THE CRISIS IN CHILD CARE : A Self-Defeating Cycle? : Cheap Fixes Undermine the System

Barbara Willer can’t forget what a federal policy maker once said about increased funding for child care: “We can’t afford a Cadillac system.”

Child-care advocates such as Willer, director of public affairs for the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children, believe many government officials don’t set their sights much higher than rent a wreck. And they believe an attitude of “the cheaper the better to get us all through this” has crippled America’s response to its child-care crisis over the last three decades. Even the working affluent struggle with the issue, as illuminated in recent weeks by Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, two mothers who might have been the nation’s first female attorney general were it not for their child-care arrangements.

At the root of the crisis, the advocates see a notorious undervaluing of child care, which contributes to a cycle of low wages, poor quality, illegal arrangements, and unfair burdens on working women.

Many Americans still believe that child care is a problem to be worked out by individuals--usually women--and see child-care providers as “unskilled” workers whose services do not merit professional salaries.

In addition, many find it difficult to put a value on activities that parents have basically done every day for free.

“Unlike food or housing, child care is a necessity that has not traditionally been paid for,” said Carol Stevenson in a 1993 report for the San Francisco-based Child Care Law Center. “Until recent years, it was provided for the most part by female members of a household without an exchange of money.”

But now, for the first time in history, a majority of mothers with preschool-age children are working outside the home, according to the 1990 Census. In California, 60% of all children are being raised in dual-earner or single-working parent families.

While upper- and lower-working class women have long traditions of hiring other women to care for their children, the situation is relatively new to the middle class. And this group is unsure how to deal with the expense, Stevenson noted.

“When a family calculates what it can afford to pay for child care, the figure is still measured most often against the earnings of the mother . . . whether it is ‘worth it’ for her to work outside the home,” Stevenson said in the report, “Caring for the Future: Meeting California’s Child Care Challenges.”

Women’s earnings are still only 71% of men’s, Stevenson said, and this calculation distorts what couples think they can afford to pay for child care. If child-care workers continue to be paid out of women’s salaries, “we’re never going to get out of this cycle.”

“It’s all fallen on women’s shoulders to figure out how to take care of it all by themselves,” said UC Davis historian Ruth Rosen. “Everybody I know is spread thin, exhausted, never getting enough sleep, never doing their job appropriately.”

Yet for all working parents, good child care has become the bridge to a functional life. Said Rosen, “It is the issue that is central to everybody’s working life. . . . You can’t even begin to have competent or adequate workers if they’re wondering all day long if the children are all right. It makes every day either an intolerable nightmare or a well-functioning day . . . .”

The Child Care Law Center report estimates that the parents of 1 million children in California cannot find adequate child care. Instead, the parents use a patch-work system of neighbors and relatives and a large number work shift jobs, so they can trade off child care, a practice known as serial parenting.

Perhaps the most obvious sign that child care is undervalued are the poverty-level wages earned by many child care workers. A 1989 study by the Berkeley-based Child Care Employee Project found that the average worker in a U.S. child care center earned $5.35 an hour for a 35-hour week--which translates into annual earnings of only $9,737.

“There hasn’t been much improvement since then,” said UCLA day care researcher Carollee Howes, who worked on the Child Care Employee Project study.

A more recent report for the U.S. Department of Education confirmed that real earnings for child-care teachers and family day-care providers had decreased by more than 25% since the mid 1970s. “We do know that in child-care centers where we have the best data on salaries, people are earning poverty-level wages and having advanced degrees doesn’t help much,” Howes said.

What’s more, low salaries have been linked with high turnover rates and can often relate to quality, Howes said.

Her research in California leads her to conclude that the average care in child-care centers is adequate, but not good. “Children aren’t going to get hurt, but it’s not going to do anything positive for them. There’s plenty of research that says it can be positive, so if it’s only adequate, we’re missing something.”

The quality of family day care--where care is provided in a private home--is harder to get a handle on, Howes said. “It ranges from absolutely terrible to absolutely wonderful. On average, it comes in a little lower than center care.”

There is little research on nannies, an area that Howe called “the large unknown.”

“I suspect again you have extremes, plus with in-home care, you have the other notion that these care-givers are something like servants, so you have class issues there.”

Advocates say the key to solving the child-care crisis is a serious reassessment of the value and importance of child care. They point to the Department of Labor, which lists in-home providers and child-care workers as “unskilled,” while a preschool teacher is a “skilled” professional.

Child-care workers vary widely in background and experience, but in fact, they all may wind up zipping up jackets and taking temperatures, as well as participating in the more sophisticated tasks of social stimulation, and the promotion of learning through language play and exploration.

Said Howes: “The work of taking care of children is almost by definition skilled if you do it well.”

Sometimes tedious tasks such as feeding, putting a child down for a nap, waking a child up, saying goodby to parents and greeting them when they return “all can be done in ways that enhance a child’s sense of security and well-being,” Howes said.

“Children require an immense amount of patience,” Rosen said. “(They) ask the most extraordinary questions. It requires an amazing amount of thoughtfulness to answer. The skills in raising moral character and intellectual potential are enormous.”

Said Willer: “One of the reasons it’s so difficult to appreciate is that when it’s done well, it looks so easy.”

Advocates say that in the past, a large roadblock to federal funding for child care has been the belief that the care of children is primarily a woman’s responsibility.

In 1970, a comprehensive child-care bill passed Congress but was vetoed by President Nixon, on the grounds that “mothers should take care of their children, government has no business being involved in family life,” Rosen said. “After that, no one dared try it again for a long time.”

Lately, however, more attention has been directed to children’s programs, through the 1990 Child Care and Development Block Grant, expansion of Head Start programs and this month, the Family and Medical Leave Act which provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to new parents, among others.

But much of the progress in child care has been made through funding of early education programs because they are not as “value laden” as child care, Stevenson said.

To assume that child care is not educational when it helps mothers to work is really “a very short-sighted decision,” Willer said.

In the aftermath of the attorney general search, 14 prominent child-care advocates wrote President Bill Clinton last Friday urging him to appoint a task force on the economics of child care similar to the health care group headed by his wife.

The advocates suggest the task force study how to create a supply of quality child care; how to bridge the gap between what quality costs and what parents can afford to pay; and how to make child care a career that people can afford to pursue and to “bring the underground work force above ground.”

The letter notes that child-care centers and in-home arrangements are already providing the early education for most of America’s young children, in addition to Head Start programs and preschools.

The writers, from organizations such as the Families and Work Institute, the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children, Parent Action, and the Child Care Action Campaign, previously requested full funding of Head Start as well as increased funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant.

“We understand that there are no simple solutions to these problems,” the letter states. “But we also know that we can no longer afford to ignore them.”

COMING NEXT

The bad news about the child-care crisis is that obeying the law is not always easy. If you hire domestic help through an agency--or on your own--you can’t always be sure the required paperwork is authentic. The good news is that something positive may yet come from the spectacle of a government in complete disarray over the problem of illegal domestic employees. At least the subject was opened for discussion, and there are tentative proposals for reform.