New Child-Care Law Gets a D-Minus

After years of debate, Congress has finally passed child-care legislation that takes a tiny step in the right direction. But it is disgracefully inferior to programs long in place in almost every other industrialized nation.

The new law was touted as a historic achievement by President Bush and by some Democrats, who had to make major compromises to push it through Congress and to get Bush to sign it.

Sheila Kamerman, a highly respected Columbia University professor, has just completed an extensive study of the European family-care programs and concludes that they “put our country to shame.”

She and Vivian Cadden, contributing editor of Working Mother magazine, wrote in a recent article that “the European commitment to working parents and their children is nothing short of astonishing, and our first overall reaction was envy--pure and simple.”

The very modest child-care measure passed by Congress will basically add only $234 a year--that’s a year--to tax credits that poverty-level workers can get to help care for a child. It offers a bit more for those with a child under one year old.

Big deal.

That small amount will do precious little to help.

The bill also provides what amounts to small change--$750 million the first year--out of our multitrillion-dollar budget to help states expand the inadequate child-care services they now offer.

It does establish urgently needed, but minimal standards, that day-care providers must meet to take part in the program.

The new law does nothing about such other essentials as universal prenatal care, preschool programs--other than a tad more for the much-praised Head Start--and nothing for paid time off for working mothers and fathers to care for newborns.

Congress did pass a bill a few weeks earlier requiring large companies to provide unpaid parental leave. But kinder, gentler Bush vetoed that minimal beginning of a meaningful paid-leave system, which is so common in Europe and Japan.

Other countries help poor working parents more than we do. But they realize that those with moderate incomes also need child-care assistance, especially these days when both parents usually work outside the home and there are more single-parent families.

Maybe the small step taken by Congress will encourage us to look at what other countries do to help families, which all political leaders are so fond of saying are the bedrock of the nation.

Americans don’t hesitate to compare American, Japanese, German and Swedish cars. And by buying millions of the foreign-made vehicles, they have been, in effect, telling U.S. manufacturers to look at the foreigners and learn better ways to design and build automobiles. It took a few years of punishing economic losses for U.S. companies to get the message, but today America’s cars are generally at least as good as and often less expensive than those made abroad.

Few of us, however, ever compare American and foreign family-care programs and then urge Congress to meet the foreign standards; this, even though our children are so obviously far more essential to our future than the cars we seem to love so much.

A host of statistics shows the advantages of decent family-assistance programs, starting with prenatal care.

Just one example: U.S. infant mortality is 11 per 1,000 births. Every other industrialized country has some kind of universal prenatal-care program; they also have a lower infant mortality rate than we do. In Japan, there are only five infant deaths per 1,000 births.

That one, sad figure doesn’t show the full economic and emotional costs of inadequate child-care programs in this era of the disappearing traditional family.

We don’t have to copy the successful foreign family-care programs, but they can serve as guides for us.

Kamerman and Cadden rightly conclude that the cornerstone of any well-designed child-care policy must be a parental job leave that is at least partially paid.

All major industrialized countries except the United States manage to afford decent family programs. We can afford them too, because their cost is more than offset by greater productivity and healthier workers and their children.

Despite the Bush veto, Congress ought to go further when it tries again to adopt an unpaid parental leave program that would bring us up to programs in other countries.

Germans, for instance, get 14 weeks of maternity leave at full salary. Either parent then can take an additional 16 months of job-protected leave with reduced earnings.

In Japan, women can take off work for six weeks before a child is born and eight more weeks after birth. They get 60% of their basic wages while caring for their children at home.

Sweden, which has the highest-quality publicly subsidized child-care program in the world, provides 90% of earnings for a new parent (man or woman) for a year. After that, a parent can work a six-hour day until the child is 8 years old. Nurseries and preschools for children younger than age five are generally available for parents who want to continue working at their regular job.

The child-care programs in other countries are paid for by government and industry and are accepted as a normal cost of doing business in a humane, profitable way. They are, as Kamerman says, “designed to assure babies a good start in life and to protect maternal health while maintaining family income.”

Cries for lower taxes will probably continue for a time to drown out calls for a rational child-care program.

But that negative emotion--envy--just might help turn the tide if enough of us learn what other nations are now doing routinely to help family life.