Child Care--<i> Every</i> Day

With their sense of wonder and joy, children are the center of attention during the holiday season. Their care the rest of the year is starting to draw more attention in a handful of states, California among them, but more often governments are behaving like Mr. Scrooge as they spend less on child care. And the script reads just as bleakly for the future because of threatened reductions in federal spending.

The Children’s Defense Fund, a national organization that gathers information and lobbies for programs for children, finds in a new study that “the gap between the need for affordable, high-quality child care and its availability is growing in almost every state in the nation.”

In 1981 the Reagan Administration cut by 21% the major source of federal day-care dollars for poor children, a program called Title XX Social Services Block Grants. Any state that maintained or increased government commitment to child care services did so with its own money, often at considerable struggle.

Even these state increases couldn’t make up for the federal cut. “Thirty states increased state funding for child care by 4% or more between 1984 and 1985,” said fund president Marian Wright Edelman--but that increase amounted to only $60 million, compared with about $84 million lost in federal funds in the early years of the Reagan Administration. As a result, 22 states are spending less for child care than in 1981, and 24 states are serving fewer children.

Part of the reason the money doesn’t go as far is that there are more children needing the services. The report shows that need clearly:

--Almost 47% of mothers with children under 1 year old were in the labor force in March, 1984. That’s a 95% increase since 1970.

--More than 9 million children under age 6 have mothers in the work force. Almost 15 million children between 6 and 13 have mothers who are working.

--One in five of all children live in single-parent households. By 1990 that ratio will be one in four, or double the 1970 rate. Help with child care is imperative for these women, because in 1982 the average single mother earned only $8,951.

California’s landmark child-care legislation will boost state spending for parents in the work force and those seeking training to join the labor pool. Although the program is not yet in place, it is one of the bright spots in the national picture. Massachusetts increased state money for child care and added staff members to its licensing office. Extra money approved in Florida will provide care for 10,000 more poor children. New Jersey, North Carolina, Minnesota and Pennsylvania also were cited for improved funding.

The task is not the government’s alone. More than 1,800 employers help in some way with child-care services either by providing on-site centers, by joining with other firms to support a day-care operation or by subsidizing employees’ day-care payments. That’s a great increase in recent years, but not nearly enough.

Certainly the federal child-care grants will be vulnerable to the Gramm-Rudman deficit-cutting efforts. More cuts on the federal level will shift more of the burden to the states, and they are already hard pressed. It makes more sense, and costs less, to pay for child care than to pay welfare to a woman who can’t work if she can’t find someone to look after her children. And it makes the most sense of all to devote as much attention to children and their welfare throughout the year as they are receiving today.