Or let us look at day care needs in the United States. Carmen Maymi, Director of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, said in Chicago last November: Almost 27 million children in the United States under the age of 18 had mothers who were in the labor force in March 1974. About one-fourth of these children were below regular school age and probably required some kind of care while their mothers worked. But for the 6 to 7 million pre-school-aged children with working mothers cited by Ms. Maymi, there exist only 1 million licensed day care spaces in this country. As final evidence of the need for the legislation we are considering today, I would cite our difficulties with respect to health care for children. I think you will all agree with me that it is inexcusable that this, the richest country in the history of mankind, currently ranks 14th in the world in terms of infant mortality. I would hope that the prenatal and postpartum care which this bill can make available to families will help us improve this astonishing statistic. Speaking for myself then, I think the time is long past when resolutions and expressions of good will will suffice for the children and families of our society. It is time for action, not words. And the action that will best demonstrate our respect for families and concern for children is the prompt enactment of the measure before us today. Let me finally say just a brief word about the voluntary nature of the services to be provided under the child and family services bill and about the question of parental involvement. First, children may be enrolled in programs providing services only after a written request from their parents or guardians has been received. Second, the bill requires parental involvement at every stage in the planning, development, and operation of the programs. Third, parents are to be part of the councils which are required at both the prime sponsor and local program levels. Finally, parents themselves will choose which services they wish for their children. Let me conclude by reiterating that the provisions of this bill are not. etched in stone, and I look forward to the testimony of our witnesses today regarding improvements which might be made in the legislation. Senator MONDALE. I want to say also a one word of welcome to Mrs. Edelman for her fine work in the past and her efforts regarding child development, and I am sure there are going to be questions as to whether these proposals are adequate or extensive enough. We, on this committee, are ultimately going to have to make some choices and adjustments, and this will not be easy. Welcome to the committee. STATEMENT OF MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN, WASHINGTON RE- Mrs. EDELMAN. Chairman Brademas, Chairman Mondale, and members of the committee, I am Marian Wright Edelman, and I am here today, thanks to your invitation, to testify on behalf of the Washington Research Project Action Council. The Action Council is a public interest lobbying organization which focuses its attention on legislation which affects children, especially low income and minority group children. It has served as coordinator of an ad hoc informal coalition of nearly 50 national organizations, many of whom were instrumental in securing passage, with your leadership, of a comprehensive child development bill in 1971, and all of whom maintain their interest in enactment of such legislation now. The Action Council also works closely with over 400 individuals and organizations throughout the country who are interested in improving child care services in their own communities. I am also director of the Children's Defense Fund, a child advocacy project, which has spent the last 22 years gathering evidence about find the condition of children in this country. CDF will issue during 1975 a number of reports on problems faced by large numbers of American children. We seek to correct the problems we uncover through Federal and State administrative policy changes and monitoring, litigation, public information, and support to local groups and parents who are trying to make life better for our youngest citizens. Above all, I am here as the parent of three preschool children. Like every parent, I want the best of everything for my children. But unless we insure that children other than our own have a decent chance to grow up healthy and whole, all of our children will be left a costly legacy in services, in crime, in alienation, and in national division. Many voices are now raised against considering new domestic spending programs. Although he hesitates little about recommending new expenditures for defense, President Ford counsels cutbacks in those programs directly benefiting families and children, like food stamps and child nutrition. We cannot sacrifice our children in times of economic trouble. Federal support for child care services had its largest growth during the depression of the thirties, under Franklin Roosevelt, when funds were authorized so that children would not suffer irreparable hardship. It is our children who will suffer most later by neglect now. The infants and toddlers we were seeking to help in 1971 are ready to start school. The preschoolers were already in third and fourth grade. And thousands more children have been born at a disadvantage because their mothers did not have decent nutrition and prenatal services. To those who ask whether the time is right for this kind of categorical legislation, in this economy my answer is an unequivocal yes! The recession has increased the urgency for child care services. As the purchasing power of the dollar declines, more and more families require assistance-food, health care, subsidized services to meet the basic survival needs of their children. 57-649 O pt. 176 10 breadth And as the unemployment rolls grow, particularly with the increase in male unemployment, the general sense of economic insecurity may well be forcing more mothers to take part-time jobs, and may be keeping more new mothers in the work force after their children are born. The waiting lines for decent child care are not disappearing. Investment in child development programs can help stimulate the economy because it will create jobs. If we are going to maintain the child-staff ratios necessary for quality programs, we will have to employ a lot of people. However, let me inject a word of caution here. Child care work is a separate distinct profession. It is not just makework. It needs men and women with warmth, openness, and demonstrated effectiveness in dealing with young children. Academic credentials, by themselves, do not measure those kinds of skills. Parents and community people who are employed in programs like Head Start and neighborhood child care facilities, who come from the child's own environment, are providing some of the best care for children today. If one of our goals is to keep families together-and I think that is the primary one-then helping community people work with children, while providing the means for them to support their families with dignity, has a double payoff. What then should we be trying to accomplish with comprehensive child care legislation? And what are the main questions and fears that have to be addressed by you in your subsequent hearings? The principal objective of this legislation has always been to provide services to families who want and need them in order to meet the comprehensive needs of their children. We need to make the record clear on this point. This is not just a day care bill, although the lack of sufficient quality day care options is one of the most pressing needs in many communities today. It is not only or primarily an early childhood education bill, although education is one of the components of a comprehensive program. It is not a bill just for poor children, because many children and families require decent child care options. It is not a bill just to provide group care for young children. Parents must be able to choose from a wide variety of arrangements, including in-home, family, and group care, before and after school programs, and work-based facilities. It is not only a program for working mothers. Nor is it designed to encourage more women to enter the work force. We are trying to deal with the needs of children whose mothers already work, and to meet the needs of children whose mothers do not work but whose families need help. In sum, this legislation seeks to provide the framework and the funds for a community to deal with its own most urgent needshealth, nutrition, family support services, outreach, prenatal care, day care, preschool education-whatever they may be in that particular locality. That a crying need for this kind of program exists is clear. For example: Forty percent of the young children in this country are not even fully immunized against childhood diseases. That is an alarming step backward in meeting the most basic child health needs. Only one out of three AFDC children who need eyeglasses get them. At least 10 million children, most of them poor, receive no health care at all. Only 11 percent of the pregnant women and children under age 4 who need supplemental feeding programs for basic nutrition get them. Over 4 million children have limited or no English-speaking ability, and only a handful of them are enrolled in bilingual, bicultural programs. Some look at this evidence and ask whether child development legislation is the best way to meet these ends. Why not provide enough money to families to enable them to purchase these services for their children? I believe in an adequate income maintenance program. Lack of income is a major source of stress in families today, and the distorted welfare system encourges separation of families as a condition of financial assistance. However, while an adequate income maintenance program might well eliminate or reduce the need for public subsidy of the cost of certain services to children, there will still be a need for public funds to encourage the development of facilities and services. Gaps in child development services exist now, not only because people do not have the money to pay for such services, but because the services just are not there, even for families who can afford to pay. More essentially, however, one has to view the argument in terms of practical possibilities. A family will not have enough resources to purchase even the most basic child care services until we are ready to talk about income maintenance levels at least twice and maybe three times as much as the administration has been willing to suggest or the Congress has been willing to consider in the past. I am not prepared to sacrifice all of the children who are out there now, with needs that we might begin to meet with the kind of legislation you are considering, to wait for the time when we have a political climate that will support a truly adequate income maintenance program. Other opponents fear this kind of legislation on grounds that it will encourage women to work and thus undermine mother-child relationships. First of all, there is evidence that working mothers spend as much or more one-to-one time with their children, and find as much or more enjoyment in child care, as non working mothers. Second, there is no hard evidence to show that harm to mother-child relations, or harm to children's development, will occur if children, like other members of the family, leave the house daily to be cared for by friendly consistent adults. Third, this position ignores the reality of what already exists. Most women work because they have to. Of the 27 million children under age 18 whose mothers work, 12 million are in female-headed households, where the median income is $6,195 if the mother works, and only $3,760 if she does not. In another 1 million families, the husband's income is inadequate to maintain minimum financial independence. And, in most cases, a wife's earnings make the difference between poverty and middle class. One-fourth of these children of working mothers are below school age. Since 1970, the number of children of working mothers has in creased by 1.2 million while the total number of children in the country has gone down by 2.2 million. Yet, in spite of all these facts, there are still less than 1 million slots in licensed child care facilities. Some argue that we do not have enough evidence of long-term gains from Head Start to justify putting new Federal resources in these kinds of programs. That position assumes that the success of such programs should be measured in terms of lasting IQ gain, a traditional white middle class yardstick. However, if we measure these programs in terms of the things that really matter to many parents and children-elimination of health problems, improved nutrition, stimulation of the child's curiosity, changes in other community institutions-then they are unquestionably successful. Evaluators of these kinds of programs must be extremely cautious about imposing their own values on other people's children. Many parents may not care so much whether their children get into an Ivy League college. But they do care, as I do, about whether they are in good health, can see and hear, are getting enough to eat, are able to relate to their peers and, above all, are happy. A mother worries when she has to work and cannot find someone she can trust to be nice to her children, to keep them warm and clean and fed, to help them grow and learn about themselves and about the world around them. Poor parents worry when they cannot get enough food, when they cannot figure out what is wrong when their child complains of a stomach ache, and they cannot afford a doctor to help them. Cognitive development is important, but it is only one of many important needs which children and families have, and which this legislation attempts to address. Some child psychologists are moving away from the heavy emphasis on the first 5 years of life as essential to a child's development. They point to evidence that developmental gaps in early childhood can be filled at a later stage of life. But that is no argument against early intervention. It only supports the argument which all of us here, I think, have always made-that you cannot intervene at just one stage in a child's life and expect that to be enough. Still, the fact is, that while it may be possible to correct a child health problem at the age of 10, it is probably easier and certainly better to do that when the child is 2 or 3. Similarly, it may be possible, when you discover at the age of 8 that a child has a hearing or sight problem, to correct that problem and provide the remedial services necessary to help him catch up with the rest of the third graders. But is it not fairer to the child to catch the problem and deal with it before he gets to school? And what about the child who starts first grade with no understanding of the English language? Could not a bilingual, bicultural preschool experience based on that child's own heritage and environment help to prepare him for the first day of school? Child care legislation must support families. This means including parents. |