U.S. Role in Day Care: New Funds, New Hope

By ROBIN ABCARIAN

May 13, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

What will our child-care system be like in 20 years?

Robert Cervantes, the man in charge of California’s child-care programs, lets out a big sigh. You can practically hear him thinking: Where will the money come from? How can we streamline the bureaucracy? Will we ever be able to help all the children who need assistance?

His answers seem surprisingly optimistic.

“I think the system will get better and better,” says Cervantes, director of the Child Development Division of the state Department of Education. “I think there will be greater consciousness on the part of parents and the public about the role of child care. Those of us currently in the field, I think, will look back (at this era) and say we seized the opportunity to put a comprehensive system in place.”

Years from now, children’s advocates will undoubtedly point to the early 1990s as a critical moment in the history of government involvement in child care.

California has always earned high marks for its commitment to child care, and in the last half century the state has spent millions of dollars a year on support programs.

But until now, there has been relatively little federal involvement--almost none, in fact, since World War II came to a close, ending the large-scale and urgent need for women in the workplace.

Although there have been attempts over the years to reignite federal involvement in child care, the movement has been hampered by a debate over whether the government belongs there at all.

Now, the point may be moot. Last fall, after a four-year campaign, Congress passed laws that appropriate billions of dollars for child care. Thousands of children who need care will receive it as a result of the 1990 legislation.

Yet, buoyed as they are by this immense success, advocates say millions of children will still be without proper care.

“It is hard to say how many children need care,” said Helen Blank, a senior child-care associate in the Family Support Division of the Children’s Defense Fund. Her Washington-based nonprofit organization “exists to provide a strong and effective voice for the children of America, who cannot vote, lobby or speak for themselves.”

Blank estimates that about 400,000 children will receive some sort of care thanks to the new legislation, but millions more need it.

“I would like to see states take this opportunity presented by the federal bills to create a system that provides the best possible care for children and for them not to see the bills as a substitute for their efforts. And I would like to see the federal government say, ‘This was a first step, and we will take 10 more.’ ”

The child-care issue has great appeal to politicians of all stripes these days. Everyone loves to talk about how, as one author put it, “Children are our most precious etc., etc.”

But not everyone is pro-care in the same way or to the same degree. Society still harbors some deep-seated feelings about whether the mothers of young children--especially babies--should be working outside the home. And many people oppose any public involvement in family issues.

“I worry that children are not a high enough priority in this country,” said Lorraine Schrag, executive director of the Child Care Resource Center of the San Fernando Valley. “We say we value children, then we don’t back it up with the dollars that are needed.

“This country has traditional values, and those values mean that child care is not probably seen as a community responsibility or even a family responsibility. We still look at children as a mother’s responsibility.”

Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, a nonprofit organization that “seeks to promote fair treatment for traditional family values,” says children are the mother’s responsibility: “All the research shows it is very risky for children under age 3 (to be left by their working mothers). The child needs the mother the same way the child needs food.”

Schlafly and others who think the government does not belong in the child-care business believe that the way to help working parents is to cut their federal income taxes.

“I think there should be less taxes, too,” said Blank. “But I think the government should be involved in child care. I’m not saying it should run child care. I am saying (the government) should have a role in making (child care) accessible to parents because it is an important part of a child’s development. If we don’t have government investment in child care, we will have too many children in unsafe care that will affect their future development.”

The philosophical issues are complex, said Karen Hill-Scott, an expert on local child-care supply and demand and co-founder of Crystal Stairs Inc., a Los Angeles resource and referral agency.

“The doctrine of parens patriae , which essentially states that children are the property of their parents, is widely used to inhibit public sector responses to the need for child care,” said Hill-Scott.

“It is regarded by many, many people as a completely private responsibility, that the state has no business being involved in it. I personally think that there ought to be regulations to protect the lives of children,” she adds. “I don’t think that just because you birth a baby, you’re gonna be a responsible parent.”

The Good Old Days

Believe it or not, there once were some good old days in the child-care business. Unfortunately, it took a global conflict to bring them about.

In the 1940s, when men went to war, women went to work and children went to federally funded day care centers.

Evelyn Benas, an Oakland nursery school teacher who has studied government involvement in child care, tells a story about meeting the man who created the famous federally subsidized day-care center at the Kaiser Shipyards in Portland, Ore.:

“He said to me, ‘Evelyn, it’s a terrible thing to say, but if the war had lasted just three more years, we could have nailed this (child-care) thing down!’ ” said Benas. “But six months after the war, there was no more child-care center at Kaiser Shipyards.”

After federal support for state-operated child-care programs withered in 1946, California opted to continue funding its day-care centers. Over the years, the state expanded its commitment to include support for specialized needs, ranging from handicapped children to children of migrant workers.

At the federal level, things were slow until 20 years ago: There was another brief, shining moment, when the Comprehensive Child Care Act of 1971 breezed through Congress. The act would have allocated about $2 billion to create a strong, federally directed child-care system, said Blank. But then-President Richard Nixon vetoed it, fearing the “Sovietization” of the American family.

Nixon’s pen plunged federal support for child care into a two-decade deep freeze, from which it is only just thawing. Why the thaw was so long in coming is debatable, but many advocates say there are at least three main reasons: Nixon legitimized an era of conservative opposition to federal involvement in child care; there is a deep-rooted ambivalence in this country about whether the mothers of young children should work, and children are not our top priority.

Over the last 45 years, in the absence of federal involvement, states became responsible for regulating child care. As a result, an estimated 43% of American children in out-of-home child care are unprotected by state regulation, says the CDF, “often because the places where they receive care are exempt from even minimal health and safety standards.”

California, however, is one of the few states consistently singled out for praise.

“California early on had more support for child care than other states,” said Blank.

“For example, you were the first state to implement the statewide research and referral system, and you had a fairly strong child-care program operated out of the Department of Education, and a whole host of smaller initiatives, funding special programs for teen mothers, migrant workers. You have invested in before- and after-school care. You recognize the problem; now it’s just a case of meeting the needs.”

Cervantes said California’s “enlightened leadership” in the area of child care has helped keep families together.

“Well over 70% of the folks we deal with are the working poor,” he said. “They are single heads of households--mothers--with an average of two children, who are making usually $12,000 to $13,000 a year. And many of these people consistently say the difference between that and going on welfare is our child-development programs.”

New Federal Funding

The two laws enacted by Congress last fall are the Child Care and Development Block Grant and the Grants to the States under Title IV-A of the Social Security Act for At-Risk Child Care.

The first--block grants--will total $2.5 billion over three years to expand and improve child-care programs. Congress intended the bulk of the money to be used to help families pay for child care.

The second bill will provide $1.5 billion, or $300 million a year for the next five years, for children whose families are at risk of going on or returning to welfare rolls. (Congress also approved another $13 billion over the next five years in tax credits for the working poor--families who earn less than $20,000 per year--and authorized a series of funding increases for Head Start which, if appropriated, says the CDF, will allow all eligible 3- and 4-year-olds and 30% of eligible 5-year-olds to participate by 1994. In 1990, Head Start served only 27% of eligible children.)

California, which already spends $350 million a year on child care, can expect to receive about $78.2 million this September from the block grant money and another $36.6 million, which is already available, from the at-risk bill.

“We will use about $70 million of the $78 million for direct service--that is, to buy child-care space for children,” said child-care specialist Jack Hailey, consultant to the California Senate Office of Research. (The rest of the money will be used for latchkey programs and state preschools, and to train providers and to improve their salaries and benefits.)

There is some disagreement about how many California children need quality care and aren’t receiving it, but the Child Development Division’s Cervantes said his best estimate is 1 million. Only 9% of the children whose families meet eligibility guidelines for state aid--about 115,000--are getting any because of the lack of adequate funding, said Cervantes.

He estimated that between 30,000 and 35,000 additional children will be helped by the new federal money.

“This infusion of additional dollars will help tremendously, but it is certainly not going to solve the problem,” said Cervantes

Hailey agreed: “This is not going to meet the need by any means, but it is a very sizeable step. And it certainly will reach a significant number of our children of working parents. It will not reach the children of what I guess you would call ‘blue collar,’ or unionized workers, who, you could make a good argument, could certainly use some subsidy.

“Even though the pool of eligible children is large, this is more than $110 million, and that is extraordinary. This compares to no other appropriation in California history.”

What would it take to solve the child-care shortage in California? Cervantes estimated that it would take an additional $1 billion to $1.5 billion to ensure that every child in the state had access to quality child care.

National Policy Sought

For years, child-care advocates have bemoaned the fact that the United States, unlike most other industrialized nations, does not have a national child-care policy. (At least one advocate has argued that the country does indeed have a policy, only it is an implicit one: Except for war, divorce, abuse or other family disaster, children are the responsibility of parents.)

Now, however, with the new federal legislation, the country appears to be on the verge of declaring one.

“This is a first step,” said Blank, who would like to see Congress enact an explicit policy that states: “Every child should have access to safe, stimulating child care, and no parent should be denied this care because of lack of adequate income.”

Added Hailey: “Until this bill, I would have said that we didn’t have one, that our policy is that child care is up to parents or states. We have had a federal income tax credit, and (former President Ronald) Reagan briefly encouraged employer support of child care, but I don’t think that amounts to a strong public policy.”

Cervantes, the eternal optimist, likes to remind himself that no one in the child-care business 50 or even 25 years ago could have imagined the kind of money now being spent on children.

“What people now realize is that investment in early childhood provides an answer to a lot of the social, economic and educational problems we see,” he said. “It is not the answer, but it is a significant part of the answer.”

The Series at a Glance

SUNDAY: Los Angeles is rated as a top city for child care, but is it really? There are critical shortages for children of certain ages. Quality is next to impossible to monitor. And, as working parents quickly discover, child care eats up a huge portion of the family budget.

TODAY: What has America done for its children lately? Last year, Congress passed major legislation appropriating millions for child care--but some say it’s only a drop in the bucket.

TUESDAY: Many companies express an interest in helping employees with child care, but very few offer the ultimate: on-site centers. The city of Los Angeles and TRW are two employers who believe children and the workplace are not incompatible.

WEDNESDAY: Every day, thousands of Los Angeles children are dropped off at private homes for family day care. Only a small percentage of homes are licensed, and no one really knows what kind of care is delivered behind closed doors.

THURSDAY: Finding child care is a desperate search for many families. But some parents in Mount Washington have joined forces to create their own parent-run child-care center. It won’t be easy.

For more information on the series, call (213) 237-6569.

What the State Spends

This year, California will spend about $350 million on child-care programs administered by the Child Development Division of the California Department of Education. Support is divided this way:

* General child development, including school districts, private agencies and family child-care homes: $218 million.

* State preschools: $38.7 million.

* Alternative payment (vouchers for care chosen by low-income parents): $34.7 million.

* Latchkey: $17.6 million.

* Campus child care (children of college students): $11 million.

* Children of migrant workers: $9.8 million.

* Resource and referral: $8.5 million.

* School-age parenting (adolescent parents): $7.2 million.

* Respite (short-term crises): $1.1 million.

* Severely handicapped children: $774,000.

* Miscellaneous: $711,000.

* Exceptional needs: $446,000.