Caring More for Our Children

Politicians do not seem to kiss as many babies as they used to. But they are beginning to pay attention to children when they discuss issues. It is a trend that we hope continues.

It also is a trend that the Children’s Defense Fund--which lobbies for health, education and other welfare programs for those who are too young to lobby for themselves--is trying to encourage. The most recent move by the organization in that direction is a report on “what every American should be asking political leaders in 1988.”

“The first high-school graduating class of the 21st Century will enter first grade in September, 1988,” the fund’s president, Marian Wright Edelman, often points out. The class faces a future of risks. One in four of its members is poor. One in five may become a teen-age parent. One in six is being raised with no health insurance. One in seven may drop out of school.

“And one out of every two has a mother in the work force, but only a minority have safe, affordable, quality day care,” Edelman adds.

To try to reverse the adverse statistics on health care, Edelman and her group recommend that political candidates be asked what policies they propose in order to reduce infant mortality, like having the government help provide better prenatal care; how the candidates would halt the decline in childhood immunization rates, and how they would vote on the measure by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) that would require employers to provide health insurance to all employees and their families.

With half the mothers of preschool children now in the work force, the Children’s Defense Fund recommends asking candidates whether they think that the federal government should have a role in helping low-income families pay for day care and in developing good care for children from all economic backgrounds. Specifically, how would candidates vote on S 1885 and HR 3660, the Act for Better Child Care Services, which would offer these subsidies and establish procedures for setting standards for care?

Does the federal government have a role in overcoming mental-health problems that lead parents to abuse children? Should federal fair-housing laws be expanded to prohibit discrimination against families with children? How can the federal government expand the successful Head Start program so that it will serve more than the 18% of those eligible that it now serves? And do the candidates support expansion of the popular program of nutritional supplements for pregnant women, infants and children that now serves only 40% of those eligible?

It’s a long list, longer than this sample of questions indicates, and an expensive one if implemented. But for a country that ranks 19th in the developed world in keeping children alive through their first year of life, it’s an agenda to which attention must be paid before more and more children die or are forced to go through life handicapped by poor health and poor education.