Television Reviews : ‘Hush Little Baby’ Looks at Child Care

The issue of inadequate child care services in the United States sits in that remarkably complex area where domestic dilemmas become charged with political implications. “Hush Little Baby: The Challenge of Child Care,” on the Lifetime cable channel (tonight at 9 p.m. and repeating on Feb. 4, 11 and 16), succinctly examines these multiple dimensions.

Produced and directed by Dennis Lofgren, the film plies a human touch without resorting to the plucking of heart strings.

This balance is struck in two ways. Narrator (and “thirty-something” star) Mel Harris provides cogent overviews of the hourlong program’s four segments. Then, the segments themselves cover a wide swath of America’s socioeconomic landscape: the struggling middle-class divorcee with two little girls; the black, single, working mother and her two latchkey children; the upper-middle-class white couple, faced with hiring a new nanny; and one solution--the “state-of-the-art in child care centers,” run by the Pomona Unified School District’s Bill Ewing.

The narration’s statistical information enumerates a national scandal. Sixty percent of American mothers with kids under 14 are working, we’re told, and a large majority (especially in expensive, job-rich cities such as Los Angeles, where the film is set) put out nearly 50% of their income in rent and utilities--leaving little for affordable child care. Yet subsidized child care is available to only 1% of American kids who need it.

The camera supports the statistics. Spending long periods of time with each family, Lofgren reveals the pitfalls facing parents: private “centers” with exposed light sockets and pit bulls in the back yard; impersonal, expensive, corporate-style facilities; the depressing lives of latchkey kids. Even the privileged family that can afford a nanny faces frustrations that seem absurd in a land of affluence.

“Hush Little Baby” ultimately makes one wonder why child care, given modest attention during the presidential campaign, is not a national issue of compelling stature.