Q: will the Clinton child-care initiative be good for America's kids?

Insight on the News, March 16, 1998 by Olivia A. Golden, Diane G. Fisher

Yes: The plan will make day care better and safer for kids' early development.

Every day millions of America's parents face difficult decisions in balancing work and children. As President Clinton said in his State of the Union address, "No parent should have to choose between a job they need and a child they love." The president has proposed the nation's largest single investment in child care to help ease that burden for America's parents, offering high-quality, affordable choices and restoring trust in care where their children will learn, be healthy and safe.

The president proposed this historic investment in child care at the same time he sent to Congress the first balanced budget in 30 years -- a budget that eliminates completely the federal deficit that was so ominous just a few years ago. The reason the president has chosen to make this critical investment in child care -- even with all the hard choices he had to make elsewhere in the budget to pay for it -- is simple: Affordable, accessible, high-quality child care is an essential support to America's working families, and it also is critical to children's healthy development. Healthy, safe, high-quality child care matters to our nation's economy and to our children's education.

The president's proposal is about working families. While it builds on the success of the investment that the president, Congress and governors have made in child care to help families on welfare move into jobs, this proposal is not about welfare. It is about families who work yet find themselves constantly worrying about how to pay the child-care bills and how to find care that they trust for their child.

At the White House conference on child care convened by the president and first lady in October 1997, we heard again and again from parents, providers, business leaders, researchers and public officials from both parties just how critical child care is for working families and how limited the choices too often are for those families and their children. The numbers tell the story. Today, 70 percent of all mothers go to work and trust their children to the best child-care arrangements they can find and afford; 45 percent of all children under the age of 1 are in child care on a regular basis. Yet according to a recent Harris poll, half of these parents say they found it very difficult or extremely difficult to find affordable care. The same proportion said the lack of affordable, satisfactory care made it difficult for them to do a good job at work, and a significant 43 percent said they had not taken a job they had wanted because they could not find adequate care.

The proposal builds on the president's history of supporting working families, including families in which both parents work and families in which one parent stays home. From the Family and Medical Leave Act to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the children's tax credit in last year's budget act, the president has supported the choices that families make to go to work and care for their children. This proposal adds one more piece to that history of commitment.

Following the themes that Americans from all walks of life highlighted at the October conference, the $resident's proposal focuses on helping parents find and afford child care and on ensuring that child care is good for children.

For many, affordability is the first hurdle. Child care takes up a large portion of any family's income but particularly of low-income families. A family with an annual income of $15,000 spends a quarter or more of its income on child care. Yet, of the 10 million families eligible for federal subsidies, only 1 million receive them. The president's proposal increases the subsidies to low-income working families, which will help 1 million more parents. For moderate- and middle-income families, tax credits will provide relief from the high costs of child care. These tax credits will aid 3 million families. And parents earning $35,000 who have high child-care costs will not have to pay any federal tax.

After achieving the ability to pay, parents face the hurdle of availability. The subsidies and tax credit enable parents to make the choices in care they believe are best for their children, including relatives or caregivers in their home, family-based home providers or centers. Yet care still can be hard to find. Many parents, some employed for the first time, work split and night shifts. Night care can be hard to find or is of a quality that does little to help the child grow. The Clinton administration is encouraging public-private partnerships based on successful local efforts to increase availability. Also, the president's proposal provides incentives to businesses to offer child-care services to their employees through a targeted tax credit.

But how good will the child care be? The quality of services is an overriding priority. We have long known that the first years of life are critical to a child's development. Now recent findings point to strong scientific evidence of just how critical those first years are.