Child-Care Issue Frames Welfare Reform Debate

Like other parents throughout the United States, Sonya Brown scrambles every day to meet commitments for work and the care of her young child.

For Brown, 25, who juggles her $6.15-an-hour job with college courses, a government benefit pays for her 3-year-old son’s day care. Without it, she says, “I would be in big trouble.”

Rashida Walker, 32, is already struggling. “I wanted to keep my son in day care, but I couldn’t afford it,” said Walker, who was laid off in January from her job on a computer help desk. Since then she has been unemployed, and her 16-month-old remains on the waiting list for a child-care subsidy.

As Congress attempts to launch the next phase of welfare reform, the cost of child care has emerged as one of the biggest obstacles to moving ahead. Legislators remain billions of dollars apart, and the rift is complicating efforts to extend the nation’s welfare programs, which had been authorized only through last Monday until Congress passed an emergency three-month extension.

Fueling the conflict are waiting lists for child-care subsidies that have emerged in 21 states, and sharply divergent views about how to reduce them. Moreover, tougher work rules proposed for welfare recipients are expected to push up demand for child care even further, as mothers spend more time away from home as a condition of government aid.

North Carolina knows well the difficult choices faced by parents and government officials in a world where the clamor for subsidized child care exceeds the availability. As in most places, North Carolina officials give priority to families on welfare or seeking to move off the dole--meaning that other low-income households may be less fortunate. Almost 20,000 children are waiting for the benefit in North Carolina, compared with the nearly 100,000 who already get it.

“The goal is to get that [welfare] client to work,” explained Peggy Ball, director of the North Carolina Division of Child Development in Raleigh. “And they can’t work without child care.”

With little fanfare, demand for child-care aid has skyrocketed, and child care now costs taxpayers more than $10 billion a year. A growing number of states spend more on child care than on welfare, a remarkable shift in just the last five years.

“It’s been a huge change, and it’s been virtually beneath the surface,” said Mark H. Greenberg, director of policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington.

Child-care subsidies involve not only welfare recipients, but also the working poor and even families closer to middle-class income levels. Households far above the poverty line may qualify for subsidies, with an estimated 15 million children technically eligible, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy. Of these, just 2.2 million are getting the aid.

California’s waiting list for subsidized care has reached 280,000 children. In Florida, 40,000 are waiting.

Without subsidies, which typically vary according to household income, parents may pay child-care centers $4,000 to $10,000 a year. The financial burden pushes many to seek cheaper alternatives with relatives, neighbors or other in-home providers.

Current federal funding contains “plenty of money” for welfare families and the working poor, said Wade F. Horn, assistant secretary for children and families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“If the taxpayers’ pockets were bottomless, we’d give everybody a subsidy,” Horn said in an interview. “But that’s not the way the real world works.”

In the real world of North Carolina, people closely tied to the issue insist that a large number of low-income families are not getting the child care they need.

Of the 95,562 children getting subsidized care in North Carolina, more than 8 in 10 come from families earning less than $25,000 a year.

Officials believe that the waiting list, which recently numbered 19,930, mirrors that same modest level of income. But they say the waiting list reflects only a fragment of the overall demand. People often quit waiting out of frustration, perhaps also giving up the search for work, and some never bother to put their children’s names on it in the first place.

“The waiting list is the part of the iceberg that you see above the water,” said Ball, the state’s top child-care official.

Walker would be the first to agree. She and her son live in a trailer with her 91-year-old grandmother. She has survived on unemployment insurance since getting laid off, but no longer can afford the $105 a week she used to pay her son’s day-care provider.

Walker symbolizes a rarely discussed aspect of welfare reform: Households that have avoided welfare are typically given lower priority for child care.

“There are people out there that don’t want to work, and they’re just getting help left and right,” Walker said.

“When it comes to someone who’s been working and paying taxes, there’s no help for them. It is very unfair.”

Some advocate child care for the nonwelfare population as a way to keep low-income households from slipping onto the rolls of cash assistance if they run into a major problem.

Anna Mercer McLean, director of the Community School for People Under Six--a cheerful, red-brick center on a hilltop in Chapel Hill--says she sometimes sees a disturbing chain of events: First, a parent loses a job. Then she loses child care. Then it becomes harder to put the pieces back in place.

“How do you expect a parent to get their job back when they’ve lost their child care?” she asked.

Ball says officials should view child care as part of the infrastructure of the state economy, a crucial nutrient for healthy, growing companies. Employers, she said, “move to North Carolina and ask, is there a good water system? Is there a good electrical utility? They look at the schools. The other piece is whether there’s sufficient child care for their employees.”

Adding heat to the national debate is the reality that states across the country are suffering the fiscal fallout of a weak economy, and a growing number are looking for ways to curb child-care costs.

Iowa, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Mexico and West Virginia are among the states that have imposed a variety of cost-saving measures on their child-care efforts, with proposed restrictions being considered in various other states, according to a recent report by the Children’s Defense Fund. Waiting lists have been expanding in Florida, Indiana, Texas and Tennessee, it noted.

“Low-income working families--those families working hard to stay off of welfare--have suffered the most from cuts in state child-care programs,” according to the advocacy group.

In North Carolina, the picture is mixed: Lawmakers cut one early childhood program but sought to expand others. They recently added $15 million to help those on the waiting list and a larger amount for at-risk 4-year-olds. “Now we look to the federal level to see if there are going to be additional funds,” said Ball, who is closely following proposals that would increase work requirements for parents on welfare.

In Washington, the House and Senate are billions of dollars apart on what to spend on child care.

This year, the House passed a welfare bill that would add $1 billion in mandatory funding for child care over the next five years.

The Senate Finance Committee later approved its own welfare bill, with a $5.5-billion increase for mandatory child-care spending over the same period. In a noteworthy move, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) opposed the bill of the Democrat-controlled committee, declaring that he wanted to raise the dollar figure for child care even more.

As Congress struggles to resolve the issue, the matter of waiting lists--and those who don’t even bother to leave their names--will be mentioned frequently. “If there’s not an infusion of new child-care money this year, you’re leaving all these families in the lurch,” said Helen Blank, director of child care at the Children’s Defense Fund.

Still, those who counsel restraint in spending insist that such fears are overblown and that those truly in need will be taken care of.

“I’m not saying that a family that makes $28,000 a year could not use some help in accessing child care,” the HHS’ Horn said. But, he added, “The fact of the matter is, when you have a budget, there are finite resources, and you have to set priorities.”

But he conceded that those seeking more child-care spending had become a significant political force. “We understand that this is a legislative process,” he said, “and at the end of the day there’s probably going to be a higher [budget] number for child care.”