Where is the pressure coming from to make baby-sitting of preschool children, including infants, a federal function? Of course, we know that the liberals always propose a new federal agency as the “solution” to every problem, and we know that the feminists always want to unload the “burden” of child care onto the government.
It’s also obvious that the American people don’t want to submit their children to federally-regulated daycare. In actual practice, families are “voting with their feet” in overwhelmingly (by at least 75 percent) choosing in-home child care by mothers or other relatives, and even the surveys on the subject that are outrageously loaded in favor of federal solutions come out in favor of mother-case, parental-decision making, and tax credits which do not discriminate against the mother in the home of religious daycare.
Last year the Washington Post said that child care legislation “ought to await the outcome of the national debate now taking place between the presidential candidates.” So, why are Congressmen toying around with Dukakis-style daycare (which imposes federal regulations and discriminates against mothers in the home) when the election results and the moral high ground are both clearly on the side of Bush-style tax credits (which are nondiscriminatory and allow full parental decision-making)?
Perhaps the answer to that question is the existence of a large network of advocates of federal baby-sitting, operating with generous funding from federal and foundation sources, with huge staffs of personnel, and political contacts both on Capitol Hill and in the individual states. Not only is this network hidden from the public scrutiny, but its social agenda is kept under wraps in order to avoid public debate and discussion.
The liberal Dodd ABC bill did not spring full-grown from the head of Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) like Athena from the head of Zeus. The network had been working for years to legislate federal baby-sitting and to create an apparatus in every state to receive funds flowing from the ABC bill.
The National Academy of Sciences, a private organization chartered decades ago by Congress, appears to be the mainspring of this network of persons trying to change the United States into a Swedish-style welfare state with national infant-to-school-age daycare paid for by the taxpayers and controlled by the government. With a closed membership selection process, it is able to elect like-minded colleagues as successors, and to channel taxpayer and foundation grants to their ideological soulmates.
The National Academy of Sciences covers its tracks through the creation of committees within committees. The NAS is the parent of a Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, which in turn birthed a Committee on Child Development Research and Public Policy, which in turn spun off a Panel on Child Care Policy.
That Panel then set up the feminist-dominated Child Care Action Campaign, which is the visible tip of the iceberg promoting federal baby-sitting. That is the front that staged a media event at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in March 1988, and has created a system of state affiliates which are now salivating at the prospect of a new flow of federal funds.
Researchers whose studies support the national daycare concept are rewarded with grants from public and private money. Persons who are trained in the Zigler system are placed on relevant Congressional committees where they can control hearings, write reports, direct spending, and pass legislation.
The NAS Committee on Child Development created a research site for the development of a Swedish-style daycare system at the Wellesley College Research Center on Women. With funding from federal agencies and the Ford, Carnegie and Levi-Strauss foundations, a demonstration site for a comprehensive public-private partnership project of daycare based in the public schools was set up at Fairfax, Virginia.
Realizing that their objective is not popular, one of their chief spokesmen, Professor Edward Zigler of the Center for Child Development at Yale University, an NAS affiliate, said that to “keep quiescent the vocal and active minority of taxpayers who do not wish to see public monies expended to aid women’s entry into the out-of-home workforce, I suggest a fee system.” The fee is meant to be abolished eventually as the national daycare system becomes part of the public school system.
American families don’t want a daycare system dreamed up by ivory-tower academics and so-called professionals who think they are better qualified to raise children than parents. The most important factors in raising children are love, commitment, and self-sacrifice, and you can’t buy those at any price.
Congressmen had better learn to recognize the difference between the voices of the self-serving bureaucracy and tax-funded lobbyists who are trying to get control of children, and of parents who want to raise their own children. The former appear to have wide access to the media, but the latter clearly have the votes.
