Child Care Needs for Families

The stark contrast of your Feb. 6 front page highlights an issue that the news media have ignored: that of finding decent, legal child care. Alongside a picture of President Clinton singing the long-awaited family leave bill was your article describing the hiring of illegal immigrants as nannies by President Clinton’s first two choices for attorney general--Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood. While hailing the new right of American parents to take time off to be with their newborns, we are ignoring the real issue facing these two women--the difficulty of finding legal child care. These women did what they found necessary to attain their professional status. Perhaps if the men inside the Washington beltway were subjected to the same scrutiny these women have been, we would find that hiring illegal immigrants and neglecting to pay taxes on child care workers are more common than we believe.

The majority of American women with young children are in the work force at least part-time. All of these women struggle with finding, keeping and affording decent care for their children while they work. For those families requiring in-home care due to long working hours, the task is even more difficult. In my experience, child care is a woman’s issue with decisions about child care rarely made by men. Perhaps rather than focusing on the hiring of illegal immigrants for child care, we as a country should be focusing on creating new safe, affordable and legal child care alternatives for the millions of families in need of such care.

SHARON L. EDELSTEIN

San Diego