Some 20 of the leading women’s magazines are currently carrying a questionnaire on child care which is touted as “the largest magazine survey of its kind.” It is sponsored by the Child Care Action Campaign and the Great American Family Tour, two organizations that have been aggressively lobbying for federally-financed and federally-regulated baby-sitting.
The fine print on the questionnaire states that the results will be presented to the President and released nationally in May. It is clear that the questionnaire was devised to produce the results that the sponsoring organizations have already predetermined.
Question 1 is “Do you think the federal government pays enough attention to child care and other family concerns?” The “no” answers will be used to argue that the public supports the federal government “paying attention” by creating a child care bureaucracy, imposing federal regulations, and starting massive federal spending and subsidies for daycare.
But one might very easily answer “no” and intend that the federal government should “pay attention” to child care and family concerns by giving families a tax credit for each child, as President George Bush has proposed. But the survey sponsors won’t interpret the results that way, you can be sure.
Question 2 is “Do you think family issues should be a top priority for the President and Congress?” Again, one might very we’ll answer “yes” but not in the slightest mean that “top priority” equals higher taxes, higher spending, or more regulations. “Top priority” could just as well mean tax fairness for families and tax credits for children.
Question 3 is “Are your child care concerns with: Finding care, Cost, Reliability, Safety, Making emergency arrangements, Quality of care?” Note how the fulltime homemaker is completely omitted from the list.
If you are a fulltime homemaker, getting along on the median family income of single earner families which is $27,000, your child care concern is probably how to pay your monthly bills, and you would welcome some tax reduction to make that possible. But there is no box for you to check. In the survey, you simply don’t exist.
This becomes even clearer in question 4 in which you are asked to check which of the following statements you agree with: (a) it is the sole responsibility of parents to pay for child care, (b) government should make good, affordable child care available for all children who need it, or (c) businesses should make good, affordable child care available for all children who need it.
The option that is the responsibility of the government to keep taxes on families low enough so that parents can afford to care for their children themselves just isn’t there. Obviously, such an answer would not be welcomed by the sponsors of this survey.
In case you didn’t get the drift, now let’s look at question 5. You are to circle how much you agree or disagree with the following statements. Here we go again.
“The federal government should develop policies to make child care more available and affordable.” For this statement to make any sense, it would have to mean only institutional daycare. Even if you answer “strongly agree” because you want the federal government to develop policies to make mother care more affordable by reducing taxes, you will still be counted by the survey managers as wanting the federal government to go into the subsidized baby-sitting business.
“The federal government should set minimum standards and staff-to-child ratios.” The joker word is “federal.” All state governments now regulate daycare within their own states. The public should be told that federal regulations would increase daycare cost dramatically without any proven benefits.
“The federal government should expand tax breaks to help parents pay for child care.” That statement compounds the discrimination in the survey against fulltime homemakers and traditional families. It would be unjust and highly discriminatory for the federal government to expand tax breaks to help parents to “pay” for child care without making those tax breaks available equally to help parents use mother care (or grandmother care) without cash transfers.
“The federal government should provide money to help parents pay for child care.” Again, it would be unconscionably discriminatory to provide money for parents to “pay” for daycare while denying it to parents who choose parental or relative care.
The sponsors of this survey devised the questions (a) to induce only answers that indicate support for federal baby-sitting legislation and (b) to prevent respondents from giving any answers that support fair treatment for families who care for their own children. It is an axiom of the polling business that you can get any result you want by how you word the question.
