Child Care a Key Hurdle to Clinton Welfare Plan : Reform: President’s task force is hard-pressed to design affordable plan to keep his pledge to end welfare ‘as we know it.’

Like thousands of other single mothers who support their families on welfare, Carolyn Bates is trying to do what President Clinton wants her to do--make it on her own.

The obstacles are no less formidable for their familiarity: only a high school diploma, an all-but-empty resume and a home in a poor, crime-infested part of Baltimore far from any job.

But Bates said that arranging reliable child care for her 6-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son is the biggest hurdle.

Although her on-the-job training program provides money for day care, the only licensed centers in her area that seem safe and comfortable also have long waiting lists. Relatives who agreed to watch the children were not dependable. So for now she leaves her training job early to pick up her children from school.

But she knows this will not be possible when she finds a real job.

“I want a very good job,” said Bates, 34. “Something me and my kids can live off. But if I can’t find good child care where my kids are comfortable, I’m going to wind up not working.”

“But I need to work,” she said, her voice filling with anxiety. “I don’t want to lay around getting checks. I’m not happy doing that. I am able and I want to work.”

Like Bates, many single mothers nationally cannot work because their children have nowhere to go. Her predicament, multiplied millions of times, poses a huge challenge for the policy designers assigned by President Clinton to come up with an affordable plan to keep his campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.”

With yearly per-child costs running from $3,000 to $5,000, child care is the most expensive part of welfare reform plans that require parents to work instead of staying at home.

Child care is in short supply in many poor urban neighborhoods and rural areas--especially high-quality care available at the odd hours that are typical of the bottom-of-the-ladder jobs that former welfare recipients often get.

An Administration task force is grappling with this issue as it prepares a welfare reform program for Clinton’s consideration. What appears to be its preferred approach--limiting welfare benefits to two years and then turning recipients out onto the job market--would send as many as 2 million of the youngest welfare recipients searching for child care.

The Administration’s welfare reformers said they have not estimated how many new children would need government-subsidized child care under that approach, but they expressed confidence the supply will be adequate.

“We agree that child care is one of the most important parts of the equation,” said Walter D. Broadnax, who as deputy secretary of health and human services is on the welfare reform task force. “The only problem is paying for it.”

For starters, the Administration is considering more than doubling the $1.5 billion a year that the government now spends for child care for the working poor. Administration officials are counting on private businesses, nonprofit organizations and even former welfare recipients to respond to the increased demand for child care.

Not everyone is so hopeful.

“What you’re talking about is thousands and thousands currently on waiting lists for subsidized child care slots and welfare reform is going to create thousands and thousands more,” said Rep. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). “We’re talking about a tidal wave for a system that is already stressed out.”

Wyden said the federal government will have to provide substantial new money and to regulate child care more closely.

“You can’t do welfare reform unless you do child care reform,” he said. “We’ve got to make sure the welfare reformers understand that this is too important to be short shrifted.”

Some conservatives argue that child care costs are so huge that welfare reform should be targeted to put recipients who need the least child care--those with older children--into training and jobs first.

The Administration’s current favored reform concept takes the opposite approach, targeting recipients under the age of 25. But they are the most likely to have additional children who will need child care for the longest period of time.

Federal and state assistance for child care has mushroomed in the last five years, with the federal contribution growing from $660 million in 1988 to about $1.5 billion this year. But federally subsidized care for people leaving welfare is guaranteed for only a year.

Lucretia Dean, a single mother who stopped getting welfare checks and started working last October, already sees a child care deadline looming.

As a nurse’s aide at a Baltimore nursing home, Dean earns $6.25 an hour--more than many former welfare recipients--but only on a part-time basis. She said she hopes to get a job at a local hospital before her year of transitional child care is used up. But even then, she would earn only another $1.25 an hour, and paying $85 a week for child care would still be impossible.

“If you’re just starting out, they’re going to give you minimum wage or a little more, and that doesn’t come close to covering rent, utilities, transportation, food and day care,” Dean said as she picked up her 4-year-old son from a child care center in a working-class neighborhood. “But they don’t think about that when they say: ‘Everybody get a job.’ Child care really is the biggest issue when you’re trying to get off welfare and stay off.”

Illinois’ welfare policy-makers thought they had a solution. They took another federally funded child care program--for people at risk of going on welfare because their incomes are less than 75% of the median--and targeted it at former welfare recipients whose year of transitional day care subsidies had been exhausted.

The hope was that their incomes would increase to the point where they no longer would be eligible for subsidies of any kind. But more than two-thirds of those who received extensions were still using them a year later.

“A lot of these jobs do not have career ladders that will ever enable them to afford child care,” said Michelle Piel, the manager of child care and development at the Illinois Department of Public Aid.

Now, because the maximum number of people are using the “at risk” child care program, the state is cutting former welfare recipients off after the year of transitional care. Some of those people already are back on welfare, Piel said.

In a 1990 survey of 7,000 recipients of aid to families with dependent children, a quarter of the respondents said they quit a job or school because of child care, Piel said.

In Texas, acclaimed for setting up a particularly efficient subsidized child care system, the number of children receiving care soared from fewer than 17,000 in 1989 to more than 60,000 in 1994.

Yet many working poor families still cannot get the services for which they are eligible. “There are at least as many children on waiting lists as there are in care,” said Charlotte Brandtley, director of child care for the Texas Social Services Department.

For public treasuries, it is clearly cheaper over the short term to let welfare recipients stay home with their children rather than pay for their child care while they receive training and go to work.

Staying at home, a mother of two preschool children in Illinois would receive a $367 welfare check each month. But if she took a minimum-wage job, the government would still pay her $135 a month in welfare benefits plus $600-$800 a month for child care for a year.

Cost notwithstanding, a consensus is forming among policy-makers that it is better for everybody--welfare recipients, their children and society at large--if single parents are required to work.

Welfare recipients themselves are not so sure.

“I don’t think the government should make it mandatory for a parent to put a small child in day care before the child can talk,” said Angela Candy, 33, a mother of three who is trying to make the transition from welfare to work. “What if something bad is happening to the child?”

“I feel the opposite,” said Rhonda Clark, 24, who recently started a job and went off welfare after receiving it off and on for seven years. She and her two children live across the street from a public housing project, and she says she sees the terrible influence on the children when their parents collect welfare checks every month.

“As long as a child is in the home, he or she only gets what the parent has to offer,” Clark said. “And if that parent is staying home all day watching TV and chatting with friends, that’s the only life the child knows. That’s why most of them grow up and end up on social services too.” She said children as young as 1 or 2 years old are better served by having their mothers working: “They’re at a very impressionable age. Things stick in their minds. The more exposure they get to other lifestyles the better.”