Child Care to Get Brief Spotlight at a Crucial Time
In the hierarchy of American occupations, it falls somewhere between hamburger flipper and truck driver.
With a median income of $260 per week and meager if any benefits, the average child-care worker toils in an industry widely viewed as requiring few skills and minimal training, little continuity and scant oversight.
But those who teach and care for small children will have their day at the White House today as President Clinton convenes the first-of-its-kind child-care meeting. Clinton’s conference spotlights the industry at a time of both dramatic growth and deep concern--for its workers, its standards and its product.
It will not, as they say at the changing table, be a pretty sight.
Every year, more than one in three child-care workers--as many as half when the economy is humming--quit their jobs and go elsewhere in search of better working conditions or higher pay. That’s a turnover rate almost three times that of truck drivers--another low-skill occupation, but one that commands far better wages than child care. In a typical light manufacturing plant, managers would panic if they had to contend with a rate of worker replacement that high.
In an industry whose finished product is young minds, however, it’s an even scarier proposition. If small children are to grow up to be happy and secure adults, a mounting body of research underscores the importance of consistent supervision by adults attentive to their needs. Yet large numbers of child-care workers live in or at the edge of poverty, holding down more than one job, juggling children of their own and scraping to make ends meet.
“If I had to live off this with my kids, I couldn’t make it,” said 42-year-old Marquita Bonner, who owns a small nonprofit day-care center in Compton called The Learning Tree. “And my workers, they’re making minimum wage. I know they deserve more. I know they’re worth more. But I can’t afford more. I try to give them little incentives to keep them but it’s just a hardship, it really is.”
Bonner believes that she is giving parents good value for their $65 per week ($75 for toddlers). But as recently as last week, she told herself: “Maybe I’m in the wrong business.”
For legions of working Americans, including many middle-class couples with two incomes, reliance on this sprawling industry is a daily fact of life.
More than 12 million children under 6--representing 60% of American preschoolers and half of all infants--are in the care of someone other than their parents for a large portion of their day. With about 4 million welfare-dependent parents being pushed into the work force, the number of children in child care could near 20 million in the next few years.
One of Nation’s Biggest Growth Industries
As a result, child care ranks as one of the nation’s biggest growth industries. Between now and 2005, the number of jobs it provides is expected to grow by 33%, more than twice the average rate of growth of the overall work force. Many fear that the dramatic growth could further erode quality control in an already-beleaguered industry.
As Clinton convenes his White House conference today, experts say that the industry cries out for more attention, more money and more uniform oversight. But in an era of strict federal spending limits and resurgent states’ rights, the president and his advisors really have only one of those powers--high-level attention--to wield.
Hard-pressed to push for expansive new federal spending and regulation, Clinton can do little more than exhort states to do the right thing by children, laying down markers for quality care, pointing to innovative new programs and creating incentives for improving and expanding child care.
In doing so, he has his work cut out. The child-care industry is as uneven in quality as it is vast, ranging from sparkling new company-subsidized day-care centers to squalid tenement apartments in which a single woman takes in neighborhood children.
The last authoritative count (taken in 1990, and the industry has grown steadily since) showed 80,000 American day-care centers serving nearly 5 million children and as many as 1.2 million family day-care providers operating from homes.
Beyond that, an estimated one in three parents leave their children in the care of a friend or relative--an inexpensive and almost completely unregulated form of care that is expected to grow as millions of poor women leave home for work.
And much of the nation’s child care--from high-priced ventures to low-cost alternatives--is not very good.
In an oft-cited 1995 study, researchers judging the quality of family-run day-care centers in four states found that 86% provided care below the level considered good. Roughly three-quarters were ranked as mediocre, and 12% provided “less than minimal” care.
For those parents who leave their children in the care of relatives or friends, the picture is even grimmer: A 1994 study found that almost 70% of situations involving friends or relatives provided care characterized as “potentially harmful to children’s growth.” Only 1% were judged to be “potentially enhancing.”
“Our children are being raised in pumpkin seats,” said 39-year-old Patti Gleason, a 17-year “warhorse” of the child-care industry who oversees six nonprofit sites in southwestern Ohio. “They’re carried in in their car seats and set down and they sit in that pumpkin seat until they scream. . . . Parents either think that’s OK, or they just don’t want to admit to themselves what’s happening, because they couldn’t live with themselves if they did.”
Physical, Intellectual Risks to Poor Care
In many cases, children could pay dearly for inadequate care--with injuries, increased illnesses or lower levels of intellectual and emotional growth than might have been achieved in better settings.
But even mediocre care does not come cheaply. According to a 1995 Census report, families living at or near the poverty line pay an average of 25% of their income for child care. Middle-class families earning up to $36,000 spend on average 12% of their income on child care.
As might be expected, affluent Americans tend to command good-quality child care. More unexpectedly, researchers have found that the very poor, because of their access to federally funded programs such as Head Start, tend to get pretty good child care as well.
Between these economic extremes, a family’s hefty investment is no assurance of high quality. As First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton told an audience recently, “it is difficult to think of a consumer situation in America where so many people are paying so much and too often getting so little.”
To child-care advocates and to many of the nation’s most dedicated child-care workers, the reason for the industry’s shortcomings is simple: Its consumers--parents, communities and the country as a whole--may passionately love their children and want the best for them but they do not always know what the best is. And when faced with competing priorities, many are just not willing to pay for it.
That’s in spite of findings which indicate that the cost of delivering good child care is only about $10 more per week per child than the cost of delivering poor child care. And in spite of consistent evidence showing that two factors--teacher training and high ratios of care-givers to children--are the best assurances of quality.
Forty-one states require no training for child-care workers. As a result, many see the kind of training or degrees that experts believe are so key to quality day care as a costly and unnecessary frill.
“People treat you like someone who has no skills. They see you like a housekeeper,” said Mirielle Belizaire, who spends 11 hours a day caring for four infants in her Charlotte, N.C., home and, in her spare time, is pursuing an associate’s degree in early childhood development. “Some even say your job is easy. They don’t know.”
To be sure, the federal government will spend $14 billion over the next six years to help states provide child care for the nation’s poor--an unprecedented investment prompted by the bid to put welfare-dependent parents to work. But the welfare reform bill that provided those funds would allow states to spend as little as 4% of their share to ensure and enhance the quality of child care. That’s down from a past practice of requiring 25% of such funds to go toward quality assurance.
Fear That Reform Will Relax Standards
What child-care advocates fear is that states scrambling to meet daunting new demands for child care from their welfare populations will relax standards for day-care centers and family-based child care. They point to Wisconsin, which has created a new class of “provisional” caregivers who do not have to meet training requirements but who will charge half as much as accredited caregivers. And they cite states such as Connecticut and Michigan, where funds for the inspection of centers and the enforcement of standards have been deeply cut.
“There’s a basic national flaw in our thinking,” said Marcy Whitebook, co-director of the National Center for the Early Childhood Workforce. “On one hand, we just keep piling up information that the early years are really important, that what happens then determines the rest of children’s lives. But we basically do not value the job of taking care of children. There’s a disconnect between what we know children need and the kind of work environment we know we need for children.”
But in many states, the challenge of meeting rising child-care demands has helped spawn a flurry of innovation, and those models are expected to dominate the agenda at this week’s White House meeting.
Rhode Island, for instance, has begun to offer health benefits to child-care workers who meet licensing standards, offering an attractive incentive to seek accreditation and helping day-care centers draw and retain more workers.
Colorado allows citizens to check a box on their income tax forms that automatically funnels part of their taxes to a program called the Quality Care Improvement Fund. The fund provides grants to Colorado child-care providers wishing to expand or improve their services.
California has one of the nation’s best-established mentoring programs. Started as a small pilot in 1991, the California Early Childhood Mentor Program has expanded statewide with federal funds and enlists experienced preschool teachers in the training of novice caregivers. The program not only boosts mentors’ earnings by offering them a $1,000 stipend but has increased professionalism and driven down job departures among both mentors and the newcomers they help train.
One of the most promising programs began in North Carolina in 1990, at a time when turnover rates among child-care workers ran about 40% per year. The program, called Teacher Education and Compensation Helps, provides scholarships for more than 2,000 North Carolina child-care workers every year to pursue or continue their training in child development and education.
