On November 19, 1987, the day the Act for Better Child Care Services (known as the ABC bill) was introduced in Congress, I was busy throwing up in the bathroom sink. I was not aware of the bill’s existence. I was just trying to get to work and I was two months pregnant.
The ABC bill was sponsored by Dale Kildee, a House Democrat from Michigan, and by Christopher Dodd, a Democratic Senator from Connecticut. It was “designed to improve the safety and quality of child care throughout the country and to help low- and moderate-income working parents pay for such care.” A Democratic showcase, it was accompanied by major press coverage and boasted a huge list of supporters, including unions, religious organizations, “children’s advocates,” and even the Junior League.
Minus part of my breakfast, I quickly helped my six-year-old son Jonathan tie his shoes, handed him his lunchbox, and made sure he had his note to his kindergarten teacher. My second son, Thomas, two days past his first birthday, would stay in his playpen while I walked Jonathan to school.
The new bill, introduced simultaneously as HR. 3660 in the House and as S. 1885 in the Senate, had a number of features. It would provide federal assistance for day care to parents earning up to around $37,000 a year, and grants to states to expand Head Start and Title XX preschool programs. It would help to underwrite training of day-care workers and to set up state child-care resource and referral networks. It would also establish national standards, enforceable by the states, for the licensing and regulation of day-care centers and family day-care homes.
I came back from Jonathan’s school, kissed Thomas goodbye, and headed off to work. I was just the kind of middle-class working mom the bill’s proponents would rely on for support in the upcoming election year, except that I was luckier than most. Jolanda, our au pair, was looking after Thomas at home, and this one little fact had gained me precisely one-and-a-half hours’ extra sleep. There were no breakfast dishes to wash, no diaper bag, bottles, and snacks to pack, no commuting to a day-care facility.
I knew just exactly how much time this saved because I had in my possession a time-and-motion study. This bizarre yet essential document told me all kinds of things that formed the nuts and bolts of my daily existence. It informed me that emptying the dishwasher took four minutes and thirty seconds a day, and that doing the laundry and otherwise caring for clothes took seven hours and forty-five minutes a week. It was the framework on which I hung my life. I had written it, all neatly computerized and appropriate to the ethos of Silicon Valley where I lived, the year before, when I was pregnant with Thomas.
That summer, Jonathan had been in day care, remarkably close and convenient day care right on campus at Stanford, and yet I had to be up at six to get out the door by eight-thirty. No skimping allowed. Jonathan’s day-care mother was a licensed professional and she knew how to run a business. Once I forgot to pack his morning snack. When I came to pick him up at the end of the day, I was crisply informed that, while this one time she had given him something, it was not to happen again. You were docked a dollar for every five minutes you were late, and she expected to be paid for the holidays she took, although finding substitute care was the parents’ responsibility. She also knew the laws of the state. When she caught two children playing doctor, she called the authorities. They sent a licensed social worker, trained to spot child abuse, to interview the parents. No smoke without fire. One family was let off, but the other little boy and his parents now had a record in Sacramento.
Heavily pregnant and working fifty hours a week, I had in desperation tried to organize my life with a rigor to match. Hence the time-and-motion study. Now, thanks to Jolanda, I no longer needed it, but it still served a purpose. It made me cherish her like the diamonds of the earth.
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That same November day, the Senate version of the ABC bill was referred to the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, chaired by Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and then passed on to the Subcommittee on Children, Family, Drugs, and Alcoholism. Interested parties would have a chance to obtain copies of the bill and read it before the first hearings were held. And so the politicking began.
Or rather, it continued, since the opening salvo had actually been fired long before. On February 27, 1987 the State Board of the California branch of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) had published a list of priorities based on a survey of its members. Those priorities included the following:
- Ensure the maintenance of high-quality program and services to young children through adequate funding, appropriate regulations, and monitoring.
- Ensure adequate and appropriate licensing and credential standards for teachers, caregivers, and others who work with young children and their families.
- Improve working conditions, salaries, professional and educational opportunity, public recognition, and accountability of child-care workers, teachers, health providers, family counselors, and others who work with and for young children.
- Ensure basic protections for young children and their families: legal rights and equal opportunity, child care, education, health and nutrition services, housing, freedom from abuse and neglect, and the opportunity to grow up in a peaceful world.
- Promote education to enhance the quality of life for young children and their families: education for parents, paraprofessionals, legislators, public administrators, business and community leaders, and others whose decisions affect young children directly or indirectly.
These goals were to become the basis of the ABC bill. Only the language about a “peaceful world” was dropped. Ellen Galinsky, president of the NAEYC, had longstanding contacts and a history of cooperation with the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) headed by Marian Wright Edelman. After consultation with NAEYC and other interest groups, a CDF lawyer wrote the bill, which so neatly incorporated the NAEYC shopping list, and Dodd and Kildee agreed to sponsor it. Prominent by its absence was any mention of direct aid of any kind to children and their parents, who could then decide on what form of day care to buy. Everything was to be channeled through the professionals.
Shortly after the bill was introduced, an editorial, appearing in the Children’s News, a San Francisco weekly, presented key CDF themes that would be sounded again and again in the coming months: “The federal government’s commitment to child care has diminished dramatically”; “new sources of money have not emerged”; “the Reagan fantasy of corporate support is not a reality”; “child care reduces later welfare dependence”; “with so many parents working, policy-makers agree child care is a vital service”; “child care is linked to high-school achievement”; “unavailability of and greater demand for child care.” The solution: “With the polls indicating that the public is generally in support of child-care programs, now is the perfect time to initiate new legislation on a national level.” This new legislation was of course the ABC bill. Again, familiar themes were sounded: it would “increase the number of daycare facilities and qualified providers,” it would “promote parental choice and state flexibility,” it would “protect children, strengthen families, and make child care more accessible.”
Around this time, too, some members of the NAEYC were sent a special packet of materials. Essentially it offered a brief how-to course on lobbying, plus ideologically correct literature on ABC and on the general issue of pay and working conditions. The pamphlet carefully explained that the hiatus between the introduction of a bill and the first hearings was an ideal time to “gather support and begin advocacy strategy.” Other vital tactics were to develop diverse coalitions in order to get the support of as many legislators as possible and, especially, to solicit the backing of state agencies likely to be affected. If these agencies were to testify against the bill in committee, it might be impossible to win legislative approval, so the key was to work with aides of both the agencies and the legislators. Meticulous attention was essential: the way to influence legislators was to get people in their own constituencies to inundate them with letters and calls; testimony to be presented had to be planned and rehearsed ahead of time with the legislative aide of the author of the bill. Last, there was a special section on “How to Use the Media.”
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I have always dearly loved Christmas, and Christmas with children is wonderful. That year I took the children down to see my parents in Southern California. They lived so near Disneyland that, as a child, I could hear the fireworks on summer nights. Two days before Christmas, I took Jonathan there. Jolanda had come down with me and the children, but she was not with us at Disneyland. I wanted her to be able to go with a friend, and I made an extra present of the tickets. I didn’t see how she could have a good time tagging around with me and Jonathan.
It was very important to me that Jolanda enjoy herself, because she had been unhappy lately. She said she couldn’t sleep because of the noise in her loft bedroom. It was a beautiful room, but I had to admit that the acoustics up there were something special. They were magnificent, like a church choir. You could hear the tiniest whisper. I had called a specialist immediately to see about installing shutters to close off the loft. I was afraid that if I dallied, Jolanda would leave. He came and measured and then explained that only solid wood would do, and even then the benefit would be limited. The estimate was $5,000. I said thank you and sat down to think.
We had bought the two-bedroom condominium on campus just two years earlier, after months of calculation. We had wanted a three-bedroom at least, because we had to have a place for an au pair. We had spent weeks costing out child care and an au pair was the only option. But the price of a three-bedroom house was utterly beyond our reach. As it was, God loved us, because twenty-four hours before we met the mortgage officer for final qualification, I landed a job that put us over the top for the two-bedroom condo by $58 a year. With the bonus loft, we figured we had a functional three-bedroom for only $220,000, a $50,000 saving.
We had four mortgages, one from the bank, two from Stanford, and one from my father. We were only paying three of them. The fourth would come due as a $120,000 balloon payment in ten years. The three that we paid, plus taxes and monthly assessments, came to $27,000 a year. That was 90 percent of my husband David’s after-tax income as a senior research fellow. We had no savings.
So $5,000 seemed too much for the soundproofing, especially since it might not even work. But something had to be done. If Jolanda left, she would be the second au pair in a row to quit because of the noise up in the loft, and I was afraid for my job if I had to take time off again to find a replacement for her. And to top it off there was the new baby coming. It was true that I had voluntarily spent three months, from July through September, working overtime to make up for the extra hours I had taken to nurse Thomas in the beginning. Nevertheless, when I told my boss I was pregnant again, he had suggested that maybe I should “do something about it before it was too late.” I declined to take the hint.
But now all that was far from my mind. At six, Jonathan was the perfect age for Disneyland, full of wonder. We wandered from ride to ride and munched cinnamon buns to pass the time in line. He amazed me with his stamina and bravery. This was not the shy little boy I knew. He outlasted me on all the rough rides. I was surprised and delighted, and twelve rides later, by six in the evening, waiting to be picked up, I was also worried. It was only a small pain, but it was sharp and it was in my hip. I was now three months pregnant.
If I hadn’t had a Danish friend who worked with pregnant women I wouldn’t have known enough to be concerned. But there it was, just as the literature predicted. Danish is a plain language: hip loosening, they call it. Pelvic relaxation to an American doctor. A small but definite minority of women, perhaps 3 percent, produce too much of a pregnancy hormone called relaxin, which acts to soften and lengthen all smooth muscle fibers in the body, loosening the ligaments holding the hip bones so they can presumably expand during birth. The usual side-effect of the hormone is a common and mildly annoying one of pregnancy: it makes you constipated. But other than that it is nothing much—except for the 3 percent. Some have to take to wheelchairs, their pelvic bones so unstable that they are in constant pain, unable to walk or function. The problem grows with each baby, and the closer the babies are spaced the worse it is. “Most serious when there is less than nine months between pregnancies.”
I already knew I was one of the 3 percent. With Jonathan it had been a sharp catch when I walked, starting at four months, but gone by the seventh month. At the end of that pregnancy I felt splendid. We were living then in Denmark, where my husband had grown up, and from the seventh month until Jonathan was born I was working eighteen-hour days restoring our little Danish house. Five years later, pregnant with our second child, Thomas, and living in the Bay Area, things were different. Again it started at four months, but the catch didn’t go away. By the seventh month I ruefully acknowledged to myself that I had a very characteristic walk. I shuffled exactly like an ape. But within forty hours of Thomas’s birth was fine again. It was simply miraculous. The next Monday, when Thomas was only eight days old, I was hauling him in his Moses basket up and down the steep streets of San Francisco.
But now I was unexpectedly pregnant, for the third time, and there had been no five-year gap. Waiting at Disneyland, with Jonathan by my side, I did a quick calculation. It was nine months to the day.
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Christmas was vacation for the ABC campaign, too. It resumed in January 1988, and by January 12 the bill had acquired dozens of co-sponsors in the House, and 110 organizations in support who collectively called themselves the Alliance for Better Child Care.
On January 18, Marian Edelman of the CDF spoke to a meeting of the chief school officers from the different states. She alleged that tax credits for day care were “a cosmetic approach.” True, they would give important income to poor families, but the key point was that they would not “help build a child-care system.” Her three basic principles were: “steps to ensure quality care”—i.e., licensing; “comprehensive programs funded directly”; and “trained caregivers who receive adequate compensation.” She asserted firmly that to agree with these three principles was to put the needs of children first.
Yet all three principles were actually addressed not to the needs of children but to the needs of caregivers, and it was by no means obvious that there was a connection between the two sets of needs.
What was obvious was that the service-sector functionaries had found their natural allies in the Democratic party, reeling (like them) from seven years of Reagan and determined to seize the initiative for the upcoming election year. “Strengthening the family” had always been Republican territory, but with so many mothers forced into the workforce to make ends meet, and so many divorced, it might just be possible to use the old big-government agenda and give it a new, family-oriented twist. But not directly. Things like tax breaks were classic Republican ideas. Democrats couldn’t pay back their supporters with those kinds of dollars, which after all might (indeed, almost certainly would) be used to buy private informal day care. No, the Democratic method was to give supporters a secure position with a guaranteed income stream, one that flowed through their fingers, not the parents’. And the only means of doing that was a law establishing a new day-care infrastructure that could beat the competition by eliminating it.
Under the new system, private informal day-care mothers, who now provided 94 percent of all family day care, would be regulated out of existence with requirements enforced by a corps of specialist inspectors to be established in every state. Under this original version of ABC, not only could those unlicensed mothers not be reimbursed, they could not even legally exist. Any state which tolerated any infraction of its own or national standards, no matter how silly or nominal, would forfeit all ABC funds. All this despite studies showing that, on average, unlicensed daycare mothers cared for fewer children better and more individually than their businesslike licensed counterparts.
The big question, as one Democrat put it, was how to pay for the programs and yet still appear to be the party of fiscal responsibility. The answer was, enroll the middle class with promises of subsidies for its own children. As Democratic Congressman Stephen Solarz said, “Look at Social Security. Compare that to welfare. Programs for the poor don’t fare nearly as well as those perceived to benefit the middle class.”
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Thursday, January 14, was not a good day. We had given up on soundproofing the loft. Without thinking about how we could ever pay for it, we had called in an architect who had remodeled several other units in our condominium complex. He took a look at a narrow strip of unused attic space, unfloored, that sprouted a veritable forest of pipes. Jonathan and I had discovered it by accident, just like Nancy Drew, when we removed the back of a built-in cabinet. Though the estimate was $10,000, David and I decided then and there to go ahead. If Jolanda had her own room she would stay, and if she stayed I could keep my job, something I was increasingly worried about. I was limping now and the small sharp pain was there all day. My boss was aggressive and fit and hated illness. As I got worse, he got more annoyed. I had eased off on the overtime and begun to go to the obstetrician for checkups. My boss resented it, and I was afraid that losing Jolanda could tip the balance. The job meant everything to me, because without my salary we literally could not eat.
That night when I got home from work Jolanda announced she was leaving. I said, what about the room? She replied that she didn’t want to wait the months it would take to build. She had located a job weeks before, and was leaving now. I had been home for fifteen minutes.
The next day I learned everything there was to know about day care in the Bay Area. First I called my boss to say I wouldn’t be in, then I sat on my bed and thought strategy. I decided that although live-in au pairs were wonderful, they were inherently unreliable. Someone who did day care in her own home was much more likely to stick around. As for centers, even if one teacher was gone the institution would still be there. I knew life would be different, because with two children, one a baby, the housework, cooking, and shopping took upward of twenty-five hours a week. To that I might have to add another ten hours a week just to pack up the kids and ferry them to and from day care. But now that I had a third baby on the way, I couldn’t reject any solution, no matter what the workload.
Armed with that knowledge and a phone book, I began my hunt. First I called the Stanford Childcare Resource Center to ask about possibilities. They said, first, that babysitters who would come to the house, mostly childless spouses of students, charged $7 an hour, standard. I added it up. At fifty hours a week, it came to $17,500 a year. That was $2,000 more than our total discretionary income, after fixed expenses like housing and taxes. Next I was told that day-care mothers charged $3.50 per hour per child. With Jonathan part-time, and Thomas and the new baby full-time, that would be over $20,000 a year. Next I inquired about campus day-care centers. Jonathan would be in one, and Thomas and the new baby in another, but there was a waiting list, and in any case it would come to around $22,000 a year for three children (no bulk discounts). For that kind of money, I thought, I could get a proper English nanny. Next I called a very posh and expensive employment agency that supplied dedicated nannies and housekeepers. They would place only legal U.S. residents, and had over 40 positions begging, at a cost of $800-1,600 a month, or $14,000-19,000 per year, plus room and board. The nannies did limited cleaning. Cleaning ladies were $9 an hour, or about $2,000 a year. Still, you get what you pay for. Out of curiosity I asked, how long do nannies stay? A long silence. We refund fees up to six weeks after hire. No, but how long do these Mary Poppinses stay on average, for all that money? We don’t have that information. I persisted a little, and then it came: maybe two years. I wondered if there was some sort of universal child-care law: a nanny should stay a whole childhood and stays one to two years, an au pair should stay one year and stays two months.
Two-and-a-half hours later, I had called every resource and day-care center in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. I learned a lot, but I still didn’t have child care and I still wasn’t at work. Nobody would take Thomas because at fourteen months he was an infant, and licensing requirements were too stringent for infants. By assiduously following faint telephone trails and rumors I located three centers which did take infants, but one had a minimum age of eighteen months, while two refused all drop-ins because it was illegal to exceed their staffing ratios, even for half a day.
For the next week I put ads in the newspapers and cards on bulletin boards for an au pair-at $5,000 per year, an au pair was one-fourth the cost of licensed center care for three children. Christine joined us a week later. I had come full circle, back to the only type of remotely feasible or available child care. It was the best, cheapest, most helpful, and most convenient. It was the only care that left us enough money to feed our family. And most important to me, it was the only help that didn’t leave me with twenty-five hours of cleaning and laundry and food preparation to do on nights and weekends. This was critical because after a mere ten days without help, I was now leaning on walls for support. An au pair wasn’t very reliable but neither was a nanny. All in all, an au pair was the best solution, and the irony was that it was also the most unregulated. In fact, under the 1986 Immigration Act, it was illegal.
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An even greater irony was that on February 10, when all of this was very, very fresh in my mind, I received the Bing newsletter. Bing was the Stanford nursery school. It had an excellent program and a wonderful staff. It was a research facility linked to the School of Education and the Department of Psychology. It was nonprofit and thoroughly elite. It should also have been apolitical.
But that week the newsletter was in fact very peculiar. It ran a two-page feature on day care, maternity leave, and family policy that I later discovered came straight out of the ABC campaign. Prominent among the other features was a piece on Ann Zonder, a young Bing teacher who was now a registered “child advocate” affiliated with the NAEYC and the Democratic party, operating officially out of Bing. As I read through the material and considered the implications, I became more and more alarmed.
For one thing, half the piece consisted of enticing “facts” about maternity leave in other countries. I knew France, England, and Denmark at first hand and I knew that the rosy presentation was terribly misleading. I had never been exposed to lobbying before, and I was surprised at the carefully orchestrated and manipulated information. More than surprised, I was furious. More than furious, I was panic-stricken. I had just received, two weeks before, an object lesson in the limitations of licensed care in California, whose child-care funding, licensing, and referral systems were a national ideal to day-care advocates. Regulations designed to ensure good care for infants only ensured that infants had no care. Requirements designed to prevent child abuse stigmatized the very children they were intended to protect. Rules designed to improve the quality of family day care diminished the very warmth and flexibility that made such care desirable and prohibited the simplicity that made it affordable. Only the fluid, informal market had saved us from this brave new world, yet with a crippling condition and a job at risk, I’d already had to defy one law to use it. Now, with a new law in their hands, it was precisely this market that the lobbyists were out to destroy.
So I sat down and wrote Bing an impassioned letter in which I outlined the facts about Scandinavian child care one by one. Did they know that the Danish Social Minister had admitted that the economy could not survive without unlicensed underground day care? Did they know that just a handful of years before, Sweden had been notorious for having the highest rate in the world of children removed from their parents?
But I also started to ask myself what was the source of all this pressure I was feeling. Could we have lowered our standard of living and found more time for me to rest and be with Thomas and Jonathan? No. There were cheaper places to live, but either they were so far away that we would have to spend all we’d saved on a new car, or so dangerous that we would have to spend all we’d saved on private schools. Jonathan wore thick glasses, was shy and physically awkward and always had his nose in a book. I doubted he’d survive his first day at school in a tougher neighborhood. I was willing to put up with a lot but I refused to jeopardize his physical safety. Nor could we rent, because nice apartments had strict occupancy limits, and soon we would be six, counting the au pair.
As a young feminist, I’d been taught that the 50’s were hell. But to me now, they looked more and more like paradise lost.
I finally realized that Bing was trading on its prestige, and on parents’ natural trust in its expertise, to persuade them to support something that was not at all in their interest, but was very much in the self-interest of the teachers. I believed then, and do now, that it literally never occurred to the Bing people that this might be the case. This impression was confirmed a couple of weeks later when I had dinner with Ann Zonder and two other Bing teachers to discuss the issue. She supplied me with a summary of the ABC bill and other materials in the hope that my fears would be relieved. But what I read confirmed my worst expectations. I formed the distinct impression that her personal experience in a terrible unlicensed center had caused her to dedicate herself to regularizing her profession, and that she herself, idealistic and single, had no notion of the harm that could come of this new system for people struggling to support dependents. But I also doubted that the politicians in Washington and California were either so principled or so innocent.
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On the home front, things went better in February. Christine was there, work on the new bedroom began. The Architectural Committee signed off, and on February 10 the Board voted to approve construction. The Stanford housing office was enormously warm and supportive, and got us a loan within days. We were going to have two rooms! Christine hit it off with the young carpenter and work went smoothly. More and more I realized what a difference this was going to make. Christine could have a quiet room far from the rest of the family, a place to rest and recharge her batteries. Jonathan would eventually get the other room so we wouldn’t have to have three children in one bedroom. My parents could sleep in the loft when they visited instead of on the living-room floor. More than all this, a room meant child care, child care meant my job, and my job meant not only our house but David’s entire career at Stanford.
Soon, however, a whole new problem cropped up. One day in early March at the pool, I confided to my neighbor and best friend how much this remodeling meant to us. As a self-deprecating joke, I said we were going to have six people in a two-bedroom condominium and that it was a little like Vietnamese refugees. I wanted to convey a sense that we were being good sports and making the best of a situation my parents, with their easily afforded comfortable house, would have found unthinkable. I noticed that his eyes went curiously flat, and he didn’t smile, but that was all. I thought no more of it until the end of the month.
Then suddenly one night a Board member came to our door with a list of fourteen “concerns” about remodeling. She asked David, since he was Board President, to prepare a reply. After much research and discussion with our architect and the Architectural Committee chairman, the document was delivered. Nevertheless, with every new reassuring fact about inspections and responsibility, the Board became more upset and angry. One day, that best friend told me, point blank, “You have too many people, you will lower my property values with your children, and you will make an unfair profit.” What could I say? The Board majority, supported privately by one Stanford housing official, ordered David to tell the workmen to stop immediately. “A moratorium to study the situation” had been imposed.
In despair, David wrote to the official, describing the bind we were in. We were elated when he offered to discuss the issue in person, but the conversation quickly soured. “You shouldn’t be having children in your apartment. It was designed for one or none.” But if we couldn’t move, we couldn’t remodel, and if we couldn’t squeeze in three to a room or make space for an au pair, what could we do? Ah, the kicker: “People have to realize that if they can’t afford to move into a house, maybe they just can’t come to Stanford.”
During this same month, on March 15, hearings began on ABC in the Subcommittee on Children. By now, the conservative opposition was making itself heard. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, for example, charged that the new bill threatened to do real harm to families by a combination of the carrot and the stick. The carrot was the promise of handouts to the middle class for child-care costs. Yet even a fully-funded ABC, at $2.5 billion for the first year, would only work out to an estimated $120 per year per eligible child. Ed Zigler, a professor at Yale, estimated that actually to pay for all the promises in the bill, ABC would have to cost between a staggering $75 and $100 billion per year.
The conservatives also charged that ABC, by insisting on subsidizing centers rather than paying parents, automatically eliminated religious day care as an option because of the requirement to separate church and state. Catholic schools risked having to hire Jewish teachers and taking in Buddhist children in order to receive funding.
But what most upset the opposition was the inflexible rules, “minimum national standards.” ABC was supposed to avoid bureaucracy yet would require the establishment of a new bureaucracy in every state. ABC was supposed to give parents more choice, yet under the bill as formulated, as much as 90 percent of current day-care arrangements—including all unlicensed day care, a good deal of care by relatives, and a good deal of care in church-run centers (which were 30 percent of all center service)—would be effectively barred from receiving any aid.
ABC proponents may not have been aware of these awful consequences, but they should have been, because it was liberal researchers who documented them. The truth was that parents of all classes favored family day care or in-home care for infants and school-age children. Such care was far less expensive than center care. In fact, it was all most parents could afford. Advocate organizations might cite horrifying anecdotes to show that the lady down the street was ignorant and dangerous, but the best study of family day care concluded that she provided “generally safe, homelike . . . positive environments for children.
” Rector claimed that licensing could and did depress supply. Recognizing this, several states had already lowered their requirements from licensing to simple registration. Yet ABC deliberately forbade states to make just this sort of accommodation to reality. Permanent shortages were likely to result in the type of care parents wanted most.
In brief, ABC’s licensing requirements would not guarantee the quality of care or the happiness of children. Instead, they would permit professional organizations to use the weapons of federal funds and state control to eliminate competition, depress supply, and raise salaries at the expense of children and their parents.
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Throughout the spring of 1988 the Debate over ABC raged. I still worked, though I had to hand myself from desk to desk to cross my office. I reckoned that without Christine I would have been immobile months earlier. It was just as well I could work because we could not have lived on the half-pay of disability. In June, Katie was born at last.
The 1988 version of the bill died in the fall of that year, killed by the aggressive language restricting the participation of church centers and by rigid licensing requirements.
Through the winter of 1989 I was in physical therapy for my hips, and for the past four months I no longer take painkillers to get through an ordinary day. This summer I successfully switched to a new job. Our margins are still razor-thin, but for now the children are thriving and our au pair is wonderful and showing every sign of staying the year. Through ingenuity and sometimes desperate effort, we have come to terms with the market that rules our housing and jobs.
In 1989, ABC was resurrected. It metamorphosed into three competing child-care bills, marred by bitter quarreling not just between Democrat and Republican but between Democrat and Democrat. The House Education and Labor Committee version is actually far worse than the 1987 ABC, for it forbids the use of vouchers or aid to religious centers, proof that the hostile provisions of the original bill were no oversight. ABC’s course in the Senate was given new impetus by the defection of Orrin Hatch of Utah, who had long presented himself as the chief foe of the original 1987 ABC. Without gaining real concessions in the bill, Hatch publicly announced his support of ABC in a June 15, 1989 speech. His office now shamelessly promoted virtually the same tissue of half-truths about “affordability, accessibility, and quality” he had once condemned so strongly. True, the Senate bill, “ABC III,” did incorporate mitigating amendments. Nevertheless, these amendments were there despite, not because of, the efforts of the original supporters. It remains an arrogant, deceitful, and destructive piece of legislation.
Through the law, the proponents of ABC, like the NAEYC and the National Association of Family Day Care Providers, go on seeking from the government what the free market has failed to give them, a restricted profession with high pay. If they succeed, they will exacerbate a sinister dynamic of increased taxation and severer pressure on young families like mine, whose economic, emotional, and even physical health depends so greatly on our freedom to make the best possible use of the resources we have and those we can find. The market is often harsh. But only politics can be implacable.
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