Child Care Is Not a Spectator Sport

At work, you think of the children you’ve left at home.
At home, you think of the work you’ve left unfinished.
Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself; your heart is rent.

GOLDA MEIR

Imagine a country in which nearly all children between the ages of three and five attend preschool in sparkling classrooms, with teachers recruited and trained as child care professionals. Imagine a country that conceives of child care as a program to “welcome” children into the larger community and “awaken” their potential for learning and growing.

It may sound too good to be true, but it’s not. When I went to France in 1989 as part of a group studying the French child care system, I saw what happens when a country makes caring for children a top priority. More than 90 percent of French children between ages three and five attend free or inexpensive preschools called écoles maternelles. Even before they reach the age of three, many of them are in full-day programs.

In France, there is a national consensus that the child care system should not just warehouse kids but prepare them for school and for life. Preschool teachers and directors have the equivalent of a master’s degree in early-childhood and elementary education. Infant-toddler educators have a degree that is roughly equivalent to two years of college in the United States, as well as a two-year professional course in early-childhood education and development. And the buildings where these child care centers are located are modern and inviting, designed by well-respected architects with children in mind. Walls are specially constructed to absorb sound and shock. Interiors are bright and colorful. Spaces are designated for play, sleeping, eating, and even for good-byes and big hello hugs with parents. It is no wonder that so many French parents—even mothers who do not work outside the home—choose to send their children to these government-subsidized centers.

For the small percentage of French children who are cared for in family day care, the system also works well. Three out of four home providers are licensed, and the law limits the number of children they care for to three per home. The incentives to get licensed are substantial: employee benefits, regular mailings of up-to-date information from the government, and periodic visits from a specially trained pediatric nurse.

Do I believe the French love their children more than we do? Of course not. Nor do I believe that their system can or should be duplicated wholesale here. France is a country far smaller and more homogeneous than ours. And the price for such generous social programs is felt across the board in higher taxes. What I do believe, however, is that the French have found a way of expressing their love and concern through policies that focus on children’s needs during the earliest stages of life. While I was in France, I had conversations with a number of political leaders, from Socialists to Conservatives. “How,” I asked, “can you transcend your political differences and come to an agreement on the issue of government-subsidized child care?” One after another of them looked at me in astonishment. “How can you not invest in children and expect to have a healthy country?” was the reply I heard over and over again.

 

IF YOU WANT to open the floodgates of guilt and dissension anywhere in America, start talking about child care. It is an issue that brings out all of our conflicted feelings about what parenthood should be and about who should care for children when parents are working or otherwise unable to.

Even though I enjoyed better options than most mothers, I still worried constantly about child care when Chelsea was small. At the time she was born, we lived in the governor’s mansion, surrounded by a ready-made village of adults who were willing to pinch-hit when I needed extra help. But for two years when Bill was not governor (and Chelsea was still very young), our only help was a woman who came during work hours on weekdays. And like all child care systems, ours broke down from time to time.

My version of every mother’s worst nightmare happened one morning when I was due in court at nine-thirty for a trial. It was already seven-thirty, and two-year-old Chelsea was running a fever and throwing up after a sleepless night for both of us. My husband was out of town. The woman who normally took care of Chelsea called in sick with the same symptoms. No relatives lived nearby. My neighbors were not at home. Frantic, I called a trusted friend, who came to my rescue.

Still, I felt terrible that I had to leave my sick child at all. I called at every break and rushed home as soon as court adjourned. When I opened the door and saw my friend reading to Chelsea, who was clearly feeling better, my head and stomach stopped aching for the first time that day.

I often think about what I would have done about child care if I had not had the time and money to make careful decisions. Could I have left my daughter in a stranger’s home, in front of the TV all day, or in a big room with dozens of cribs lined up against a wall? Would I have felt comfortable choosing a nursery school for Chelsea when she was two if I had not been able to take off from work several times at the beginning, to accompany her there and observe how she and the other children were treated? Many mothers, for financial and logistical reasons, do not have any choice in these matters.

We all have war stories about the heartache and heartburn of trying to find—and keep—decent child care. But the low priority we place on child care as a nation has led to a system that, unlike the one I saw in France, looks more like a patchwork quilt than a security blanket. Ten million children under age five rely on surrogate care, and many of the approximately 22 million children between ages five and fourteen whose mothers work require care during nonschool hours. While only one in five infants under age one were in day care thirty years ago, more than half are today. And many of those receive care for thirty hours a week or more.

The variety of arrangements these children are left in is dizzying. Neighbors trade child care duty with each other, or relatives are called in to help. When those options do not exist, parents must turn to a marketplace that is complex, confusing, costly, and extremely uneven in quality. Their choices include family day care homes in which one adult takes care of several children from the neighborhood; day care centers that run the gamut from very good to very bad; preschools attached to religious institutions and universities; nannies, au pairs, relatives, and full- and part-time baby-sitters.

In choosing care, cost is a primary factor for many families. Those who cannot afford to pay high prices may end up leaving their children in unlicensed, poorly staffed, and often unsafe environments. According to the National Child Care Survey in 1990, families earning less than $18,000 a year, for example, spent an average of $54 a week for child care. Though often not enough to assure quality care, that $54 represented a huge portion of their household income—about 25 percent on average. By contrast, families earning $54,000 or more spent only about 6 percent of their household income for child care.

Does this mean that children from poorer families never receive loving, patient, and attentive care? No, it doesn’t. But from what experts tell us, there is a link between the cost and the quality of care. Many lower-income parents are in a double bind because of their work schedules, which often conflict with available child care. The survey showed that one third of mothers with incomes below the poverty line and more than a quarter of those earning less than $25,000 worked weekends. Yet only 10 percent of day care centers and an even smaller percentage of family day care homes provide care on weekends. Almost half of working-poor parents are in jobs with rotating schedules, making child care arrangements even more complicated.

For parents, particularly those working long hours for low wages, finding child care can present a serious dilemma. Like immigrant mothers at the turn of the century who left their children alone in tenements while they worked in sweatshops, many parents today feel there are no good options when it comes to child care.

In 1990, a woman in New Jersey left her five-year-old daughter locked in her car while she worked a part-time job on Saturdays. When the little girl was discovered, she was temporarily removed from her mother’s care. It turned out that the woman was a single parent struggling to support her daughter and had nowhere else to leave her while she worked. The car seemed to her the safest of a bad set of options.

This may be an extreme example, but I bet a lot of parents can relate to that mother’s desperation. Ask parents sitting around their kitchen tables to talk about child care, and many will say the situation is dire. The more than 250,000 women who responded to the federal Working Women Count! survey were uniform in their observations about child care. A woman in Oregon who has two grown children, two foster teenagers at home, and a grandchild conveyed the sentiments of most respondents when she wrote: “Child care is a disgrace in this country. On the one hand it’s too expensive for many women considering their salaries, on the other hand, it does not provide the child care provider a decent wage. Locating good child care is a nightmare.”

A single mother in Illinois who works in a clerical job said: “Working moms already have limited time on their hands, but…they feel like they’re searching for a needle in a haystack when it comes to child care.” She described herself as falling into the child care netherworld because she makes too much to qualify for state programs but finds that the price of private day care “is well out of reach.”

Paradoxically, while many parents say that finding affordable child care is a major worry, the vast majority claim to be happy with their arrangements. Often they feel satisfied because the location is convenient, the price is affordable, or the caregiver seems nice. In some cases, parents—who have spent days searching high and low for care—are simply relieved to find any solution that meets their needs.

Yet two recent studies point to an alarming fact: Faced with options that range from wonderful to terrible, many parents do not know what to look for when choosing child care. They often overlook important measures of quality, such as basic safety requirements, the experience and training of child care workers, and whether the setting is appropriate for their child’s stage of development.

Child care facilities for infants and toddlers were recently rated in a national study and found to be generally low in quality. Only one in seven was rated as being developmentally appropriate for the children being served. Two hundred twenty-five infant and toddler rooms were evaluated and found to be particularly inadequate. Many had safety problems, poor sanitation, unresponsive caregivers, and a lack of toys and other materials for children. A study of an equal number of home-based child care providers in three communities, conducted by the Families and Work Institute, turned up similar serious concerns about quality. Not unexpectedly, these problems were more prevalent in settings serving low-income children.

As Geraldine Youcha reminds us in her history of child care in America, the most important thing for a child is the quality of care he receives, not necessarily the setting he receives it in. “Children have been helped and hurt by any system, whether orphanages, foster care, upper-class nanny care or mother care. The best was good; the worst was bad.”

Why isn’t child care in America as good as it should be?

The sad fact is that, unlike the French, we Americans have never sufficiently valued the work of caring for children. It is only recently that we have even begun to acknowledge the contributions of mothers who stay at home—and to appreciate that “mothering” is really a form of early-childhood education. Historically, we also have undervalued the outsiders whom we rely on to care for our children. As far back as Colonial times, raising children was frequently the responsibility of apprenticed girls or indentured servants. Children were cared for by slave women who served as wet nurses, maids, and nannies. Too often a child care worker can be just about anybody who asks for the job. And what does it say about our view of child care when we pay more to the garage attendant who parks our car than the person who is responsible for our children all day?

This devaluation of child care workers is due in part to our nation’s long history of ambivalence about whether surrogate child care is an acceptable part of American life. The extraordinary settlement houses that Jane Addams and other social reformers founded in the late nineteenth century to assist the children of immigrant working mothers went out of fashion years ago. The pioneering efforts of early-childhood experts like Dr. Bettye Caldwell to turn schools into family centers that also provided child care never fully caught on, in part because they represented a new idea about using schools for broader community purposes. And Americans continue to be divided over what role, if any, the federal government should play in helping working parents pay for child care.

The fact is that the federal government has subsidized child care at various points in our history. During the Civil War, there were federally sponsored nurseries for mothers working in hospitals. There was a substantial system of federally funded day care during World War II, when mothers went to work in factories to support the war effort. By 1945, approximately 1.6 million children were in day care centers, most of them for six days a week, twelve hours a day. With factories operating around the clock, child care was a patriotic necessity that had to be funded.

But as much as the nation depended on the labor of millions of “Rosie the Riveters,” mothers were still criticized for entering the workplace and putting their children in day care centers. There was extensive public debate and many warnings about the expected damage to children from institutionalized care. Even when follow-up studies of parents and children failed to produce any evidence of the predicted ill effects, the critics would not be silenced. As soon as the war ended, federal support for child care was cut off and most women returned home.

For twenty years after the end of World War II, a booming economy made it possible for most families to support their children on one income, typically the father’s. When mothers worked, out of necessity or desire, the care of children was usually entrusted to siblings, relatives, or older women like Mrs. Walters, whom Bill’s mother employed to care for him and Roger.

Over time, however, child care became a political issue, as women, responding to a changing economy and exercising their hard-won rights to enter the paid workforce, again began joining men on the job. In 1971, President Nixon vetoed federal child care legislation, explaining that it “would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.” In retrospect, what is more interesting is what he said he could support: increased funding of day care for welfare recipients and the working poor; tax deductions to subsidize day care for families with two working parents; increased funding for the construction of day care facilities; expanded nutrition and health care services for poor children; better targeting of maternal and child health services to low-income mothers; and expanded funding for Head Start. Now even these measures are controversial in some quarters.

Meanwhile, the need for child care has continued to grow. Global economic changes since the early 1970s have resulted in stagnant wages and benefits for many people. On one income, many families cannot enjoy what is considered to be an American standard of living. Most single parents face a stark choice: either they work or they end up on welfare. But they cannot work without a safe place to leave their children.

In the late 1980s, the federal government forged a bipartisan consensus that significantly increased funding of child care for low-income children. States also increased their contributions. Yet even at its peak, the amount of assistance provided has not come close to meeting the needs of families.

 

IN PART because we have done so little to encourage better training and compensation for child care workers, a culture has evolved in which child care is more often viewed as “baby-sitting” than as a vehicle for nurturing the emotional and intellectual development of children. Like the French, we should make sure that child care offers our kids the opportunity to learn and grow in warm, stimulating environments that help prepare them for school.

Finding quality child care should matter to parents. Although studies show that children are not affected adversely by having parents who work outside the home, there is evidence that poor care has damaging consequences. Children enrolled in family child care—care in a private home—are more likely to be in settings without licensing or standards than are children in child care centers. Family care is generally less expensive and more convenient than center-based care, which makes it especially popular with single parents. But unlike in the French system, family caregivers in America are often not regulated. In 1993, almost half of the states did not limit the number of children who could be cared for in these home settings. And roughly half of all states did not require a full range of basic health and safety protections. Child care centers, too, suffer from a hodgepodge of regulations, which vary from state to state.

Parents often assume that cost is the biggest barrier to good care, but another problem may be their inability to recognize good quality and demand it for their children. Parents need to be alert, engaged, and informed consumers, just as they need to be self-aware in their own parenting. I have visited child care facilities all over the country, and I can testify to the superb conditions in some settings and the abject inadequacy of others. While many centers offer bright, pleasant surroundings and an assortment of toys, others are dreary and spartan, with no open spaces for play. In some centers, the caregivers seem bored, distracted, and uninterested in the children. But in the best settings, the workers are creative, energetic, and focused on the children. And you can tell immediately that they also take seriously the responsibility of their jobs.

Zero to Three, an organization devoted to informing the public about young children’s needs, tells us that caregivers should be “well trained in pediatric first aid, rescue breathing, sanitation, and prevention and detection of early signs of contagious disease” and that the setting should meet or exceed local and state health standards and provide health information to parents.

Having enforceable state licensing requirements for child care providers also helps raise standards of care. A study of Florida’s child care centers measured the quality of care children received before and after state regulations went into effect. These laws put more adults in charge of fewer children and required that at every licensed center at least one staff person have a Child Development Associate credential or its equivalent for every twenty children served. Researchers observed that the day care workers were more responsive and positive in dealing with the children after the regulations went into effect. The children themselves exhibited greater language and social development, and the number of behavior problems went down.

Even when caregivers meet legal standards, there is no guarantee that the quality of their care is what children deserve. Parents can learn a lot about child care by making unannounced visits to a site before and after enrolling their children. Every parent ought to find out the ratio of adults to children in a particular child care setting. Experts agree that one adult should watch no more than three or four infants, for example.

Parents should ask questions about the training of child care workers, which can range from a few hours a week as a neighborhood baby-sitter to a master’s degree in early-childhood development. And parents should feel they have the right to ask about salaries: a caregiver making only the minimum wage might have one eye focused on finding a new and better-paying job. Continuity is important. Turnover is high among low-wage workers, and that can be problematic, as children form attachments with people who suddenly vanish from their lives.

In scouting out child care, what we observe tells us a lot. The room where kids play does not have to be opulent, but it must be clean. It does not have to be filled with every toy advertised on television, but it should have a variety of toys, books, stuffed animals, and art supplies suited to your child’s stage of development. The Child Care Action Campaign, a nonprofit coalition of individuals, organizations, and businesses dedicated to helping parents recognize and find quality child care, advises that “jigsaw puzzles and crayons may be fine for preschoolers but are inappropriate for infants.” It may seem obvious, but when parents are feeling pressed to find a place for their child, these factors are sometimes ignored.

Zero to Three illustrates easy ways to understand the impact “quality of care” can have on small children and how parents can be partners in promoting it. Let’s say Tim is two and a half years old and his mother drops him off for the first time at a child care center. She may have visited the center before but has not made a point of finding out who her son’s primary caregiver will be. It turns out no one is assigned that role and Tim is left to fend for himself. He is bullied, and when no one attends to him when he starts to cry, he takes it upon himself to fight back. Within a few weeks, he, too, has become a class bully, who is regularly yelled at and assigned to “time-outs.” He has learned his lessons well: his feelings are not valued, and in this day care center it is every toddler for himself.

In an alternate scenario, Tim and his mother spend time with his primary caregiver, a woman named Mindy. She asks Tim and his mother questions, and learns from Tim’s mother about his temperament and particular needs. When another child intentionally bumps Tim, Mindy pulls him aside to talk and then introduces the two boys. Whenever Tim’s mother leaves him, Mindy gives him extra attention and reassurance. Within a few weeks, Tim is playing happily with the other children and is no longer anxious about his mother’s return. With Mindy’s help, he has come to feel safe and valued.

These are steps we can take as individuals to ensure that our own children receive the care they need. But what can we do as a society to make sure that all children are cared for the way we want our own children to be?

We can begin by insisting that the federal government not turn its back on children by depriving low-income and working families of the assistance they need to be assured quality child care. As battles rage over the federal budget, it is important to remember that much of the best child care for low-income children is subsidized in one way or another by the federal government. Child care for working and low-income parents has been subsidized through the Child Care and Development block grant and other federal programs, along with additional state funding. Other forms of assistance help subsidize care for children whose families are on welfare.

Earlier this year, I visited the Linn County Day Care Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which, supported by federal, state, and local funds, enrolls nearly seventy children from low-income families. I was impressed by the center’s range of activities. In one room, children were gleefully feeding guinea pigs; in another, they were busy making valentines with paper and glue. Every classroom and every activity I saw reflected the center’s emphasis on developing the language and social skills of each child.

It was also clear that the center understood that quality child care and strong families go hand in hand. There was not one parent I met who was not either working, actively involved in job training, going to college, or trying to get a high school equivalency diploma. Having access to child care they could trust enabled them to pursue goals that would benefit both their families and society.

Many states have worked to address the patchwork problem by creating integrated systems of support and supervision of child care. Beginning in August 1993, North Carolina merged its state and community funds to establish the Smart Start initiative to improve the health and well-being of its young children, in part by improving the training of child care providers and creating high-quality programs to prepare children to enter school. In Ohio, even in an era when the state’s overall spending has grown at its slowest rate in forty years, legislators have increased funding for select programs for children and families by one third since 1991 through the Ohio Family and Children First Initiative. Its goals are to assure healthier infants and children, to increase access to quality preschool and child care, and to improve the state’s outreach efforts to promote family stability. These programs are successful in part because they expand on a base of federal support delivered through the states.

One of the most hopeful signs I have seen is the growing interest of the business community in assisting employees with child care. More and more, businesses are recognizing that when employees miss work to stay home with sick children or when parents are distracted by child care problems, the bottom line suffers too.

The Du Pont Company was one of the first large companies to institute work-family programs such as job sharing and subsidized emergency child care. A study of Du Pont employees confirmed the view that family-friendly policies are a good business practice, because they make the workforce more committed and more engaged. “If you do something to meet the employees’ needs, they return the favor,” said Charles Rodgers, whose firm conducted the study.

Eastman Kodak provides a backup child care service in which a nurse or similarly trained professional will come to an employee’s home when regular child care arrangements fall through. IBM allows some of its employees the flexibility to work at home and sponsors day care centers that offer children a wide range of activities. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas allows employees to work from home via computer and has set up a private room at its headquarters where new mothers can nurse their infants. Local governments and nonprofit organizations, too, are discovering the benefits of policies that help families. In Kansas City, Missouri, for example, city employees are granted four hours of paid leave annually to participate in children’s school activities. And the YWCA of New York City offers employees reduced tuition for children’s summer camp.

On October 31, 1995, I hosted an event at the White House honoring twenty-one companies in the American Business Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care that have pledged to contribute $100 million for child and dependent care in fifty-six cities nationwide. Allstate, AT&T, Chevron, Citibank, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Mobil, Texaco, and Xerox were among the companies honored. James Schiro, the chairman of Price Waterhouse and one of our guest speakers, said: “All of the companies participating believe in our theme: ‘Doing together what none of us can afford to do alone.’”

Hundreds of other companies around the country have also been listed on the Department of Labor’s “honor roll”—a list of employers who pledge to initiate workplace policies that help parents and families, such as flexible work schedules, paid leave to attend children’s school activities, and tax-deductible set-asides from employees’ paychecks that can be used to pay for child care.

Susan O’Neil, an employee of Deloitte & Touche, who spoke at the White House, described the hectic pace of her life as a mother working full time outside the home. She credited her employer with helping her find child care through a company referral service and giving her flexible hours to meet her family’s needs.

“This is real, America,” she said. “We ask you the government, and you the employer, to help us, the working people, to make it work. We can’t do it alone.”

She is right. As a nation, we must make child care a priority and begin to value the important work of raising strong, healthy, and happy children.