Child care: what do families really want?

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1993 by Michael Schwartz

Parents are hard-pressed to find facilities that are accessible, affordable, and reliable.

When parent's seek substitute care for their children, there are three fundamental considerations they weigh - accessibility, affordability, and reliability. The first two seem to be fairly obvious. A substitute caregiver must be accessible: near home and work. Any arrangement that entails substantial added commuting time is not practical. Similarly, the cost of child care must not take up such a large portion of a family's disposable income that it seriously would diminish the benefits of working.

These two factors so closely are related that they could be combined under affordability. If a family can afford to pay, accessible child care will be available. The market of providers is so flexible that it is potentially infinite. The Department of Labor concluded in 1988 that there is no lack of child care. There may be temporary, localized shortages, but the market has proved to be highly responsive to these situations. Where a need appears, someone inevitably and quickly moves to fill it.

The question of reliability is more problematic. When parents hire a babysitter for even one night, they want to be confident their offspring will be safe and secure. This concern is even greater when it is a matter of entering into an arrangement for substitute care on a regular basis over a long period of time.

What constitutes reliability is a highly individualized judgment. Most parents probably have experienced child care arrangements they found unsatisfactory for some reason, and have shopped around for a better one. The factors they weigh in making a judgment about the reliability of a substitute caregiver could be extremely varied.

Parents may be concerned about the meals their youngsters are served or the kind of entertainment offered to them, as well as the ages and behavior of the other children being cared for. The physical environment in which their kids are placed may be uppermost in their minds. In many cases, it may be a personal response to the substitute caregiver. If they find one they like, who inspires confidence and builds a positive relationship with their children, other, more easily measured factors may pale in significance.

Government is incapable of making these personal judgments. What it can do, and does, to address the reliability of child care is to establish certain minimum standards for commercial child care. This is reasonable because there are some objective, measurable conditions the state has a right to demand of those who offer a service on the market.

Yet, it must be admitted that a regulatory standard is a clumsy instrument for guaranteeing a satisfaction that depends so heavily on intangible factors. People will have various conceptions of what is acceptable, desirable, and ideal. Most of all, they will have different ideas about who is trustworthy. The main task of regulation is to protect children from foreseeable threats to their health and safety. As regulation goes beyond that point, it becomes a matter of replacing the personal judgment of parents with the abstract decisions of regulators not directly involved in the relationship.

Currently, Congress is considering legislation that would establish certain minimum regulatory standards for virtually all commercial child care providers. It is very important, in this connection, to bear in mind that the issue is not whether there should be regulatory standards, but whether they should be set at the state or Federal level. Each of the 50 states already has a set of regulatory standards they have determined are best suited to their particular circumstances and conditions.

Are Federal

standards needed?

The question, then, is whether Federal law, in the interest of increasing the reliability of child care, should replace the standards set by the states with more stringent ones. This is ill-advised for several reasons.

In the first place, there is no evidence that the existing standards in any state are inadequate. Many of the tragedies that have occurred to youngsters while they were under the care of parental substitutes have resulted from unforeseeable accidents. Some have involved instances in which local regulatory standards were violated. Far more often, they have resulted from circumstances in which children were placed in situations beyond the reach of state regulation, frequently without adult supervision at all. In no instance has it been shown that a child has suffered harm because a state regulation was so lax that it placed his or her health and safety in danger.

The argument has been made that there are Federal standards for airline and consumer product safety and environmental pollution, so they should exist for child care as well. This analogy, however, fails in at least three ways:

* The safety of airplanes or the flammability of pajamas can be measured objectively, scientifically, and precisely. The reliability of child care is not amenable to this sort of laboratory analysis.