Notoriety Puts Focus on Crisis of Child Care

Corporate counsel Zoe Baird, who thought she’d be starring as the nation’s first woman attorney general, is back at her old job now. She was dropped from the cast of the Clinton Administration over complaints that she didn’t understand the importance of hiring the right help.

Federal Judge Kimba Wood, the understudy, never even got to say her lines. “Yes, Senator, I realize that my child might come down with a bloody nose while I’m in a Cabinet meeting. I’ll wear a beeper.”

And now Janet Reno, the Miami prosecutor with a reputation for being scrupulously, almost eccentrically law-abiding, looks like a shoo-in at last. Gentlemen, ready the marquee:

She’s tough. She wins elections. Odds are good that she can even dunk a basketball through a hoop. She’s been immortalized in rap.

She is single, with no kids.

So, oh boy, we’ve stopped talking about “the Zoe Baird problem,” which, of course, is not really Zoe’s problem anymore. Zoe makes more than a half million dollars a year.

And Zoe, remember, didn’t even know she had a problem until the radio call-in crowd vociferously pointed it out. (Which, in turn, had the desired trickle-up effect at the White House and on Capitol Hill.)

Now this is yesterday’s news. Give it a few months, and Zoe will be able to shop at her local gourmet grocery store without turning heads. I’ll bet that reporters have even stopped hounding her and her neighbors by now.

In other words, “the Zoe Baird problem” looks to be a flash in the pan.

For Zoe, that is. And for Kimba. And even, in a way, for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown--who, enlightened about one of Zoe’s problems, started paying Social Security taxes on the woman who cleans his home.

This leaves the rest of us to muddle on, emphasis on muddle , synonymous with bungle, but hoping for the best.

Now smile, before you burst into tears.

So is that it? Must we wait for another Celebrity With a Problem before the mere mortals among us can get some attention paid to our child-care problems as well?

Must it always take a high-profile case to focus people, and our government, on the everyday calamities that never make the news? And even then, we must realize that notoriety is no guarantee of any long-term fix.

Think of Chicago’s “home alone” case of child abandonment, or the 12-year-old Florida boy who divorced his parents, or New York’s Katie Beers, abused and held captive in an underground cell by a “family friend.”

These and other domestic horror stories surface from time to time, and then the larger issues they bring with them tend to “disappear” behind America’s closed doors. We nuclear-family types think of these so-called family issues in very limiting, private terms.

This is outdated, and dangerous too.

Our national child-care crisis isn’t just about the Zoe Bairds. It’s about families--usually moms--forced to patch together child-care arrangements with the fewest risks. Benefits would be nice, of course, but we take what we can get.

This is what passes for “choice.”

Then we tsk-tsk when a child is hurt or neglected at an unlicensed day-care center (bad choice), or even at a licensed one (bad luck), seeing as how state governments freely admit that they don’t have the money, or often the will, to inspect them all (bad policy).

The message could not be more clear. This is not the ‘50s anymore. For the first time in our national history, most mothers with preschool children are working outside the home.

And they are needed there, as well.

So let’s get real. Employers know that parents, usually mothers, miss work on account of their kids. Other times the absences may be more mental: “Oh, God, I hope everything’s OK at home. Why isn’t anybody picking up the phone?”

The more pragmatic companies try to help where they can. They subsidize day care for their employees, they offer flexible working hours, they have a heart. They are the exceptions to the rule.

Still, it’s been more than 20 years since Congress passed a comprehensive child-care bill, and even so, the point is moot. President Nixon vetoed it.

Since the airing of “the Zoe Baird problem,” 14 prominent child-care advocates have written to President Clinton urging him to appoint a high-level task force on the economics of child-care, similar to the one he put together to dig us out of the health care morass.

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

I like the pitch. It sounds very Clintonesque. It sounds like a good start.

We should keep talking about “the Zoe Baird problem,” only we can drop that name. Then we should do something that works for our children first. The rest should trickle down from there.