A Less Taxing Approach to Day Care?

At a time when President Clinton is pressing for new ways to subsidize day care for working families, a group of Republican lawmakers is daring to ask: What if Americans didn’t have to put their kids in day care?

Clinton has proposed a $21.7-billion, five-year plan to give businesses tax breaks for helping employees with child care. It also provides federal aid to improve day-care quality and extend federal day-care subsidies to a million more children.

These Republicans are proposing something quite different: They would give tax breaks to families in which one parent goes without an income and instead does what many mothers tell pollsters they would do if only they could afford it--stay home with the kids. The size and nature of the tax breaks have yet to be determined.

“We all know, if it’s possible, that the best possible care is the care of a mom or dad or a grandmother or grandfather or a relative,” said Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), one of the conservative lawmakers who is leading the countercharge to Clinton’s initiative.

Critics of the Republican approach argue that day-care centers should be improved, not undermined, by government policy. And they charge that Republicans are pitting stay-at-home parents against parents in the work force in an unseemly fight about who is best and who deserves the government’s help.

The debate comes as the proportion of mothers of infants and toddlers in the paid work force has grown from 25% in 1965 to 65% at last count. And the 1996 federal welfare reform law is adding to the pressure for more day care by requiring most public aid recipients to work.

At the same time, the day-care industry--from imported au pairs to family day-care homes and bustling centers--faces withering criticism from all directions.

Avalanche of Initiatives at State, Federal Levels

Concerns about day care’s quality and availability have spurred an unprecedented flurry of state and federal initiatives, including the president’s. In Congress alone, close to 50 bills touch on the issue of child care, and others are still being drafted.

In addition, new research on the brain has prompted questions among some influential academic experts about the wisdom of placing very young children in institutionalized day care. Other academics and children’s advocates, citing the same findings, have countered that it has never been more important to lavish both the government’s money and its attention on the care of children whose parents work.

Another key study cited by both sides is a landmark 1995 survey that found that all but 14% of day-care centers deliver care that ranges from mediocre to miserable.

Children’s advocates use the results to bolster arguments that day care must be improved. That message is at the heart of Clinton’s package and the dozens of Democratic initiatives proposed in the past year.

Conservative groups and a small but growing number of social scientists, however, contend that the 1995 study shows that organized day care is so bad that it should be avoided whenever possible.

Both sides also see ammunition for their arguments in the preliminary results of a six-year study of day care by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Now in its fourth year, the effort is the most comprehensive national study to date of day care and its effects.

Last year, researchers in the study reported that children in the care of someone other than their mother suffered no disadvantage in cognitive or linguistic development. And unless a mother is herself insensitive to her child’s needs, the study found that “nonmaternal care” does not negatively affect a child’s attachment to her mother.

But Jay Belsky, a professor of human development and family studies at Penn State and one of the principal investigators for the study, recently testified at Coats’ Senate hearing that the study is raising many red flags.

By a child’s second year, researchers found that children who had spent long hours in the care of someone other than their mothers exhibited slightly less affection toward their mothers. And mothers of such children, in turn, were found to be slightly more negative toward their children and less sensitive to their needs.

Beyond that, the researchers found that the mother-child relationship suffered measurably in situations in which a mother’s sensitivity to her child was low to begin with and the child spent more than 10 hours a week in “nonmaternal” care--or any time at all in poor or unstable care.

Such findings, Belsky said, suggest that those assessing the effects of day care should tread warily until researchers have a better fix on what becomes of young children left in the care of others.

“It makes sense to be cautious about the adoption of public policies that will encourage more and more families to rely upon more and more child care--much of it of questionable quality--at younger and younger ages,” Belsky said.

At the same hearing, Harvard psychiatrist Armand M. Nicholi Jr. testified that parental absence “can exert a profound influence on a child’s emotional health.”

“Why has our society almost totally ignored this research? The answer is the same reason society ignored for scores of years sound data on the adverse effects of cigarette smoke. The facts demand a change in our lifestyle that we simply do not want to change--or have difficulty changing.”

But to many Democrats and child-care activists, the maternal care versus day care debate not only fails to reflect reality but also politically stacks the deck to favor maternal care.

“Many of us feel it in our hearts and stomachs: It’s really the right thing for very young children to be home with their mother or someone who will love them like crazy,” said Faith Wohl, president of the Child Care Action Campaign.

Need for Care Won’t Go Away

But no matter how much the federal government encourages mothers to stay at home, Wohl said, millions of children will still need day care either because they have a single parent who must work (one-third of children are now born outside of marriage) or because they have two parents who still want or need to work.

“The experts sometimes do us a disservice because they hold up a standard that can’t be met,” she said. “I want what’s best for children under the circumstances we have to deal with in 1998.”

Today, the Census Bureau says, only 17% of American households conform to the traditional model of a wage-earner dad, a stay-at-home mom and one or more kids.

The Children’s Defense Fund says one of every three children whose mother works is poor or would be poor if she didn’t work.

Ironically, conservatives led the charge for enactment of a law that arguably does more than any recent governmental action to drive children into day care. The 1996 welfare reform law requires welfare recipients--mostly single parents with young children at home--to work, even if their children are as young as 12 weeks old.

Whether women work because they have to or want to, their employment has become not only a key strut in the nation’s economic superstructure but also an indispensable pillar of family economic stability. According to a 1995 survey conducted for the Whirlpool Foundation, 55% of working mothers provided half or more of their family’s income.

“This is part of the new definition of what it is to be a mother,” Wohl said. “It’s not just hugs and kisses and Band-Aids on knees, it’s about providing economic security for their families.”

And none of that even addresses the psychological rewards that mothers may gain from work. Researchers in the early 1980s argued that the young children of working mothers may benefit when their mothers are employed in jobs that raise their self-esteem.

That kind of reasoning reminds Danielle Crittenden, one of the founders of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum, of the argument in vogue among psychologists 20 years ago that children were better off with divorced parents than with two parents living together unhappily.

A nation as rich as the United States, Crittenden said, should be able to do better. “Why, in the space of a generation, have we come to consider taking care of your own kids--even if it’s just for the few short years before they are in school--as a perk of the rich, like yachting?”

Like many congressional Republicans, Crittenden asserts that new mothers have been driven into the labor force by the overall burden of taxes on American families and by specific benefits that federal and state laws parcel out to two-income families who incur child-care expenses. But she also takes to task feminist groups, day-care advocates and politicians who make a virtue of mothers’ paid work, whatever its cost to young children.

Republicans may be tapping into profound misgivings that the American public feels about institutionalized day care. In a recent nationwide poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 74% of those surveyed agreed with the statement: “Too many children are being raised in day-care centers these days.”

“Almost any time something significant happens about child care, this underlying ambivalence we feel about mothers in the workplace comes pouring out,” Wohl said. “Every time there’s been a crisis point, out comes all of that stuff we haven’t resolved yet. You begin to wonder if we ever will resolve it.”

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Working Mothers

These are the percentages of mothers with children younger than 3 and with children younger than 6 who were in the work force in various years.

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Children under 3 Children under 6 1997 61.8% 65.0% 1996 59.0% 62.3% 1995 58.7% 62.3% 1994 57.1% 60.3% 1993 53.9% 57.9% 1992 54.5% 58.0% 1991 54.5% 58.4% 1990 53.6% 58.2% 1989 52.4% 56.7% 1988 52.4% 56.1% 1987 52.9% 56.7% 1986 50.8% 54.4% 1985 49.5% 53.5% 1984 47.7% 52.1% 1983 46.0% 50.5% 1982 45.6% 49.9% 1981 44.3% 48.9% 1980 41.9% 46.8% 1979 40.9% 45.4% 1978 39.1% 43.7% 1977 35.1% 40.9% 1976 33.8% 39.8% 1975 34.1% 38.8%

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Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics