Help the Parent, but Not at Child’s Expense : Welfare: Reform must include good child care, allow for part-time work and exempt mothers of infants.

Welfare is supposed to be about aid to dependent children. You wouldn’t know it from studying the plans of the welfare reformers, which are all about changing the behavior of adults--sometimes at the expense of the children.

Welfare reform seems headed toward trading off a long-term national interest in the hope of immediate political gain. The intention is to deliver on President Clinton’s promise of ending “welfare as we know it,” but the skimpy resources available are not even enough to prepare unskilled, alienated adults for mainstream employment, much less to prepare their children for a self-sufficient adulthood.

Putting mothers to work while neglecting the needs of their children is out of sync with the nation’s overriding concern about crime and violence. Police chiefs tell of their despair in trying to control crime and violence among adolescents and young adults whose early development was neglected.

The scientific evidence documenting the early roots of crime and violence is overwhelming. A major report by a Carnegie Corp. task force, released last week at a conference featuring First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, provides the latest substantiation of the central role of early childhood. It demonstrates that society pays dearly when the fundamental building blocks of healthy development are not put in place during the infant and toddler years. The Carnegie group found that in America, early childhood has “become a time of peril and loss,” that very young children are “society’s most neglected age group,” even though “new evidence confirms that these years lay the foundation for all that follows.”

It is remarkable how much unchallenged knowledge about the importance of the early years the welfare reformers, federal and state, are managing to ignore. It is now accepted knowledge that, during their first three years, young children need familiar adults who respond to their basic needs, care for them, protect them and act in predictable ways. Remove the loving adults who make them feel special and valued and you remove the foundation for empathy, a sense of right and wrong and even a good chance to succeed in school.

In recognition of the importance of those early years, pediatricians and child development experts now urge parents to spend more time with their babies, to arrange part-time work and high-quality child care if they need to work outside the home, and not to allow marketplace demands to rob young children of parental attention.

Middle-class parents are heeding this advice: They are being selective about child care; fathers spend more time at home, and more mothers are working part-time.

But the poor mother? Under current plans for welfare reform, she would be told by her government that she must go to work or school, even if that means leaving her baby in care of dubious quality. There is no recognition of the need to achieve a reasonable balance between work expectations and parenting responsibilities. Some proposals call for mothers to leave infants as young as 12 weeks in the care of others. What are the policy-makers saying to American parents? That middle-class children need parental time and attention to get a decent start on life, but that poor children do not? That the poor mother’s role in laying a solid foundation for her children’s schooling and future prospects is inconsequential, because the rest of society cares only that she works to earn a minimum wage? That quality child care will be reserved for those with the personal resources to pay for it?

Does it make sense to be devising welfare reforms to socialize adults to the world of work while dooming a generation of children by denying them the presence of caring adults, both at home and in child-care settings?

The “family day care” that is the most widely used form of child care for young children was found by a new study released earlier this month to be “barely adequate” on average, and possibly harmful to more than a third of the children.

I do not envy the reformers operating in a financial straitjacket as they strive to make fundamental changes. Keeping people on the dole is relatively cheap. Preparing adults for work is more expensive. Helping parents to put children on the road to success in life may be even more expensive, but only using the most short-sighted calculation. If welfare reforms are to achieve improved outcomes, they must include quality child care (for current welfare recipients and the working poor), assurance that part-time work will meet the work requirement for mothers of young children, exemption of mothers of the youngest children from requirements to leave their children in the care of others and protection of families with young children from extreme deprivation.

Reforming welfare so that the journey from dependency to self-sufficiency will be made by not one but two generations is the soundest fiscal, social and moral investment that we can make for a better future for all Americans.