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Essay on Childcare in Working Class Families
Childcare serves two functions: support for maternal employment and developmental enrichment for children. Public policies in the United States for these two functions have followed very different paths, in part because their goals are different (Phillips 158-189). For low-income families, subsidies for childcare constitute the major public policy to support maternal employment. Head Start and other early intervention programs represent government efforts to provide developmental enrichment.
From 1935–1996, the major federal program providing cash support for lowincome families with children was Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). By the early 1980s, however, there was declining political support for paying parents, almost all of whom were single mothers, to stay home with their children. President Ronald Reagan referred to “welfare queens”, and policies to move welfare recipients into employment entered the political agenda. One rationale for this change was that mothers at all economic levels were in the labor market, so mothers in the welfare system should be expected to work as well.
This trend culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, which ended AFDC as an entitlement program and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) (Greenberg et al. 27). One of the major goals of this legislation was to move families from welfare to work. Indeed, after 1996 the number of people receiving welfare declined dramatically, and employment among single mothers with low incomes increased. As a result of these changes in employment among mothers at all income levels, most young children in the United States spend some of their time in childcare—that is, in regular care by someone other than their parents.
To meet the needs of employed parents, a patchwork of childcare services has evolved in the United States with little public planning. Unlike the public schools, which are intended to provide education for all children at government expense, childcare is largely a market-based system with little centralization.......
