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Uncle Sam and the Kids: Parents, Politics, and Child Care
| Article
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19712 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
6,030 Words |
| Author
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Rober Rector
Robert Rector is a policy analyst for social welfare and
family issues at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.
He is coeditor of Steering the Elephant: How Washington Works,
a book on the internal workings of the presidency. |
Washington is seldom without a crisis. During the 1988 presidential election campaign and for the next two years, Washington bellowed its way through the "day-care crisis." Media and political attention are fleeting, and the "day-care crisis" has given way to fresher social perils. But the three-year debate over federal child-care policy remains important--not because it solved a "crisis" that most experts believe never existed in the first place--but because it raised crucial questions about the proper role of families and government in society. Unlike the "day-care crisis," these questions are still with us and will reappear whenever politicians consider policies that affect family life.
Beneath the media hype, two questions lurked at the center of congressional debate over child-care policy from beginning to end: How will young children be cared for? and who will decide how young children are cared for? Two radically different answers to these questions emerged from the federal child-care debate. These answers stem from different visions of the future of American society and different premises concerning the proper role of government in the lives of parents and children.
The first answer was embodied in the Act for Better Child Care (ABC) introduced by Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Congressman Dale Kildee of Michigan. Under ABC, federal funds would be channeled through state governments to bureaucratically selected and controlled day-care centers; parents with incomes of up to $50,000 per year would be eligible for subsidized child care in these government-funded day-care centers. Numerous variations on the ABC approach emerged: federal funding for day-care programs for three- and four-year-old children in the public schools, and transforming Head Start into a child-development program for the middle class. All variants of the ABC approach shared a common principle: Despite lip service to parental choice, funds were not placed in the hands of parents. Bureaucrats, not parents, selected the type of child care that would be subsidized. Parents who did not like the government-selected and funded day-care program were out of luck.
The second answer to the basic question of government's role in helping parents was offered by George Bush. The president proposed tax relief and cash assistance to low- and moderate-income families with young children. The Bush plan had three key elements. First, all funds should go directly to parents. Second, parents should be given the widest possible choice in determining how their children would be raised. Third, traditional two-parent families, where one parent is employed
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