On being paid to care for your own disabled child — and the strange emotional terrain of a wage that lands beside the name of someone you love.
The deposit lands twice a month, and every time I feel the same small flinch when I open the app and see it. There is a number where a number has no business being. Beside it, in the memo line, the shorthand for what I am now: provider. Some hours of my life, counted and converted.
“I want to tell you it feels like nothing. It doesn’t.”
Nobody hands you a job description when, in my case, your child is born different. You learn it in the dark, one emergency at a time. You learn how to read a face that can’t tell you where it hurts. You learn the weight of a body that keeps growing when its legs won’t hold it, and how to lift that body without wrecking your own back, and how to do it again at two in the morning, and again at four. For years I called all of that being his mother. There was no other word for it. There was no paycheck, either.
So the paycheck is strange. Twice a month I sit down at my computer looking at my etimesheet and I put numbers on the things I used to do without counting. Bathing. Feeding. The slow, patient work of getting medicine into a boy who does not want it. I write down the hours the way you’d log any shift, and some part of me stands off to the side and watches, uneasy, because it feels like I am billing for my own devotion. Like there should be something shameful in being paid to love the person I would care for whether anyone paid me or not.
Here is what I have had to make peace with. The love was never the thing on the timesheet. You cannot invoice love; nobody is trying to. What the state is finally paying for is the labor — the real, spine-bending, sleep-shredding labor that was always there, that I did for free for years while the world looked past it. The paycheck doesn’t buy my feelings for my son. It just stops pretending the work isn’t work.
You cannot invoice love. Nobody is trying to.
Because it is work. I left a job to do it. A lot of us did. We watched careers thin out and disappear because you cannot hold down a full shift somewhere else and also be the only person who knows how your child likes to be held.
For a long time California wouldn’t pay a lot of parents to be their own minor child’s provider at all — the assumption, I think, being that a mother’s hands are free. That rule changed in 2024.
Now many of us can be paid, through In-Home Supportive Services, for the care we were already giving. The wage is modest, somewhere between about $17 and $23 an hour depending on which county you happen to live in. The truth is, even with max hours, it will not make anyone rich. However, it has, in my house, meant the difference between drowning and staying afloat.
The rule behind the paycheck
For years, California would not automatically pay a parent to be the IHSS provider for their own minor child. That restriction was eliminated in 2024, and many parents can now be paid providers for a disabled minor child through In-Home Supportive Services. Some limits still apply, including provider work-authorization rules and certain program exceptions.
Provider wages are set county by county and currently range from roughly $16.90 to about $23 an hour.
Sources: California Dept. of Social Services (IHSS for Children); Disability Rights California; county IHSS wage rates, 2025–2026.
And still the guilt visits. It comes on the good days, oddly — the days he laughs at something on the television and I catch myself thinking, they’re paying me for this? As if joy disqualifies the job. It doesn’t.
The nurse who loves her patients is still owed her wage. The teacher who adores her students still gets paid in September. Tenderness has never been proof that labor isn’t happening. If anything it’s the opposite; the love is what lets me do the parts nobody else will.
What I’ve come to is quieter than gratitude and steadier than pride. The money doesn’t cheapen what I do. It names it. For years my work was invisible — to the economy, to the tax forms, to the neighbor who asked when I was going to go back to work, not understanding I had never stopped. The paycheck is the first thing that ever wrote it down and called it real.
The money doesn’t cheapen what I do. It names it.
So I take the flinch, twice a month, and I let it pass. I cash a check that says a state of forty million people has finally admitted out loud what I always knew in the dark: that caring for my son is not nothing. It is the hardest, most necessary work I will ever do. And now, on the same day every month, someone finally puts a number beside his name and agrees.
Caring for someone you love?
You may be able to be paid for the care you already give. IHSS Connect helps California families understand In-Home Supportive Services, find providers, and get connected across every county.
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