Are They Just Playing Politics With Kids? : Families: Candidates used to kiss babies; now they’re talking about them. That’s progress, advocates say, but they still worry that the words won’t be matched by action.

Long before Murphy Brown was even pregnant, Susan Nall Bales decided to establish an alliance of nonprofit groups concerned with the alarming increase in the cost of health care, the growth of hunger and homelessness, infant morality, drug addiction, day care, parental leave and adoption--issues that touch the hearts of American families.

Under Bales’ stewardship, the Coalition for America’s Children was launched in January with about 75 organizations. By Labor Day, that number had ballooned to more than 200 groups representing 40 million Americans--a clear response, Bales contends, to the feverish discussion of the family in this year’s presidential election.

“From our perspective, the debate over family values is the best thing that ever happened to the children’s movement,” said Bales, a vice president of the National Assn. of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions.

While no one would be so indelicate as to say that advocates for children and families are exploiting the current emphasis on family values--and while fund raising appears to be less of a goal than consciousness-raising--agencies and organizations that focus on families plan to use this new attention to their advantage. There is a new momentum, Bales and others said, a new sense of clout among groups that in the past have often felt overlooked.

“What you’re seeing is that groups centered around children and families are taking the ball and running with it,” said Bales. With new fervor, these groups are testifying before Congress, meeting with community leaders and reaching out to families.

In past elections, Bales said, “all you saw from politicians was the occasional kissing of a baby. But now you’ve got both sides using our issue (families) politically, and we’re determined that if we’re here as a symbolic presence, let’s make it a substantive one as well.”

Political rhetoric prompted Barbara Reisman, executive director of the Child Care Action Committee, to draft a survey that would permit families to define the phrase that has come to embody much of the rancor between the Bush-Quayle and Clinton-Gore tickets.

“Tell the President what you think,” Reisman invited in a “family values” questionnaire that appeared in 11 national magazines, including Ladies Home Journal and Parents’ Journal. Reisman said the results will be published in four of those publications in November, “hopefully just in time to get our message to the new President.”

Reisman, who has spent more than a decade at the forefront of the debate over child care, described her poll as a “direct result” of both parties choosing the family as a battleground.

She called her family values survey “a way to try to move the debate from this rhetoric and name-calling to something that is a little more substantive and serious.”

“Family values means valuing families, and giving them the support they need to do the job,” she added.

In Baltimore, Rosalie Streett said telephone inquiries to Parent Action, the year-old “support and advocacy” organization she heads, have increased in direct proportion to the escalation of the political debate.

“We get more and more calls from parents every day, and they’re outraged,” Streett said. “They’re furious that somebody else is defining ‘family values,’ and that they’re using it in a political way.”

Streett said all the talk about the family in this year’s political arena has strongly worked to the advantage of groups like Parent Action.

“If anything, the fact that politicians are talking about the family with the same level of credibility that they use to discuss foreign affairs or the economy has made things better for groups like ours,” she said. “It’s brought the subject up, front and center--and it’s definitely causing us to mobilize.”

But Streett said that--like families themselves--many organizations that focus on the family are severely underfunded. Action may speak louder than words, she said, but words may be all they can afford.

On the other hand, some groups are so stunned by what they perceive as the hypocrisy of the political dialogue that they have not yet leaped into action, said Bernice Weissbourd of Family Focus, a nonprofit family support program in Chicago.

“I don’t think that organizations like ours have counter-attacked sufficiently,” she said.

Peter W. Forsythe, vice president and director of the program for children at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York City, said the amorphous quality of talk about families in this year’s political campaigns makes action very difficult.

“The problem for all of us, obviously, is that this is a code phrase for some very discriminatory and anti-family things,” Forsythe said. “What’s being talked about are the family values of a protected few, so it really is a code phrase for softheaded wishes about the way things were.

“It’s really a diversion,” Forsythe said. “I don’t think advocate organizations have any way of taking advantage of it.

“It’s like what happens when people talk about religion,” he added. “That’s why I’m not sure we want to engage with these guys at all. It may not be a terribly courageous position to say we have to wait until the storm passes, but that’s what I think we have to do.”

Stella Ogata, for example, said the Children’s Defense Fund has tried to steer clear of this year’s political fray.

“We haven’t gotten into the debate over family values,” Ogata said. “But we’re in a position to talk about what families need on a daily basis.”

Possibly chary because of its long-term affiliation with board member Hillary Clinton, Ogata said the fund “really hasn’t gone out and jumped on the bandwagon.”

Weissbourd agreed that some groups have held back, perhaps for fear of finding themselves on the receiving end of the verbal shrapnel of the furor over family values.

But there are signs of unification, perhaps the strongest of which comes from Bales’ group, the Coalition for America’s Children. The alliance represents such diverse organizations as the Assn. of Junior Leagues International, the American Federation of Teachers and the American Assn. of Retired Persons, which in the past might have found themselves competing for attention rather than converging for it.

First, the coalition came up with a catchy political phrase of its own, deciding to ask candidates: “Who’s for Kids, and Who’s Just Kidding?” Then, with funding from Washington, D.C.’s Benton Foundation, Bales and company announced plans for what they call the first “national satellite summit” on children’s issues.

The Sept. 24 forum will permit community leaders from 50 cities around the country to engage in what Bales termed “a very hard-edged discussion” of what the next Administration can do to make families and children a top priority. Each presidential candidate has been asked to provide a five-minute videotaped statement of specific responses to a series of questions submitted by the coalition, Bales said, and both Bush and Clinton have been asked to send their directors for children’s issues to the forum.

Bales acknowledged that a children’s issues director may not have been a fixture on every past presidential candidate’s staff, but, she added, “If they don’t have one now, they (had) better get one.

“It’s our saying, ‘Great, you guys have discovered children as politics, now let’s see what you’re going to do in terms of policies.’ ”

Bales said the outcome of so much talk about families and family values can only be positive for the groups that work in those areas.

“I think both parties are very much aware that this issue is moving forward,” she said. “And I do expect a growing awareness among candidates that this is an issue that matters in their electability.”