Renee Connelly sat in a lounge chair with a restless 9-month-old on her lap. The baby, whose name is Jayden, couldn’t figure out if he wanted to stand up or sit down, cry or laugh, scream or say “Da-da.” He slapped his hands together, put his finger in his mouth and showed off his big dimples when he smiled.

Renee had Jayden July 4, 2008, 10 days before her NIU orientation.

“I didn’t know how it would all work, but I really wanted to go back to school,” Connelly, 23, a junior elementary education major who also has a son named Isaiah, 2, said. “So I really had to make it work. It just had to happen.”

While many students have been affected by the economic crisis, student parents have the added pressure of having mouths to feed besides their own. Their demographics may be changing as well.

“Some older parents are going back to college for career change, while others can’t afford going to college at this point due to the cost of tuition,” said Xiaolin Xie, coordinator of family and child studies, adding that student parents have to balance child-care responsibilities with school and, in some cases, part-time jobs.

But Connelly can’t even find one of those. She’s sent out her resume to numerous employers but hasn’t heard back from any of them. She’d ideally like to work at a bank, as the hours would allow her to be home at night with her sons. For now, she makes about $50 to $60 a week donating plasma and gets some money from her parents.

Janea Kelow, a 23-year-old senior elementary education major with a 7-year-old daughter named Arianna, went to the NIU Job Fair last month and noticed multiple recently laid-off teachers were there looking for jobs.

“They were a lot more aggressive and assertive because they had a lot more experience than I did,” she said. Though Kelow has a job interview next month, finding a job has been “very hard in this economy,” she said.

At Connelly’s second-floor Northern View apartment, Jayden finally got off his mom’s lap. He got into a crawling stance on the carpet and stayed in it for about half a minute. When it looked like he was about to crawl, he straightened his legs out and dropped onto his stomach, shuffling across the ground by pulling himself forward.

He was doing his “little mermaid swim,” Connelly said, “like a little fish just flapping around.” Jayden hasn’t crawled yet, but he gets around pretty quickly this way. “Your legs work. Yeah they do,” Connelly told him. “You can use them.”

While it can be difficult, particularly now, Connelly wouldn’t trade her situation for anything.
“I love being a parent,” she said. “I love being in school. I love my boys; they’re my life.”

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