Children's rights to early care and education raise a fundamental issue to be grappled with in the free market fundamentalism that shapes a 21st century American childhood. The discourse about child care for children in poverty is largely instrumentalist, and focused on a cost-benefit analysis of outcomes, not on children's existential well-being. Children's rights and mothers' rights to high quality child care are not part of the discourse. In this article I argue that child care should be universally accessible and viewed within a broader framework of human rights. The voices of low-income mothers, who have struggled to access high quality care for their children, are presented in order to illuminate the care deficit and make visible how failed public policies and lived realities take shape on the ground. (Contains 1 footnote.)