Talking It Over

Many of you are rushing to read this as you drink one more cup of coffee before setting off for work. If you're lucky, you won't worry about the safety of your children while you're gone. If you're lucky, you trust that they're in a safe, nurturing and stimulating environment — one that they're excited about going to each day. If you're lucky.

Unfortunately, many working parents aren't so lucky. With the help of relatives, in-home providers, professional day-care centers, and before- and after-school programs, working moms and dads manage to cobble together affordable care for their children. Some of this care is excellent. Tragically, though, recent national studies find that most is "poor to mediocre."

This week, my husband took a major step toward improving child care for America's working families. With the largest investment in child care in our nation's history, he proposed increasing child-care tax credits for 3 million working families; doubling the number of children receiving child-care subsidies; providing after-school care for 500,000 children; funding up to 50,000 scholarships each year to promote the training of child-care providers; providing financial incentives for states to toughen enforcement of quality standards; and providing home visits, parent education, and consumer education about child care.

In the over 25 years I have worked on children's issues, I have seen firsthand the results of our failures to invest in our children at the most critical stages in their lives. I have learned why good child care is so critical to our children, our families and our future. Although studies show that children are not adversely affected by having parents work outside the home, there is evidence that poor care either inside or outside the home has damaging consequences, especially in the first three years of life.

In October, the President and I hosted a White House Conference on Child Care. That conference was meant to start a conversation — to renew our efforts to improve child care in America. This week, the President took action.

At the White House Conference, lots of issues were raised: how to ensure the safety of every child in child care; how to do a better job of training and paying caregivers; how to encourage more employers to provide child-care benefits to employees; how to make successful after-school programs more widely available; how to learn from the good models that we have in every community.

The President's proposal tackles these issues.

Each of us who has frantically scrambled to find alternative arrangements for a sick child, who has murmured instructions into the phone after school, who has sent a child off to school with "just a little cold" — each of us understands the urgency of the situation.

But new scientific information makes the case even more compelling. We now know from the White House Conference on Early Childhood Development in April that what happens to a child in the earliest years of life affects how well that child will learn for a lifetime. With 45 percent of our children under age 1 in day care regularly, the issue of quality child care has tremendous bearing not just on individual lives but on the future of our nation.

It is no surprise that demand for quality child care is growing with the dramatic changes in the American work force and way of life over the past 40 years.

During World War II, the federal government stepped in to provide federally funded day care for the mothers who went to work to support the war effort. But, today, it is the ordinary, not the extraordinary, that drives our efforts. Now, more than 80 percent of married mothers with a child under age 6 work outside the home, and 13 million children under the age of 6 are in child care.

In addition, because the school day ends before the workday does, families also need care, supervision and stimulating activities for school-age children after school. This is also important in our continuing fight against crime, for it is between 2 and 6 p.m. that adolescents are most likely to find themselves in trouble with the police.

Sadly, though, as a society, we have never sufficiently valued the work of caring for our children — whether by mothers or other relatives who stay at home or by paid child-care providers. On average, child-care providers earn between $5,000 and $12,000 per year. It's a sad state of affairs when we pay the garage attendant who parks our car more than the person who cares for our children.

The President's initiative this week is a major step toward turning the situation around by helping working families pay for child care, improving the safety and quality of care, promoting early learning, and building the supply of good after-school programs.

No program can stop any of us from worrying about our children. After all, that's what parents do. What this one offers is a helping hand to parents, educators, community, state, and federal authorities working together to provide safe, nurturing and stimulating care for our children in the most important learning years of their lives.

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