Beyond Research
No one can say what the
welfare-reform bill will bring, but one unlikely outcome already shows signs of
taking place. Child-care policy may finally receive practical, rather than
polemical, attention. For more than three decades, social scientists have been
studying the costs and benefits of child care, and their work has yielded only
one consistent result: Their research is seized upon, waved about, politicized,
and in the end, nothing much gets done. But the polarized stalemate can't
continue much longer, for two reasons. Child care has become an inescapable
public issue, and social scientists themselves have been expressing a new
humility about child-care research. Politicians now have to stop hiding behind
the experts and start improvising policy.
Does the welfare-reform
bill provide enough money to take care of the kids whose single parents are now
forced to work? The lines that get drawn on that central question are fairly
predictable. Liberal child advocates, the Children's Defense Fund prominent
among them, regard the funding--$20 billion, available over six years--as
almost surely insufficient to offer the poor a true choice of quality day care.
"What we know from child-care research," as a press release from Child Trends
Inc. puts the standard position, is that "the quality of child care matters for
children's development, and it matters the most for low-income children."
Conservatives are content to assume that a majority of
women who leave the rolls will rely on free (or cheap) unregulated child care
by relatives and neighbors, as the poor have generally done in the past. Ron
Haskins, an influential Republican staff director on the House Ways and Means
Committee, has been outspoken in invoking social science to defend this
position. The latest research, he argues, has been unable to demonstrate with
any certainty that the quality of day care has much of an impact on a child's
future. Why invest more money if it won't make a difference in the long
run?
The interesting twist here is
that, as far as the science is concerned, conservatives are right, and liberals
lag a wishful step behind when they cite sure proof that early day care
decisively influences a child's development. To make sense of the shakier
expertise both sides now confront, it helps to trace the history of child-care
research through three unsettling waves during the past quarter century.
The first wave crested
in the 1970s, when researchers faced the question: What happens when mothers
work? The mood was apprehensive, the phrasing negative--what harm was
being done to babies whose mothers leave them in the care of others?
Psychologists looked at maternal-infant bonding as measured by the so-called
"Strange Situation" test, in which they observed the partings and reunions of
babies and mothers and graded the baby's behavior from secure to "avoidant."
All in all, the evidence seemed to suggest that infants who spent more than 20
hours a week in nonmaternal care risked being less attached to their mothers,
and risked displaying uncooperative behavior later in life.
When these findings left the lab, they were
promptly construed as political propaganda. They were part of a "backlash
against the women's movement," declared Sandra Scarr, a professor of psychology
at the University of Virginia and prominent day-care expert (now the CEO of
KinderCare), in the strident mood of the moment. "The advice for women has
always been to get out of the work force. This is just another way of saying
the same thing."
The second wave of studies
followed in the 1980s. They were more textured and hopeful, the question behind
them less dour: What kind of nonmaternal care can help infants and children?
Longitudinal studies sought to measure children's "development"--their language
skills, school achievement, cognitive gains, social and emotional adjustment,
etc.--given different kinds and quality of care in their early years. When the
widely varying studies detected short-term benefits from better-quality care,
liberals and child advocates trumpeted them. Meanwhile, conservatives seized on
findings that such benefits faded in later years.
Day-care research since
the early 1990s has been characterized by what the experts call a more
"ecological" approach. Studies have lately aimed to take into account
children's family characteristics--parental living arrangements and attitudes,
income, experience with welfare, etc. But as Sandra Scarr confessed in a recent
paper surveying the child-care landscape, the results have pulled the rug out
from under two decades of work. Taken together, these studies seem to show
that, given basically safe child-care settings, the quality of care has next to
no measurable, independent effect on children's long-term fates. Poor day care
doesn't seem permanently to harm kids whose lives are otherwise in OK shape.
Nor can good day care be solidly proven to give a dramatic or lasting boost to
kids whose home lives are a mess. Sometimes it can help, but a child's family
appears to be what really counts.
In retrospect, it's clear that earlier studies
made too much of small effects on development that were derived from very small
samples. The complex interaction between family and day-care situations--to say
nothing of individual temperaments--defies ready measurement. But where does
that leave us? Liberals and child-care advocates, no longer armed with evidence
to bolster their demands for big investments in child-care quality, have two
choices. They can either rely on outmoded studies to argue with conservative
politicians, who, for the moment, have the more authoritative pretext for
scrimping on day-care cost and quality. Or they can follow the example set by
Scarr. Acknowledging the new research (and doing some of it herself), Scarr
still champions quality, but now on more immediate, less quantitative grounds.
Her approach points the way for liberals to gain credibility by shedding the
onus of being "social engineers," and take their turn at playing the populist
anti-expert card.
Liberals and child advocates can now explain,
as conservatives have before them, that social policy isn't about enforcing
officially approved "choices." They can say that, regardless of what the
experts tell us, it's perfectly obvious that cheap care by relatives and
neighbors shouldn't become the only feasible alternative for struggling
mothers. Parents can make the best decisions for their kids, and if they are
looking for quality day care, it isn't likely to be because someone in a lab
coat tells them it will mean an IQ 4.6 points higher at age 15. It will be
because they hope it may mean a happier, more secure week for their kid and a
less anxious one for themselves. What's more, the chance to take an active
choice in the matter as a parent may itself be a step toward the more
successful, better monitored arrangements that poor working parents--and more
middle-class parents, too--say they need and want.
A similarly pragmatic spirit
beckons on the conservative side. Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin
and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York, the conservative vanguard on the issue,
show no inclination to exploit research that says, in effect, Why care about
day-care quality? Instead they're busy scrounging for funds to spread good care
more widely. Thompson recently came up with $25 million more for "affordable
quality child care" as welfare mothers head to work--$20 million to ensure that
the working poor aren't edged out of the subsidized care they count on, and $5
million to increase the supply and quality of overall care. Of course, this
decision raises plenty of questions of its own. Is $25 million more going to be
enough in a state like Wisconsin? How should that money be used--on more
informal arrangements or on more day-care centers, on stiffer regulations or on
other financial incentives to improve quality? On some of everything? The
political debate over those questions will be more practical and less
ideological, paradoxically enough, if scientific claims about a long-term
payoff, or the lack of one, are left out of it.
