The Child-Care Dilemma

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Without much federal help, the poorest mothers are caught in a vise. Working is the only way out of poverty, but it means putting children into day care, which is unaffordable. "The typical cost of full-time care is about $3,000 a year for one child, or one-third of the poverty-level income for a family of three," says Helen Blank of the Children's Defense Fund in Washington. As a result, many poor mothers leave their young children alone for long periods or entrust them to siblings only slightly older. Others simply give up on working.

Rosalind Dove, 29, of Los Angeles, is giving it her best shot. A single mother of four, she worked for five years as a custodian in a public high school, bringing home $1,000 in a good month. "I was paying $400 a month for child care," she recalls. "We didn't buy anything." When that failed, she began bringing her children to work with her, hiding them in an empty home- economics classroom while she mopped floors and hauled huge barrels of trash for eight hours a day. "I'd sneak them in after the teacher left and check on them every 30 minutes or so." She finally quit last February and slipped onto the welfare rolls. She applied for state child-care assistance, only to learn there were 3,000 others on the waiting list. Frustrated, she returned to work this month. "Don't ask me how I'm going to manage," she says.

Child care has always been an issue for the working poor. Traditionally, they have relied on neighbors or extended family and, in the worst of times, have left their children to wander in the streets or tied to the bedpost. In the mid-19th century the number of wastrels in the streets was so alarming that charity-minded society ladies established day nurseries in cities around the country. A few were sponsored by employers. Gradually, local regulatory boards began to discourage infant care, restrict nursery hours and place emphasis on a kindergarten or Montessori-style instructional approach. The nurseries became nursery schools, no longer suited to the needs of working mothers. During World War II, when women were mobilized to join wartime industry, day nurseries returned, with federal and local government sponsorship. Most of the centers vanished in the postwar years, and the Donna Reed era of the idealized nuclear family began.

Two historic forces brought an end to that era, sweeping women out of the home and into the workplace and creating a new demand for child care. First came the feminist movement of the '60s, which encouraged housewives to seek fulfillment in a career. Then economic recessions and inflation struck in the 1970s. Between 1973 and 1983, the median income for young families fell by more than 16%. Suddenly the middle-class dream of a house, a car and three square meals for the kids carried a dual-income price tag. "What was once a problem only of poor families has now become a part of daily life and a basic concern of typical American families," says Sheila B. Kamerman, a professor of social policy and planning at Columbia University and co-author of Child Care: Facing the Hard Choices. Some women are angry that the feminist movement failed to foresee the conflict that would arise between work and family life. "Safe, licensed child care should have been as prominent a feminist rallying cry as safe, legal abortions," observes Joan Walsh, a legislative consultant and essayist in Sacramento.