To the Editor:
Jessica Gress-Wright’s article, “ABC and Me” [January], is outstanding for its lack of interest in the content of child-care arrangements. But since a discussion of that matter might be too lengthy here, perhaps it is sufficient to note that the author was seeking child care for fifty hours a week at $5,000 per year. So much for the “free market.”
Vera Ending
New York City
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To the Editor:
My, what a lot of research and hand-wringing when a short look at the facts might have saved the Gress-Wright household much grief. Jessica Gress-Wright states: “The job meant everything to me, because without my salary we literally could not eat.” Several paragraphs later she lets on that the cheapest solution to her day-care crisis is an au pair girl, at $5,000 a year, which works out to $96.15 a week. That plus the cost of the au pair’s food is more than enough to put food on the Gress-Wright table, with the extra added bonus that this physically stressed mom can have all week to do her cleaning and get to be the one who provides the emotional and intellectual environment for her children during their first crucial years. To reap all these benefits, all she has to do is quit her job. Is that such a shocking idea? Presumably, if she had wanted to be apart from her offspring for fifty of their waking hours a week, she would not have had them in the first place.
This more leisurely life at the Gress-Wright household would also give the author and her husband time for still more clear thinking. She states that she was “unexpectedly” pregnant with Katie, their third child. This from a woman who can put together a time-and-motion study on a computer in her nonexistent spare time, the wife of a man pursuing an advanced degree at Stanford University? In five years, when all the children are in school, Mrs. Gress-Wright can resume her career, unless there are any more “unexpected” pregnancies.
One reason there is so much difficulty in formulating a national child-care policy is that many of its most strident advocates are people who do not need child care at all; they can afford to take care of their own children, but prefer not to. The only issue that Congress should be addressing is child care for truly poor families with no other options. For the most part, these will be one-parent households. That is a welfare problem, and one that the nation can afford. We cannot afford baby-sitting services for middle-and upper-income people who do not wish to deal with the reality that in a life well-lived there are priorities to consider and choices to be made.
Karen Stenbo Sapolsky
Belmont, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
I was very interested in Jessica Gress-Wright’s “ABC and Me” because I was a licensed family daycare provider in California during the period she is describing, approximately 1987-89.
The article is not a well-reasoned, logical argument against regulating child care. It is, instead, a howl of outrage at the various factors that make maintaining a home and raising children so extremely difficult in her situation. Along with long descriptions of her housing costs and problems, her pregnancy-induced disability, and her unaccommodating boss, Mrs. Gress-Wright rails against each of the child-care options that failed her. Her “licensed-professional” day-care mother was too cold and rigid; she actually expected the children’s parents to remember their responsibilities such as providing snacks for their children or paying extra when picking their children up late. Her au pair left after two months. Other options, such as nannies, were too expensive. There was not enough child care available, even in the day-care centers.
Mrs. Gress-Wright found herself starting to mourn the 50’s as a “paradise lost.” No doubt back then child care was cheap, easily available, flexible, and warm. Naturally, that kind of care was most often provided by the mothers of the children themselves. They chose, or were forced by circumstances, to provide child care rather than hire it.
Now that so many more people choose, or are forced by circumstances, to hire child care rather than provide it themselves, is it unreasonable for there to be some regulation of this field? Mrs. Gress-Wright says “parents of all classes favored family day care. . . .” California requires licensing for family day care where the children of more than one family are cared for (excluding the provider’s children). Its sensible regulations include: an inspection of the home for safety, toys available, and sleeping places; screening of all adults in the home for TB; fingerprinting all adults for background checks; filing a chart of emergency exits and emergency phone numbers.
A basic license is granted, without charge, for six children, of whom three may be under age two. Believe me, one person is stretched to the limit with six young children to care for. It is a very labor intensive profession. Once the license is granted, the provider sets hours, care provided, and fees for herself. In contrast to the remarkably high prices Mrs. Gress-Wright was quoted for child care in the Stanford area, an average price for full-time day care in Southern California was $75.00 a week, or $1.50 an hour for fifty hours a week (which includes a parent’s fulltime work day, plus commute).
Mrs. Gress-Wright feels that providers are greedily pursuing “what the free market has failed to give them, a restricted profession with high pay.” Rather, as she discovered when it was so difficult for her to find and keep people to do child care, it is already a self-restricted profession because of its long hours, low pay, and low status. People do not eagerly vie for the position of day-care provider. And for this situation to change more than slightly will require greater incentives than extra tickets to Disneyland.
Holly Zimmerman
Long Beach California
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Jessica Gress-Wright writes:
Karen Stenbo Sapolsky says that if we had sat down and reckoned carefully, it would have been evident that I could afford to stay home with my children and suffered less to boot. But her “short look at the facts” appears to exclude simple arithmetic. I refer her to page 31 of my article. One doesn’t need a computer to calculate that if $27,000 of housing costs took 90 percent of my husband’s after-tax income, then the remaining disposable income, if I had quit work, was not $5,000+ for food, but $3,000, or $57 a week, for absolutely everything over and above housing. Welfare allots more for food stamps alone.
But there is worse to come. Miss Sapolsky evidently thinks my children are straight out of Lord of the Flies. How else to explain the spectacle of a pregnant mother, virtually disabled and in constant pain, who prefers work to staying home with her small children?
But if Miss Sapolsky thinks little of my budget and my children she thinks still less of my politics. She places me firmly among the “strident advocates” of a “national child-care policy” who love their jobs more than their offspring and clamor for a federally subsidized “baby-sitting service for middle-and upper-income people who do not wish to deal with the reality that in a life well-lived there are priorities to consider and choices to be made.” I don’t know what article Miss Sapolsky was reading. It certainly wasn’t mine.
On page 32, I quote Congressman Stephen Solarz as saying “ ‘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.’ ” I quoted him to show that the promise of a middleclass child-care subsidy in the Act for Better Child Care Services (ABC) is the cynical sugar-coating on a political poison pill. ABC is bad not because it enables middleclass parents to evade responsibility for rearing their young, as Miss Sapolsky implies. ABC is bad because, once swallowed, its costs and regulations will prevent parents from assuming that proper responsibility.
Moreover, while ABC is bad for the bourgeoisie, it is positively nasty to the poor. It lays the heaviest burden of new regulation and bureaucracy on the very care the poor use most: informal day care by friends and relatives. Any federal aid for child care should be targeted at the working poor, and it should be structured in a way that permits the parents to choose the care they want for their children, whether it be grandma upstairs or the religious center down the block. Both have been discouraged under proposed versions of ABC because of elaborate regulations and contracting requirements and because of prohibitions on any form of religious expression.
While I don’t think much of Miss Sapolsky’s logic, I think a great deal of her values. If she had read a little more closely, she would have found a friend where she thought she saw a foe. We don’t need a child-care policy, we need a family policy. Moreover, we need a family policy which fosters parental responsibility instead of discouraging it, which helps the poor instead of harming them, and, above all, a policy which has as its chief goal the welfare and happiness of the child.
Contrary to Vera Endig, I should have thought I went into the content of child-care arrangements at great length indeed in my article. Concrete detail taken from real life seemed the best way to illustrate the perverse consequences of current misguided attempts to legislate affordability, quality, and availability of child-care arrangements, both in California and federally. I get the feeling that Miss Endig thinks expensive care, or “official” outside care, is better for children. Not so. Nursery school, which is wonderful for little children, is the exception. Otherwise, compared to my cheap home care, outside care was worse, despite the price.
I was unable to make sense of Miss Endig’s next statement for a long time. Did she mean that the free market is unfair because I was able to find care for $5,000 a year or did she mean that for $5,000 a year, no wonder I had trouble finding care? Either way, she missed my point.
If she means that the free market is unfair because I was able to find good care at $100 a week, I will say that parents pay what they can. I went into great detail about my efforts to find reliable, good care in the official system, even though it would have cost far more. As I itemized in my article, official care for three children by centers, family day care, live-out baby-sitting, or nannies would have cost us between $14,000 and $22,000 a year, or from 90 percent to 140 percent of our disposable income after fixed expenses like housing and taxes.
And even were parents able to pay what Miss Endig may think they should, they must first find the care. In my area, even parents who are able to pay $175-$350 a week for care for a single child must put themselves on long waiting lists for nannies and day-care slots. Should I have refused the willing offer of help that left us enough money to eat when the more expensive help was unobtainable anyway?
The irony of my situation was that, in the end, it was the informal free market, not the licensed, official child-care system, which served us beautifully. With children of different needs and ages—in other words, with a normal family—what we needed was warm, flexible in-home care. And that was not the most difficult or most expensive to get, but the cheapest and easiest. The year after my third child was born, thirty people applied for the job. The price we paid was accepted willingly and the care provided was excellent. Only the spiteful would cavil at such a happy ending.
I thank Holly Zimmerman for her thoughtful letter. I appreciated hearing from a day-care provider with very different experiences.
Miss Zimmerman says I do not make a consistent, reasoned case against regulation. I disagree. My experience and research have taught me that some regulation of the field is reasonable but some is not. It is also important to distinguish between any regulation and the particular strictures in ABC.
ABC is the worst possible way to regulate and subsidize day-care centers because any direct federal funding of day care raises the church-state problem, because the bill requires clumsy contracts with providers instead of vouchers or direct aid to parents, and because the interest groups behind the bill are hostile to private centers in general.
But ABC is even worse when it comes to family day care, which is still the most common arrangement, and 94 percent of which is informal and unlicensed. Here, regulation tends to shrink supply and raise prices by discouraging casual care such as young mothers taking in a few children or a cousin lending a hand. A study in Sweden showed that once regulations were vigorously enforced, family care cost so much more than center care that the supply dried up. The best study of family day care, which compared informal and licensed care, found that informal care was somewhat cheaper and averaged fewer children, while the quality was the same.
I think it important to emphasize, however, that all child care is badly paid, relative to the work and skill involved. I would certainly like to see caregivers paid professional salaries, but political distortion of the market through restrictive regulations like ABC, is not the way to do it.
I do not think Holly Zimmerman or other such providers are “greedy.” The problem is systemic: severe economic pressure on young families makes them need care badly while having little left with which to buy it. I do not object to (though I may bemoan) shortages of the kind created by the market. I object to regulation that prevents both provider and parent from working around such constraints.
The day-care lobby, which largely represents nonprofit, subsidized center care, is greedy. Instead of intelligently addressing the true causes of its truly low pay, it has promulgated an exceptionally bad bill to disable permanently a national market that, overall, can still provide an adequate supply of good, if informal, child care at a reasonable price.