Child-Centered Child Care: an Argument for a Class Integrated Approach Thomas R

The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable Volume 1 | Issue 1 Article 22 1-1-1993 Child-Centered Child Care: An Argument for a Class Integrated Approach Thomas R. Marton Follow this and additional works at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/roundtable Recommended Citation Marton, Thomas R. (1993) "Child-Centered Child Care: An Argument for a Class Integrated Approach," The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 22. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/roundtable/vol1/iss1/22 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in The nivU ersity of Chicago Law School Roundtable by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Child-Centered Child Care: An Argument for a Class Integrated Approach Thomas R. Martont While we may continue to debate the reasons for the change in the profile of the American family over the past three decades, no one disputes the magnitude of that change, and few can fail to recognize its pervasive and profound impact on the mechanics of our society. There are many ways to describe this change, each importing its own particular focus of concern or bias. The focus of this paper is on child care. More specifically, the aim is to articu- late a confluence of demographic factors and social policy concerns which make the present both ripe for and strongly in need of the implementation of a federally mandated universal system of daycare. 1 Our current approach to child care is a hodgepodge affair, driven by no clear vision of overarching purpose or aim. Existing governmental provisions are either tacked onto welfare and workfare schemes or bound up in individual tax profiles. Families not adequately covered by such programs are left to a catch-as- catch-can kaleidoscope of unregulated private arrangements, both legal and illegal. And all of these approaches run aground on the same lack of adequate facilities and trained caregivers. Yet inefficiency and ineffectiveness are not the greatest failings of our current approach; far worse are the costly social ramifica- tions. First, there is the cost to work and family. Recent decades have witnessed a sweeping integration of women into the work force, a phenomenon plainly implicating the need for greater child care availability.2 Although more and more women work B- 1983, University of California, Berkeley; J.D. 1993, The University of Chicago. The author is currently a clerk to Judge Douglas P. Woodlock of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. 1 In this paper, I use "daycare" and "child care" synonymously to mean "less than 24- hour care of children for the purpose of providing positive supervision while their parents work." See Kathleen A. Murray, Child Care and the Law, 25 Santa Clara L Rev 261, 261 n 2 (1985). 2 For a high-profile illustration of the salience of this concern, one need only recall 314 The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable [1993: outside of the home, they nonetheless continue to be our primary family caregivers. Not surprisingly, this creates conflict. Without a competent family support system built around universally available child care, women, work, and family all suffer. As one commentator recently noted, daycare has thus become a matter of adequate infrastructure: We can no more send women off to work without provision for adequate childcare than we can send them off to work without adequate roads.' Second, there is the cost engendered by the increasing strati- fication of our society along race and economic class lines. Child care could be a central means of addressing this problem. Chil- dren brought together at a young age to play and grow together have the best shot at learning to live together. Yet our current approach to child care not only squanders this homeopathic opportunity for healing, it exacerbates and ingrains our divisions. We treat child care now largely as an afterthought, in fractured fashion serving the poor as poor through programs tied to welfare and workfare, while serving the rich as rich, i.e., those with enough money to pay for child care services up front, through tax breaks. This system may help the wealthy to help themselves, but without an infrastructure ensuring availability, the poor are left with insubstantial options. And unless we build such an infrastructure to serve the children of the wealthy as well as the poor, doubtless it will be poorly built. Consequently, I will argue that child care provision should be framed to serve a universal concern: children. As such, it should be an end in itself, adminis- tered separately from welfare concerns and available for all children, with access based principally on age and, only where necessary, on need. So structured, child care may provide vital passage toward transforming our too-riven society into one where perhaps we are no longer such strangers to one another. The third cost of our current approach falls directly upon our children. To the extent that families today are unable to fully accommodate the demands of both work and family; to the extent that poor children are left further in the breach when their parents seek work; to the extent that any children, in their most formative years, receive insufficient care and training-or, if President Clinton's recent travail in seeking to appoint the first female U.S. Attorney General. His first two choices, Z6e Baird and Kimba Wood, both had to withdraw as a consequence of the private child care arrangements they had made. ' Karen Nussbaum, Director of Nine-to-Five, National Public Radio interview (Feb 9, 1993). The concomitant gender inequities the lack of adequate daycare implicates-glass ceilings and the feminization of poverty-are explored below. 313] Child Care privileged, receive it only under exclusive, segregated arrangements; to that same extent we squander our most precious resource and impoverish our future. Accordingly, I will argue that adequate child care, by definition, must include an explicit educative component beyond mere guardianship, so that children are not simply minded, but actively nurtured and engaged. In sum, I contend that an infrastructural approach to universal child care provision is not only functionally mandated by the dramatic changes in our society's profile, but might also prove a powerful agent in healing race and class divisions as well as a means of enriching our children. To effectively implement such a system, we must reframe current notions of day care as a tacked- on response to particular economic or employment circumstances. Instead, our approach to child care should be child-centered; that is, first and foremost a response to children, with their care and advantaged upbringing its primary concern. Such a system must be universally available and, while carefully tailored to embrace the needs of the poor, must be as structurally independent of welfare delivery systems as is administratively possible. With this project on the table, I will begin by describing three broad and well-documented aspects of modern social and economic transformation: the feminization of poverty, the growing number of single mother families, and the increasing partici- pation of women in the workplace. While all three of these phe- nomena interrelate, the first two are particularly inextricable, and for that reason they are presented under one heading. I will then briefly canvass the impact of these trends on the growing need for child care, a need which cuts across the entire economic spectrum of society. Beginning with a historical survey, the next section will sketch out our current approach to daycare provision, evincing the fragmented and stratified nature of that approach and the confusion and waste of resources it generates. This sketch will also show that our most recent efforts to address the growing need for daycare tend increasingly to segregate daycare provision along economic class-and, consequently, race-lines while needlessly burdening general welfare programs. I will argue that this is wrongheaded and serves only to increase unwarranted fragmentation and cost, both social and otherwise. At this juncture, in order to illuminate context and gain perspec- tive, I will examine the approaches to daycare taken in Sweden and France, countries with especially well-developed family support systems. In closing, I will contend that the concurrence and broad scope of the social transformations described in the 316 The University of Chicago Law School Roundtable [1993: first section of the paper present an opportunity for a dramatic change in our approach to child care, an opportunity that both necessitates and is ripe for the implementation of the type of universal daycare system alluded to above. I will also highlight those aspects of family support offered in France and Sweden that might prove useful as models here, while rating the particular demographic and social concerns of this country that suggest a different approach may be warranted. I. ASPECTS OF CHANGE: THE INCREASING NEED FOR DAYCARE A. The Feminization of Poverty and The Growing Number of Single Mother Families Although women have made great advances on any number of fronts over the past 30 years, glass ceilings and a stubborn gender gap in earning power continue to delimit these advances.4 And, as if to mock even the halting progress of this struggle, women increasingly bear the burdens of poverty. Despite gains made in the workplace, women remain marginalized, holding down supporting roles or servicing transitional stopgaps. Thus occupying the outer rim of the economic sphere, they are among the first cast off as the economy shrinks.' To explicate the reasons for the sustained economic vulnera- bility of women is beyond the scope of this paper.6 Such vulnera- bility, however, is not of recent vintage.

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