Document 32: "Plank 5: Child Care," from National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women's Conference (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 27-29.
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PLANK 5
CHILD CARE
The Federal Government should assume a major role in directing and providing comprehensive, voluntary, flexible-hour, bias-free, non-sexist, quality child care and developmental programs, including child care facilities for Federal employees, and should request and support adequate legislation and funding for these programs.
Federally funded child care and developmental programs should have low-cost, ability-to-pay fee schedules that make these services accessible to all who need them, regardless of income, and should provide for parent participation in their operation.
Legislation should make special provision for child care facilities for rural and migrant worker families.
Labor and management should be encouraged to negotiate child care programs in their collective bargaining agreements.
Education for parenthood programs should be improved and expanded by local and State school boards, with technical assistance and experimental programs provided by the Federal Government.
City, county, and/or State networks should be established to provide parents with hotline consumer information on child care, referrals, and follow-up evaluations of all listed caregivers.
Background:
"More than two of every five mothers of preschoolers
are at work or looking for work."
Nearly half of all the children in the country—more than 28 million under 18—had mothers working outside the home in 1976. More than six million of these children were younger than six years old. At least 4 1/2 million had mothers who were single, separated, divorced, or widowed heads of families, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics.
For millions of working parents, for mothers who are in school or in job-training programs, for women who are ill and unable to care for their young children on a round- the-clock basis, access to child care facilities is of prime importance. The crucial issue for them is not whether there should be child care but how to achieve good quality child care at prices that parents can afford to pay.
Working mothers Today, more mothers than ever before are working, and their numbers increase every year. The majority of American mothers now enter the labor force when their children are of school age. More than two out of every five mothers of pre-schoolers are at work or looking for work.
Most mothers work outside the home because they need the money. A large number of American families need two incomes to get along. In more than nine million families with two working parents, the husband earns less than $10,000 a year, and half of these families would fall below the poverty level without a second income.
A woman who is the sole support of her children has an even greater burden. If she earns the national median income for women of $130 a week before taxes, or $6,700 annually, she will find many child care services priced beyond her reach.
Who provides child care? For most working parents, child care is makeshift, informal, unavailable, or prohibitively expensive. Many children are cared for at home by a relative, neighbor, or nonrelated babysitter. Husbands and wives frequently work different shifts so that they can share child care responsibility, with the result that they have little time to spend together. One-fourth of all children of working parents, including some four million children under 14, were grouped in the category "arrangements unknown," according to Joseph H. Reid, executive director of the Child Welfare League, in testimony before a joint congressional hearing in 1975. Among this group were almost two million 7-to-13 year-old "latch-key children" who cared for themselves until a parent came home from work.
The most accessible type of care outside the home is family day care provided in private homes where women take in groups of children. Only 10 percent of such homes are licensed. Although many provide a satisfactory level of care in a personal setting, they are unregulated, and many caregivers have no formal training.
Nursery schools serve a small but growing number of children, though usually only for part of the day. (Of the pre-schoolers enrolled 11 years ago, 18 percent had working mothers. That percent doubled by 1976.) There are also parent cooperatives in which fathers and mothers share duties as caregivers for a specified number of hours, but this involvement is impractical when both parents work during the day.
About 18,000 day care centers provide care for only about two percent of the children of working mothers. Yet mothers surveyed in 1971 by the National Council of Jewish Women preferred this type of care to any other because of the stable environment and the learning opportunities for their children.
Indeed, more mothers not in the labor force are also recognizing the value of part-time educational setting away from a child's home. Twenty-nine percent of the 3-and 4-year-olds in private nursery schools in 1976 had mothers working only at home, compared with only 12 percent in 1967.
Although there are some nonprofit child care centers supported by charitable organizations or by public funds (care for 250,000 children is
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Child care at the parents' workplace received a great deal of publicity in the late 1960's, but such programs are very few and far between. A small number of plants provide such facilities. Another small group of employers assists working parents by keeping registries of available services, granting vouchers to purchase day care, or by contracting with existing day care centers to hold spaces for children of employees.
A few Federal agencies in the Washington, D.C. area have been providing on-site day care facilities for employees and others at moderate cost, but in March 1978, the Office of Management and Budget was planning to eliminate them. Only after protests from federally employed women, the National Commission, and other groups were hearings scheduled by the OMB to allow public discussion of the proposed change.
Migrant working families and other agricultural workers have a special need for child care facilities because of their particular working and living conditions, with both fathers and mothers working in the fields under isolated circumstances and with no access to the kind of arrangements that parents in towns and cities can improvise.
Labor unions have shown only a minimal interest in adding child care to their health and welfare packages. (A few exceptions include the Amalgamated Clothing Workers; the Seafarers International Union in Ponce, Puerto Rico; and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen in Cleveland, Ohio.) The most obvious reason has been the absence of women in union leadership.
The quality of child care The working parent's search for convenient, affordable, dependable, quality child care is often lonely, desperate, and conducted under pressure of a deadline. Even where there are central registries of child care providers, evaluations of the services they offer are not commonly available. The Day Care and Child Development Council of Tompkins County in New York State, which operates a successful referral service, emphasizes the necessity of carefully checking caregivers before they are put on a list.
In this country, the Government supports child care chiefly as a tool to move poor mothers off public assistance and into low-paying jobs. Women in welfare programs, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, feel they should have the right to stay home with their young children if they so choose. But they also need access to free or low cost child care centers when they are able to work or wish to return to school or enter job training programs that would enable them to become self-supporting.
The Federal policy of limiting child care services to low-income women ignores the needs of lower-middle class and middle-class working women who are frequently placed in a bind: their incomes are above the poverty level but not high enough to pay for private care, even if it should be available. Women in this situation often find themselves forced to give up their jobs to stay home with their children, and their only source of income then becomes welfare assistance. To break this chain, women see comprehensive, federally-funded child care facilities with moderate sliding fee schedules based on ability to pay.
In other societies, day care is seen not only as an essential service to parents but as a positive, healthy, emotional, and intellectual experience for the child. In contrast with other industrialized nations, the United States has a poor record in providing child care services.
Education for parenthood Caregivers, as well as parents, would benefit from increased attention to teaching parenting skills. Our society has always expected future parents to learn how to be good parents from their own family experiences, yet in 1970 one out of every five persons between the ages of 14 and 17 did not live in a home where both parents were present. In addition, the average family is now smaller, so fewer young people learn how to raise children by watching their own parents or caring for younger brothers and sisters.
Child-rearing skills can be taught. The Office of Education and the Office of Child Development in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, have funded a program called Exploring Childhood that is given in junior and senior high schools. Programs to teach baby care and child development have also been developed by Girl Scouts. Boy Scouts, 4-H Clubs, and other organizations concerned with the welfare of children.
Legislative update Legislation supporting a Federal
child care program has been at a standstill since former President Nixon vetoed
the Child and Family Services Act in 1971. A revised bill, the Child and Family
Services Act of 1975, received no action in the last Congress. This
comprehensive legislation would provide for strictly voluntary and direct
parental participation in operating child and family services in communities;
support for establishing and maintaining part-day or full-day care in the home
or in other child care facilities; after school programs and information and
referral services; prenatal
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Meanwhile, Congress did pass the Child Day Care Services Act (PL 94-401), which authorized an additional $240 million in Title 20 Social Service funds to help day care centers meet their health and safety codes already in effect and to upgrade the quality of their programs.
However, new Federal standards for staffing (postponed until October 1977 by this act) have again been delayed. At this writing, a report was to be made to Congress in April 1978 on the appropriateness of the Federal Government setting any standards for child care. A series of State workshops seeking public interaction will then be scheduled throughout autumn 1978, and new or revised standards will be developed based on this local input. Any new Federal standards would therefore not be expected before spring 1979.
Some parents who must pay for private day care are now receiving a small tax break. The Tax Reform Act of 1976 provides up to $800 in tax credits to cover child care, care for incapacitated adults, and house care expenses for working parents, regardless of income level. Divorced parents who receive child support are now eligible, and a couple is eligible even if one spouse works only part time or goes to school. And families that pay relatives for child care are now eligible, as long as that relative is not a legal dependent.
But when family income, even with two parents working, still falls near the poverty level, the current tax credit provides almost no relief at all. Such low income families are also not eligible for public child care funds under Title 20, a support system that gives priority to welfare clients. Legislation to assist the working family that "falls through the cracks" was being drafted by the Senate Child and Human Development Subcommittee for introduction in late spring 1978. The bill is expected to focus on local community control in a variety of settings, including family group homes.
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