One of the problems with being reminded over and over again that you’re living in the “greatest country in the world” is that you tend not to believe it when folks from other countries tell you that you’re getting screwed.
Today, child care for the roughly 11 million American children younger than 5 who need it is expensive, the quality runs from excellent to mediocre to dangerous, research shows, and state standards are all over the map. There are no national health and safety standards. Now, child care and education are second only to mortgage or rent in the family budget, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And in 31 states and the District of Columbia, the annual cost of infant care in a center is higher than a year’s tuition and fees at a four-year public college, reports Child Care Aware of America in its most recent report.
(all links are from the original)
The lack of good, inexpensive child care in the U.S. is a travesty. It’s not because we can’t afford it. It’s because we as a country still haven’t escaped a 1950’s mindset when women didn’t work outside the home and any woman who did was somehow violating the laws of nature, doing something that should not be “encouraged.”
And in fact, it’s because of a political decision made over 45 years ago by a Republican President who was forced to resign office in disgrace:
Congress passed a universal child-care bill in the early 1970s with bipartisan support that would have offered universal high-quality, affordable, accessible child care. Despite early support from officials in his administration, President Richard M. Nixon vetoed the bill after conservatives, worried that it might undermine traditional breadwinner-homemaker family structures, threatened to run a challenger against him in the Republican primary.
As a consequence of that decision, child care has never been a priority for our government, even as the average American family now requires two incomes by necessity:
There is a dawning sense among voters that our lack of government support for child care, and the anxiety this causes, isn’t normal. In other rich countries — heck, even in Ukraine — parents get the state’s help in their children’s early years. Americans get practically nothing.
Meanwhile, the cost of child care has become an anvil around the necks of millions of American families trying to get ahead. Women are put in the position of having to choose whether it is even worthwhile to work, given the cost of child care. And because many Americans never venture out of the country beyond a pre-packaged, all-inclusive Sandals vacation to a hermetically sealed resort in the Caribbean or Mexico, most have no inkling of how the rest of the developed world handles the problem of child care for working parents.
As Pamela Druckerman, writing for the New York Times, points out, the panoply of subsidized free or inexpensive child care options in other economically developed countries like France and Germany make a mockery of our overpriced, patchwork, unregulated “free market” child care options in the U.S., simply because the citizens in those countries have demanded quality child care from their representatives in government.
Child care costs in the U.S. are double those of Germany, France, Sweden and Greece. France offers free pre-school for kids ages three and up. Ukraine pays its citizens eight months salary when they have a baby. Britain provides 15 hours a week of free pre-school as well as paid parental leave. Here, for example, is Sweden’s child care system:
Public childcare is guaranteed to all parents and it operates on a whole-day basis: most childcare facilities are open from 6.30 a.m. until 18.30 p.m. Pre-school is free for children aged between three and six for up to 15 hours per week. Parental fees are directly proportional to parents’ income and inversely proportional to the number of children in a family. The fee can be up to three percent of the family’s monthly income, but no more than 1,260 SEK (about €146) per month. The parental fees cover, on average, only 11% of the real cost of a place in pre-school which means that the cost for childcare is heavily subsidised.
The disparity of American child care versus the European experience is not lost on Europeans who visit this country. Druckerman quotes Finnish journalist Anu Partenon:
“While Nordic citizens often don’t realize how good they have it, Americans seem not to realize how terribly they are being treated,” she writes in her book “The Nordic Theory of Everything.” Ms. Partanen points out that many Europeans pay only slightly higher income taxes than Americans do, while Swedes and Britons pay less, and all get far more in return.
Americans don’t need to accept the current state of affairs as “normal.” It’s not. An overhaul of the American child care system is long overdue and should be an issue that all Americans can support. While any effort to accommodate the economic concerns of American families will encounter stiff Republican resistance in Congress, at some point the real-world needs of two-income households are going to be impossible to deny. Reversing an ingrained mindset that prioritizes hundreds of billions of dollars for military spending, or focuses on tax cuts for the uber-wealthy while ignoring the basic needs of ordinary Americans is going to be the most important task for the next President:
Hillary Clinton’s proposals include 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave for men or women, capping child care costs, raising wages for child care workers (they’re now paid less than janitors); and providing pre-K for all 4-year-olds
Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University School of Social Work is an advisor to an organization called “Too Small to Fail,” started by Hillary Clinton in 2013 to support pre-school children. As Waldfogel puts it, Secretary Clinton is more familiar with children’s issues and the high cost of child care in this country than just about anyone else in politics. There is no one better equipped to take on this challenge-- as Druckerman concludes, with a bit of humor:
I’ve already mailed in my ballot. It’s a vote to make America great, by making it a bit more like the rest of the world.
