Child Care Gets Political at Conference

Politicians who ignore child care are missing a “colossal political opportunity,” Gov. Bill Clinton (D-Ark.) said here Friday, echoing the majority opinion at this two-day conference convened to address the “economic necessity” of affordable child care for all working parents.

“I am genuinely mystified that child care is not at the heart of (the stump speeches) at least two or three candidates we’ve seen,” Clinton said at a press conference after his luncheon address. “We’ve got a lot of good people running, but somehow it hasn’t taken center stage and I don’t understand why.”

Although none of the presidential candidates spoke at “Child Care: The Bottom Line,” twice the number of expected participants showed up at the event sponsored by the Child Care Action Campaign (CCAC) to examine the economic implications of failing to set and implement a national child care agenda.

Most of the 800 conference participants--representatives from major U.S. corporations, child care advocacy groups, religious and social organizations, state legislators and child care center operators to name a few--seemed to share a common sense of urgency about the issue. They battled long lines at buffet tables and stood in the wings of the elegant Waldorf Astoria’s Grand Ballroom to hear economists and child care experts discuss the vital role that child care could play in the growth of the nation’s economy.

A ‘Screaming Need’

“Child care has become an absolute screaming need that even Washington now hears,” said Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), who has been an advocate of child care legislation since she arrived in Congress in 1972, then the mother of two children under the age of five. “The window is opened this year and it may not be opened again for eight years.”

Indeed, underpinning the conference was the CCAC’s contention that the rationale for supporting child care has changed significantly. For many years, the reason to fund child care was that the nation’s children were “our nation’s greatest resource,” according to literature distributed by the CCAC--a New York-based coalition of corporations, academics, politicians and child care advocates. Today, according to Elinor Guggenheimer, CCAC president, urgent economic concerns fuel the child care debate: reducing budget deficits and poverty and increasing labor force participation. The driving force behind this change in focus seems to be demographics.

Census figures show that the number of dual-income families with children under 18 has increased from one-half to two-thirds of all families over the past decade. During the same period, the number of mothers single-handedly supporting their children has escalated 40%, and the Labor Department estimates that 61% of all working women will hold jobs in the next 10-12 years.

Simply put, according to speakers at workshops, symposiums and luncheons, the primary care givers of this nation are also rapidly becoming its primary breadwinners. As speakers and participants continually pointed out, if government and business does not figure out a way to provide affordable, quality child care for all workers, their work product will suffer and children may not be prepared to meet the challenges of competing in the new world economy.

“We are not going to be able to retain our position in the world or the American Dream, if we don’t quit wasting our people,” Clinton warned.

Bill in Committee

Acknowledging that momentum has built for a national policy on child care, many observers here said the issue has moved out of the living room into the executive board room and is headed straight for the executive chambers of the White House--if Congress passes the child care legislation currently in committee, the Act for Better Child Care Services (ABC).

The ABC bill calls for an allocation of $2.5 billion for child care, 75% of which would be earmarked to help parents pay for child care, provided on a sliding scale based on family size and income. The bill would also assist state and locally funded preschool programs to operate all day and all year long.

The legislation’s author, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), kicked off the conference with a strong message: “A continued failure to address the basic child care needs in this country will have the most serious repercussions--not only for our nation’s children--but also for our economy.”

Dodd, who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs and one of the Senate’s most vocal critics of Reagan Administration policies in Central America, received high marks for honoring his commitment to open the conference, despite President Reagan’s decision the day before to deploy additional U.S. troops in Honduras.

Newly appointed Secretary of Labor Ann McLaughlin, who addressed the Thursday luncheon, was applauded but not as enthusiastically. While conference participants expressed gratitude that McLaughlin has said she will make child care and family issues a priority, some were disturbed at her data, which painted a somewhat rosier picture of the availability of child care than most here believed realistic.

She cited a Bureau of Labor Statistics study that found that 11% or about 133,000 of all government and business establishments employing 10 or more workers provide some specific benefit or service to workers for their child care arrangements.

Discrepancy in Figures

Conference participants more generally accepted the estimate by the New York City-based research group, the Conference Board, that of an estimated 6 million U.S. employers, roughly 3,000 businesses are doing anything at all to address the child care problem. “The BLS data indicate that there are workplaces out there that have child care, but they are not what we have been calling employer-supported child care,” said Dana E. Friedman, senior research associate at the Conference Board and vice president of CCAC, explaining the discrepancy in the figures.

However, Friedman was quick to add that “there is no question that she (McLaughlin) has made a very serious commitment to child care and she’s being realistic. She’s got 12 months and she is filling an enormous void in this Administration.”

While politicians and child care advocates recognized they were “preaching to the choir” at the conference, each issued a rallying cry to fight for passage of the ABC bill.

“The problems with child care in this country have reached such alarming proportions that we can no longer afford to offer piecemeal solutions,” Dodd said. “In short, we are at a crossroads. The time to act on child care is now, before the costs of not acting--to our children and our economy--reach the point of no return.”