Child-Care Time Is Now

Polls of voters show that a majority considers child care an urgent need and wants government action. Democrats at their national convention interrupted keynoter Ann Richards with hearty applause when she mentioned child care. Nominee Michael S. Dukakis spoke about “young families . . . forced to choose between the jobs they need and the children they love.” Vice President George Bush has proposed a $1,000 child-care tax credit.

The time for child care won’t get any better than it is now, in this election year. Fortunately, Congress already has before it a plan to increase the amount of government child-care support and to make sure that the care is safe.

The Act for Better Child Care Services has bi-partisan sponsorship and more than 200 House and Senate supporters. It would subsidize day-care costs for poor families. It would require states to set up grants or low-interest loans to help start or expand child-care programs. It says that some of the money could be used for training people who care for children in their own homes. The bill would require states to set standards that would protect children’s health and safety to prevent harm to youngsters like Jessica McClure, who fell into a well at an unregulated family day-care program last year. And it would establish referral services so that parents could get better information on child care.

Unless this bill becomes law, there won’t be enough child-care slots to enable parents to use the $1,000 tax credit that Bush has proposed. His idea is good, as far as it goes--especially his proposal to extend the credit to families that are too poor to pay taxes. But the demand for child-care services far exceeds the supply. Young mothers are especially affected; studies show that thousands of them turn down job offers each month because they cannot find or cannot afford child care. And those jobs are critical: A House committee reports that one-third more families would fall into poverty if the wives weren’t working.

The most serious threat to the measure exists in the House and involves federal aid to church-related programs. Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins (D-Los Angeles) has postponed a session during which his House Education and Labor Committee was to have started working on the bill today. Too much is at stake to let this measure get off the track now.

The question is important, because churches and synagogues now provide about one-third of all existing centers for day care. They often favor children of their own religion in order to win continued financial support from their congregations. Some members of Congress are understandably concerned about providing federal support to programs operated by religious groups.

Civil-rights laws say that any institution receiving federal money must not discriminate on the grounds of race, sex, age or disability throughout the institution and the specific program. The civil-rights laws, reaffirmed earlier this year with the passage of the Civil Rights Restoration Act, allow religiously affiliated human-services programs to prefer members of their own religions in public accommodations, employment and housing.

The child-care bill does say that no program may discriminate on grounds of religion for the day-care slots that federal money pays for, although a church-related center could still favor its co-religionists in admissions in the rest of its program. The bill also provides that no federal money may be spent for any religious instruction.

Congress may well want to clarify its position on federal aid to religiously based social programs, but it should be done in separate debate. The bill follows the lead of all existing civil-rights laws, so the debate is with those laws, not the child-care bill. Children should not be victimized by an argument that the nation has never resolved. The cumulative good of day-care services that would be made available outweighs the need for resolving the broader church-state question at this moment.