California Families Turn Into a High-Profile Issue

The vast majority of parents today have had to resign themselves to the fact that their own families bear not the slightest resemblance to the Ozzie and Harriet images that bombarded them as children.

Government, however, is slow to react to the obvious: The traditional family has largely disintegrated, and the workplace is often in conflict with single-parent families and those in which both parents work.

The Little Hoover Commission’s recent criticisms of the state’s system of providing services to children probably came as no surprise to California families, 80% of which have no full-time stay-at-home parent. The commission found that although the state spends more than $300 million on child welfare, 645,000 California pre-school children live in poverty, only 7% of the 1.1 million eligible for subsidized child care receive it and, in Los Angeles County, there are roughly 1,000 latchkey children per zip code.

“Without a drastic rethinking and restructuring of our state children’s services delivery system, a significant portion of our next generation of children will not be able to assume responsible roles as productive members of society,” the commission concluded.

Bills have been introduced, whittled down and passed to deal in patchwork fashion with issues of latchkey children, child abuse and subsidized child care. Still in its infancy is the idea of a comprehensive policy--one recognizing that families are being hit with declining earning power, that the return of mothers to the workplace is necessary and that social systems are still based on the idea that mothers are at home taking care of children.

Conservatives have traditionally claimed the issue of the family as their own, using the apple-pie appeal of the “pro-family” slogan to push an agenda that is anti-drug, anti-abortion, anti-pornography and anti-bureaucracy.

But, recently, liberal Democrats have responded by calling for a policy that addresses the family as an economic unit, inseparable from other social-policy concerns.

At last, it seems, the clamoring for family supports from liberal and conservative constituents alike has lifted the family debate above the level of emotionalism and rhetoric. It is no longer a question of which party has the higher moral values, but of how both parties might tackle the complex issues of neglected children, declining wages and an aging population. Recognizing that families are affected at the core by all three trends is an important start.

Legislative hearings last month in San Francisco called for a public discussion of the changing family and its relationship to the economy, workplace and government. The hearings, sponsored by Assemblyman Tom Bates (D-Oakland), were a forum for distressed families--single mothers who can’t afford or can’t find adequate child care, fathers laid off from industrial jobs, parents stuck with inflexible job schedules, children left alone after school.

“We want to get a handle on the changing dynamic of families and begin to develop a statewide family policy which will help parents be good workers and workers be good parents,” Bates said.

Testimony at the hearings bore out trends that have become dramatically clear nationwide: Parents and children are under increasing economic and personal stress in a society that does less than any other Western industrialized nation to provide support for the family.

The fact that Bates, a liberal Democrat, has gone high-profile on the issue of the family galls conservatives. “They’re essentially trying to take the issue away from us, but they’re doing it with the same old collectivist policies,” says Assembly GOP leader Pat Nolan of Glendale. He and other conservatives blame Democratic-imposed bureaucratic regulations for the dearth of child care, and welfare for the disintegration of the family.

Assembly Republicans have proposed legislation this year to reduce the cost of day-care providers’ insurance, lower the student-teacher ratio requirement for state-subsidized child care, help fund training for family day-care providers and give tax credits to employers who build on-site day-care centers.

Bates proposes the establishment of a new state Office of Family and Work to assist the private sector in developing employment policies that aid families, while giving state-subsidized child care a 4% budgetary increase and offering to pay the student loans of college students who choose child care as a career.

Democrats also have bills to reform the no-fault divorce laws that have worked to the economic disadvantage of single mothers and to encourage employers to offer flextime scheduling.

The two political approaches are miles apart, but the fact that both parties are now claiming families as a high-profile issue represents a step toward policy-making that is long overdue.