direct management. However, the spokesperson for Más Madrid in the City Council, Rita Maestre, censures that the mayor “fills his mouth when talking about support for birth when he does not have a policy aimed at those 12% of families in the city that are single-parent. “.
After meeting with representatives of the Single Mothers by Choice Association, Maestre recalled that single mothers “are an essential part of the plurality of Madrid families because in the city of Madrid alone there are more than 26,000 families headed by struggling women who face too many obstacles in everything in which the Administration should make it easy for them. “We have seen it with the dining room scholarships, which the Community is denying on the grounds that there is no parent in what is intolerable discrimination.”
In this regard, Más Madrid has put proposals on the table to help these families, such as “expanding child care activities during non-school hours, recognizing their reality in the scale to access certain public sports or cultural services or developing housing programs focused on their needs.
“But instead (Almeida) looks the other way, as she does with so many other realities. In Más Madrid we are going to promote measures that support the problems of these mothers and their families so that Madrid is a city that makes their lives more easy,” the opposition leader has promised.
The City Council also works on the issue of extracurricular activities for Primary and Secondary school students because “they serve to learn and parents can work at the same time.” In this regard, Fernández commented that he also wants the Equality Spaces “to become a space for conciliation”, where these mothers “can be working and, at the same time, have the children nearby.”
The delegate hoped to extend to companies in the city of Madrid a measure that the Madrid City Council has implemented regarding the issue of conciliation. “I think the issue of birth rates is a commitment as a society,” because “the alarming data we have right now regarding birth rates is very serious.”
