Child Care a Big Need That U.S. Can’t Meet on the Cheap

Look at almost any statistic showing the dramatically changing role of women in the workplace and you’ll understand why members of the 100th Congress proposed nearly 150 bills dealing with just one effect of that change: the need for child care.

But the idea-laden Congress has done precious little about that or any other family-oriented issue. Such issues were generally called “labor issues;” somehow using the word “labor” made the problems politically easier for the relatively affluent congressmen to ignore.

Now most Republicans and Democrats claim they realize that this country must face up to the increased political potency of the emotionally charged family problems created by the United States’ enormous demographic shifts.

Here’s one fact that helped raise the consciousness level of both politicians and the corporate executives clever enough to think about the implications that the data has for their own work forces: In 1950, only 12% of women with children younger than 6 had jobs outside their homes, compared to 60% today.

Another provocative fact: More than half of all children under 6 have mothers who work outside their homes.

President-elect George Bush has declared that the problem of providing help for working parents with young children “is the single most important issue arising from changes in our work force.”

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), a crusader for meaningful child-care legislation, rightly bemoans the fact that the United States is one of only two industrialized nations without such a law. The other is South Africa, hardly a country sensitive to labor--or to the family problems of most of its inhabitants.

Congress almost passed an inadequate bill last year, but it died as the members squabbled over widely differing proposals.

A growing number of corporations say they are really thinking hard about offering child care as a basic fringe benefit. Some employers even call it the fringe benefit of the 1990s.

But with all that heavy corporate thinking, only about 3,300 of the country’s 6 million companies have actually done much about it.

Unions are making a concentrated attempt to win contracts to help single-parent families or those with two working parents, but with very limited success.

Not much has actually been done in Congress yet, in part because the members could not agree on the government’s role in helping parents keep both jobs and children. Surprisingly, however, there are no serious differences over money these days.

In the early 1970s, Congress tried with little success to do something about child care in a substantive way.

Democrats realized then that it would take a considerable amount of money to do any good at all. They proposed a child-care bill that would have provided $7 billion by 1975--enough to get a running start toward easing the growing problem faced by working parents.

That sum, adjusted for inflation, would have amounted to about $15.5 billion in 1988 dollars, according to Nancy Saltford of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, whose valuable study of the issue was released last month.

The latest proposal of those “free-spend ing” Democrats, however, would have cost only $2.5 billion for child care, compared to the inflation-adjusted $15.5 billion they were ready to spend in the early 1970s. They have regressed considerably.

And what about Republicans?

President Richard M. Nixon vetoed the Democratic measure in 197l, backing instead a Republican plan priced at a measly $250 million. That difference over money killed the bill altogether, and there wasn’t much steam behind child-care proposals until the 100th Congress convened two years ago.

Now the Republicans say the $2.5 billion proposed by the Democrats is about what they themselves are willing to spend. In other words, the GOP moved forward on the money question while the Democrats moved backward.

But they are far apart on the way they want to spend the money. Even worse, none of the plans are nearly adequate to meet the need.

Bush has a plan that would cost about $2.2 billion--about half as much spent annually on the stealth bomber, a project of, at best, uncertain value.

He has proposed a tax credit of up to $1,000 for each child under 4, but he wants it offered whether or not both parents work outside the home, and that makes sense.

However, does Bush think that once children reach age 4 they are pretty much ready to go it alone, or that four years after the baby comes, the parents will be rich enough to do without the $1,000 child-care tax subsidy?

An improved Bush plan should be combined with proposals most Democrats want: government help to expand child-care services and fix minimum standards for providers of the care. They also want to provide small subsidies for low-income families in which both parents work at outside jobs.

The Conference Board, a business research organization, figures that child-care services range from $1,500 to $10,000 a year, and most parents pay $3,000, or about what it takes to go to some public colleges.

We cannot provide adequate child care on the cheap. But if we really believe in the value of family life--and that both women and men are wanted and needed as workers outside the home--it will be well worth the investment.