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The Economics of Child Care
| Article
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19713 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
3,647 Words |
| Author
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David Blankenhorn
David Blankenhorn is president of the Institute for American
Values, a New York-based organization that conducts research
on issues of family well-being, family policy, and civic
values. |
Last October, after four years of intense debate, the U.S. Congress passed, and President Bush signed into law, the largest commitment ever made by the federal government to expanding the nation's quantity and quality of child-care programs. Over the next five years, Congress plans to increase spending on child care by a minimum of $22 billion. Most of the money will go directly to individual families in the form of tax credits; the remainder will create or expand state-level child-care programs and increase funding for Head Start, the national pre-school program for children of low-income families. Moreover, several new child-care initiatives are being considered by the current Congress. In particular, proposed family leave legislation would require companies to allow parents up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave to care for newly born, newly adopted, or seriously ill children. Over the past three years, family leave bills have already become law in over a dozen states.
In the private sector, too, child care is growing as both a concern and a priority. It is a concern due to the growing possibility of increased government regulation of employer-provided child care and related employee benefits. It has also become a priority as employers increasingly see child care as a possible key to recruiting and retaining valued employees during the tight labor markets of the 1990s. Sylvia Ann Hewlett's important new book, When the Bough Breaks: The Social Costs of Neglecting Our Children, documents the causes and dimensions of these corporate trends.
This emerging private-sector focus, centered on the economics of the labor force, also reflects the remarkable success of the "work-family" movement of the 1980s--a broad coalition of corporate consultants, policy think tanks, business leaders, legislative lobbyists, and others who seek, in the words of one prominent organization, "new approaches for balancing the changing needs of America's families with the continuing need for workplace productivity." A national work-family conference in 1988, entitled "Child Care: The Bottom Line," elaborates this perspective:
Never before in the history of the United States has the issue of child care been so inextricably linked with the state of the nation's economy. Not only does the availability of affordable, high-quality child care affect the well-being of the majority of American families, it affects the bottom line of every business in the nation and ... inevitably ... affects the United States' ability to compete successfully in a global economy.
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