Philip Morris Companies Inc. stock has experienced a dramatic increase in price during the last six months, but stockholders hope that its smart business strategy will not be infected by the silliness of its public affairs department. RM commissioned Louis Harris to do a survey on child care, but it does not please anyone at all.
Although the survey results are attractively printed on glossy paper with color graphics, they can’t stand thoughtful analysis. It’s obvious that the questions were written and sequenced to elicit predetermined results.
The Harris/PM survey reveals one of the principal problems we have with this entire issue: the fact that so much advocacy and advice is proffered by people who have no children and therefore have no first-hand knowledge of what it means to bear and care for preschool children. These unqualified, inexperienced promoters of federally-financed and federally-regulated babysitting range from the high-visibility Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and feminist Gloria Steinem to the hundreds of children staffers on Capitol Hill.
The Harris/PM survey did its pseudo-scientific survey of 2,500 adults and discovered that only 19 percent of respondents had a preschool child. Then Harris surveyed another 1,534 parents of young children, leaving the survey still with a majority of respondents who did not have any preschool children.
The Harris/PM survey used the offensive semantics of “working” versus “non-working” mothers. The notion that fulltime mothers of preschool children don’t “work” is the snide attitude of childless feminists who belittle the hard work and real value (to society as well as to the family) of caring for infants and small children.
The 24-page published survey was clearly skewed to promote the idea that the Federal Government should finance and regulate daycare for employed mothers. Buried in the survey, however, is the revealing figure that “53 percent say that children under 6 are cared for at home by their mother.” That tallies almost perfectly with Census Bureau figures which report that 54 percent of preschool children are in fact card for in their own homes by their own mothers.
The responsible, caring response to this figure would be to explore ways to increase this percentage, NOT try to provide incentives to reduce this figure by subsidizing federally-regulated warehouses for children. When the Harris/PM survey asked what type of care families prefer for preschool children, 75 percent chose care by a child’s relative and only 13 percent opted for “daycare groups,” a non-precise term that could include neighborhood daycare mothers and religious daycare, both of which would be disallowed under the liberal babysitting bills.
The Harris/PM survey reported that 85 percent of Americans are convinced that the Federal Government should establish daycare regulations and there is no substantial evidence that they are unsatisfactory.
The overwhelming majority of parents choose family child care in preference to licensed, center-based daycare, anyway, and for good reasons. Family and neighbor child care providers are usually personally known to the parents and provide environments far less subject to daycare diseases.
If you have the strength to read through to the end of this Harris/PM survey, you will find that 97 percent of respondents believe that “parents must play an important part” in selecting child-care alternatives and that 96 percent believe that “parents should be able to choose among several options to decide which child-care program is best suited for their own children.” The 3 and 4 percent, respectively, who want to deny parents these rights are probably the child developmentalists who are salivating at the thought of taking control of preschool children away from parents.
Despite all the loaded questions, the survey still came out with more people favoring President Bush’s child tax credit proposal than not favoring.
This remarkable result surfaced even though respondents were not told that the tax credit proposal is the only federal approach that does not discriminate against mothers who care for their own children or against employed mothers who use daycare by relatives, friends, neighbors, or churches. If respondents had been told the truth about the tax credit plan, it is likely that all respondents would favor it except the liberal bureaucrats and social service professionals who want to increase their own turf and control at the expense of the family.
Philip Morris’s president said that he hoped the survey would manifest the corporation’s “interest in broad social concerns.” In fact, the survey is bad public relations because it shows that the corporation’s officers are naïve and gullible about controversial political issues.
