Work Outranks Children
At first glance, the emerging consensus on the importance of child care to welfare reform seems to bode well for poor children. A recent study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that, in general, children in high-quality day care do as well socially and intellectually as children cared for at home by their mothers. Given the quality of many home environments in poor communities, some children are probably better off in a child care setting.
But most children of welfare recipients will inherit the fate of the majority of children of adults in the work force: an agonizingly small amount of time, “quality†or otherwise, with parents, compounded by long hours spent in mediocre to harmful surrogate care. Almost regardless of the economic status of their parents, children in surrogate care are the victims of a society that values time spent working much more than time spent raising children.
Working parents at all income levels have less and less time to spend with their children. Inadequate family leave policies mean that many infants get only a few months of full-time, one-on-one attention, if that. For many children, ample, unscheduled parental attention becomes a thing of the past before they turn a year old. While high-quality care does not impede children’s social and intellectual development, the minimal amount of time spent with parents does interfere with forging crucial primary relationships.
Perhaps due to the increasing difficulty of caring for children while working full-time, commuting and managing household obligations, even mothers who can afford to take more time off work to spend with their children often don’t. In her coming book, “The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work,†Arlie Russell Hochschild suggests that many parents prefer spending time at work to spending time at home. The work world has become “a more appreciative, personal sort of social world,†while at home, “emotional demands have become more baffling and complex.†Work beckons with “orderliness, harmony and managed cheer,†while home offers unresolved quarrels, unending housework and scheduled “quality†time with children.
In addition to the stresses our economic system puts on parent-child relations, recent studies clearly show that most surrogate care in the United States, whether in child care facilities or in family care settings, is far from the high-quality care children need to thrive. More than three-quarters of the children who spend their days in child care centers and almost two-thirds of those in family day care are receiving custodial care that does not meet their needs for “health, safety, warm relationships and learning,†according to the Families and Work Institute. Ten percent of children of working parents are receiving care that is so inadequate, harmful, unsafe and unsanitary that it interferes with their basic development. And it is unlikely that the children pushed into care by welfare reform will do better than their more advantaged peers.
The fact that our culture has reached consensus on shifting 3.5 million children into a dysfunctional child care system is a testament to our bankrupt expectations for the next generation. We treat the issue of children’s well-being as an afterthought. Child care is conceptualized as the key to transforming children into wage earners. As one child care advocate explained, “While parents are earning money, children are learning so when they grow up they can earn money.†Children’s needs take a back seat to the exigencies of an increasingly family-hostile economic system and to our burning desire to punish those who can’t or won’t participate in it. We need a broader, more generous vision of why we have children and what they deserve for their own sake.
