Who'll Mind the Children?
E., D.
Who'll Mind the Children? In the political battle over motherhood, day care is a central point of contention, but one largely obscured by the passion of ideology. In feminists' eyes, day care...
...This leads easily to a dismissal of subsidized day care as a national need...
...The debate focuses on day care-meaning the organized care for large groups of children-more often than other forms of child care, in part because large centers are where government is involved and where innovations and regulations can most easily be applied...
...be left safety and happily in someone else's cane how will women continue to advance in the workplace...
...Her arguments still stand as a fair reflection of tire "pro-family" attitude: "The energies and dedication of the Positive Woman are needed as never before to fend off the attacks on the moral, the social and economic integrity of the family...
...Meanwhile, some people who say that "day care is fine for children" arc thinking about several hours a day in a family home...
...but there are certain families in which parents cannot or will not care adequately for their children...
...then they quit...
...Often, conservative opponents of day care say they recognize that some mothers have to work and even sound broad-minded about it...
...Large facilities arc also the most economical and efficient way for caring for children...
...Bettye Caldwell may never have seen daycare centers like those Browning described, but I have, and I did not have to look very hard Liberals in general have found it hard to confess the limitations of their social programs even though such warts and imperfections are inevitable in even the best run organizations...
...Obviously the government should not "substitute" for parents...
...It is detrimental when so many kids are left in day care operations with strangers...
...Jerry Falwell has said, "My pastoral advice is, if the wife must work, the husband should make the extra effort to compensate in any way possible for her absence ....The husband is as much responsible for rearing the children as the wife...
...Caldwell was particularly outraged by a' 1983 article by Dominique browning, published in Texas Monthly magazine, Browning described day-care centers in and around Houston: "Workers are paid the minimum wage, and many of them take a job in a center only long enough to snake money for a special purpose...
...When we talk about the comparative costs of care for infants, toddlers, and pre-school children, we ought never to forget that we are talking about children who will be taken from their mothers and cared for primarily by strangers from the first months of their lives...
...All day long, 11 to 15 babies...
...Does Weyrich know what it is like to "try to see to it" that a friend or relative can handle all the day care...
...lake, for example, the tremendous drive to sett up child-care centers-taxpayer-financed, government-managed, 'universally' available for 'all socioeconomic groups' regardless of means...
...Of primary concern, they added, is the question, "how does day care affect our children...
...Let's look for a moment at the real subject of our discussion-children," the congressmen said...
...For example, Paul Weyrich, president of the far right Coalition for America, has said: "If a mother has to work, she should see to it her children are cared for by another family or by other family members...
...In feminists' eyes, day care is indispensable to the formula for women's equality...
...To what extent wilt those parents' sins be visited upon their children...
...Feminists may be willing to entertain private comments about the defects of certain facilities or certain approaches as long as everyone understands that they all believe in day care as an institution...
...They support the kind of laissez-faire child care system we have today, whereby some combination of luck or money is the only answer to finding good care...
...If Falwell really believed that mothers must sometimes work, would it not follow that someone else must look after their children...
...Some people who "don't believe in day care" really mean that they wouldn't consign their children to large, impersonal facilities, yet they happily send them to family homes or nursery schools...
...In the political battle over motherhood, day care is a central point of contention, but one largely obscured by the passion of ideology...
...Day care has to he the answer...
...If day care is therefore necessary, shouldn't the right join in supporting improvements in the institutions where these children will spend so many hours...
...Bettye Caldwell, president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, reflects this doctrinaire attitude, denouncing even the most troubling reports about day care...
...No doubt Caldwell, who represents those who work in centers, is sincerely concerned about the conditions that make large group day care difficult for many children...
...Rochelle Beck of the Children's Defense Fund points out that Falwell's Moral Majority is part of the network of "'pro-family' interest groups [whose...
...The most familiar conservative criticism of day care is that it amounts to a near-totalitarian separation of child from parent and should in no way be encouraged...
...For this reluctance they have paid a sleep political price...
...effective lobbying and fundraising efforts go to oppose federal funds for child-care services" The conservative spokesmen do not explicitly block improvements in day care, but they oppose all the steps-especially further regulation and subsidy-that would make improvement possible...
...D.E...
...Leaders of the women's movement, who have done so much to remove barriers to women's occupational success, naturally view day care in a special light...
...A child learns to hide the things lies worried about from some day care attendant...
...In the meantime, 2 million children are in day care centers, and 6.5 million under the age of 13 go without any supervision at horse...
...Apparently not, if that means further expansion of federal power...
...For feminists it is but a short step from criticizing day care to suggesting that there are fundamental conflicts between parenthood and career...
...By defining those parent, as morally unworthy-which in sortie cases they may be-the conservatives have successfully excluded the innocent children of thosefamilies from the universe of those deserving public help...
...this is certainly a good question, but it will not be answered with confidence anytime soon...
...He is right about the drawbacks of large day care centers but is content to push the problem away, since this fits conveniently with hiss overall, political views...
...The feminists don't delude themselves with dreams about fathers quitting work to tend the children while their wives move up...
...This adds up to an attempt to make it public 2policy to remove babies from the family unit and place them in an institutional environment...
...There is a lot of very bad day care out there, and the institution of outside the home child care must be strong enoughwithstand scrutiny or it will not improve and flourish...
...Conservatives see it as a threat to the foundation of the family...
...PA Phyllis Schlafly, leader of the anti-ERA movement, touched on day care in tier 1977 book, The Power of the Positive Woman...
...According to the women's movement, the only people who object to day care are thus who feel threatened by the idea of women succeeding in the workplace...
...The Rev...
...Often the area of disagreement extends even to what "day care" is...
...But when criticism is conducted in-public where the gains made by the women's movement still seem so fragile, it's inevitably seen as a hostile act...
...The sifters cannot play with any child for very long because, as one of them explained, the child would get used to the attention and scream whenever he didn't get it In her remarks to the 1983 Junior League Parenting Conference in Washington, D.C., Caldwell said that in all her travels, she had never seen any day-care center like that Caldwell has written that "the media need to, highlight more of the positive aspects of quality child care if the public interest is to be served...
...from about eight weeks to 12 months old lie in their cribs or sit in their-pens and scream for attention, stare at the ceiling, gurgle quietly, or sleep...
...As is so often the case in political life the inflexibilities and excesses of one extreme are fully matched by the other...
...For example, when the House of Representatives Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families recently recommended more federal support of day cart, four Republican committee members dissented, arguing that government-sponsored day care is unacceptable as a matter of first principles...
...But she reserves her public fury for something else - the reports about bad conditions, which she says give day care a bad name...
...Unless children can...
...Yet the logical progression seems to come to a halt at this point...
Vol. 17 • June 1985 • No. 5
