A National Disaster. A National Disgrace.

April 27th, 2022 by Tom Lynch

One of the maxims of our nation, embraced by everyone, has always been, “Our children are our future.” Not much to argue with there.

Another universally accepted truth is that a child’s formative years are the most important in learning and character development. According to UNICEF:

Children’s brains are built, moment by moment, as they interact with their environments. In the first few years of life, more than one million neural connections are formed each second – a pace never repeated again. The quality of a child’s early experiences makes a critical difference as their brains develop, providing either strong or weak foundations for learning, health and behaviour throughout life.

If the forgoing is true, if we really believed it, you would think we would plow every possible resource into early childhood development and learning. You would think responsible societal child care would be one of our top national policies and priorities.

But such is not the case in America. No town, city, county, or national government, none of them, support child care in any meaningful way. It’s sort of every parent for themself. Good luck finding decent child care, and you’ll need even better luck paying for it.

We have a situation in which child care enterprises cannot afford to pay many of their educators much more than minimum wage, and, even at that, parents, especially poorer parents, cannot afford to enroll their kids, presuming they can find an available slot. Every single thing in the child care “business” seems set up for failure.

For example, in my home state of Massachusetts, generally regarded as having the best educational system in the nation, 15.3 percent of early childhood educators still live below the poverty line and families in the Commonwealth pay 20% to 40% of their income for early education and care.

This is insane.

Sonya Michel, a professor at the University of Maryland has written a fascinating and infuriating essay on the history of child care since earliest times. The History of Child Care in the U.S., published by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Social Welfare History Project, should be required reading—for everyone.

Michel explains how early child care advocates, always women, fought hard to get government financial support for child care during the New Deal and after World War II. However:

From 1969 to 1971, a coalition of feminists, labor leaders, civil rights leaders and early childhood advocates worked with Congress to legislate universal child care policy, but their efforts failed when President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971. As a result, for the next three decades, direct federal support for child care was limited to policies “targeted” on low-income families. At the same time, however, the federal government offered several types of indirect support to middle- and upper-class families in the form of tax incentives for employer-sponsored child care and several ways of using child care costs to reduce personal income taxes.

Ronald Reagan, who did not invent the term “Welfare Queen,” but adopted it as part of his campaign strategy beginning in 1976, saw to it that, after winning the presidency in 1980, child care expenditures for low-income families were dramatically reduced while those benefiting middle and high-income families nearly doubled, mostly through tax credits.

In the years since Reagan, we have continually found new and inventive ways of sweeping this national disaster under a threadbare carpet for posterity to trip over time and again. Despite all the face plants, we never learn.

There are places where child care and early learning are done well. Unfortunately, unless you’re really well off, you won’t find those places in America, which is one of the reasons many ex-pats living in France choose to remain there until their children are ready for public elementary school. The French, like them or not, have figured out how to provide high-quality, affordable child care. Why can’t we?

Other European countries have distinguished themselves by enacting policies aimed at elevating work-life balance to a high level. In addition to France, Germany and Sweden have embraced the notion that governmental assistance in early childhood is a serious societal responsibility.

Without credible, high-quality early childhood education for everyone, how can we expect to prepare today’s children to carry America’s torch into the future?

It’s time to end this national disgrace.

 

 

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