Child-Care Options: Not Enough of Them : America has to do better to help its parents cope

It’s hard to imagine that much good could come from the derailed candidacies of Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood for attorney general. The domestic lives of two accomplished women have become grist for talk shows and sound bites for television news. Bill Clinton, now four weeks into his presidency, has had great difficulty in his quest for an attorney general, and other top Justice Department offices remain unfilled.

If there is a silver lining in this dark political cloud, it is that the issue of child care is finally off the “women’s pages” and onto Page 1. The personal has again become political. Now, perhaps, the politics of child care will at last push national policy toward better and more available child care and toward a new understanding of the intersection of work and family.

OLD PROBLEMS: “Women’s issues” are often like that. Sexual harassment became Topic A when Prof. Anita Hill leveled charges against Clarence Thomas in hearings on his Supreme Court nomination. But women have endured harassment in the workplace for as long as there have been water coolers and inner offices. Yet it took the firestorm set off by Hill to produce new policies and new behavioral norms.

It’s been like that with child care in this country for entirely too long. It used to be “her” problem. Each mother, by herself, arranged for someone to care for her child, and each mother, by herself, panicked when that arrangement fell apart. Employers were not supposed to know about the messy personal details, much less tolerate or accommodate unavoidable disruptions. Children were to be seen, if at all, only in smiling desktop photographs. Those children weren’t supposed to spike a fever in the middle of the night. Nor were their baby-sitters supposed to suddenly quit. But in recent decades, child care has clearly become everyone’s problem. Fathers are increasingly involved, often deeply involved, in their children’s care arrangements. And mothers are in the workplace to stay, in ever-growing numbers.

So many women with young children now work that the patchwork of child care has revealed itself to be an increasingly threadbare and skimpy national quilt. We must finally acknowledge that there is no impenetrable barrier between work and family. Child-care arrangements and family issues inevitably permeate the office and factory, affecting workplace quality and productivity.

In this regard, the family leave bill that President Clinton signed last week is a major step forward for this country. The legislation guarantees workers in companies with more than 50 employees unpaid time off for illness or to care for a newborn or a sick relative. But beyond its specific provisions, the leave bill should signal a change in the national mind-set about how American families arrange their lives.

NO COOKIE CUTTER: Other changes in Washington and in firms across the country should follow. Government and the private sector must work harder to provide parents with more and better child-care options. That doesn’t mean that every company needs to build its own child-care center. Surveys indicate that parents prefer a range of high-quality options--family day care, live-in care, school-based programs as well as center-based care--rather than a cookie-cutter approach.

But federal and state tax codes should reward companies that provide or subsidize child care; tax laws should also recognize the true cost to parents of child care. More employers should institute work policies that accommodate families, including flex time, job sharing, part-time jobs with benefits and paid sick days for the care of children.

The failed Baird and Wood candidacies, along with the enactment of a national family leave policy, should mark a beginning, not the end, of national attention to child care.