It’s No Reform If Children Are Harmed : Welfare: Full-time work for aid recipients will be beneficial only if decent child care is available to all.

The Clinton Administration is eagerly sketching the virtuous New Welfare Mother of the 1990s: She awakes early to drop off her youngster at day care, then zooms to Burger King. Sure, she earns just $4.35 an hour; but she has sworn off the evils of welfare. Through the sanctity of working full-time and despite her ignoble past, she rises as a born-again Calvinist.

What’s wrong with this lovely picture?

It depends on the mythical mother’s ability to find child-care or a preschool spot for her young child. Almost two-thirds of the 4.5 million single mothers on welfare have preschool-age children. But the current day-care system serves just 4 million youngsters nationwide. And “system” is an optimistic misnomer: Preschooling in America is an archipelago of little organizations in basements and churches, thinly stretched over an escalating number of children.

If President Clinton is serious about strengthening fragile families--as he signaled in his first year, implementing the Family Leave Act and cash support for working-poor parents struggling to escape welfare--he must also focus on the most vulnerable members: young children.

Policy-makers rushing to get single mothers off the dole and into jobs could inadvertently push infants and young children into unsafe, low-quality day care. Then we will undoubtedly read more stories of abuse inflicted by care-givers, youngsters left home alone because the baby-sitter didn’t show, babies handed off to “friends” of dubious child-care ability in violent neighborhoods.

Thoughtful family policy should aim to reduce welfare dependency and strengthen the quality of young children’s lives. This requires that policy-makers and children’s advocates tackle three issues as this summer’s debate over welfare reform steams up Washington:

* Dumping more young children into already strained child-care organizations will further erode quality. Any parent who has shopped around for preschool services has seen distressing disparities in quality, from unsafe conditions to unstimulating staff. We pay preschool teachers one-fourth the wages earned by public-school teachers. Low-quality preschools turn over half their staff every year. A recent review of Head Start confirmed what insiders had known for years: Rapid expansion has seriously undercut its quality.

* Poor single mothers have too little access to child care. The child-care market has barely kept pace with rising demand and the supply of quality preschools is distributed unfairly. Working-class sections of Los Angeles have just 11 preschool classes available for every 1,000 preschool-age children, compared with more than 25 classes per 1,000 in affluent suburbs like San Mateo County or Arlington, Va. Some inner-city neighborhoods and towns in Southern states have no child care at all, or the few that exist are of dismal quality.

Welfare agencies like to nudge mothers into home-based day care, since it saves money. Latino families often opt for modest home-care operations run by Spanish-speaking neighbors who are more personal. But a recent study, drawing on observations of these services in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, found that such caregivers often have no training in child development and that preschoolers show little warmth or attachment to the care providers.

Clinton’s welfare proposal does include fresh funding for child care, but far less than the leading congressional proposals. Clinton’s increase, in fact, is less than the increases proposed by President Bush in his last two years in office.

* Washington’s policies, while pro-family, are unfocused.

Clinton’s support for families has come in fits and starts, in fragments like the budget increase for Head Start, rather than building broad-based policies and consolidating programs. Entitlements increasingly go to parents who already have abundant resources. More than $1.5 billion in child-care tax credits now go to families earning more than $50,000 a year. Rather than financing welfare reform by cutting benefits for the politically powerless, like the White House plan to slash aid to elderly immigrants, money can better be saved by targeting child-care aid so it goes to poor and working-class families.

Just a year ago, the Family Leave Act--a touchstone of pro-family sentiment among presidential candidates--advanced the argument that perhaps we should change work as we know it, allowing more time for parents to be with their young children. But Washington’s prescription for impoverished single mothers goes in the opposite direction. Pushing mothers into full-time work may be beneficial to all concerned, but not if we shove their children into hazardous child care or even no care at all.