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Why has child care legislation developed along its present course? How did the political players influence lawmakers? What do the politics of child care legislation over the past thirty years indicate for the future? Based on more than one hundred interviews with legislators and executive branch ...

Why has child care legislation developed along its present course? How did the political players influence lawmakers? What do the politics of child care legislation over the past thirty years indicate for the future? Based on more than one hundred interviews with legislators and executive branch officials, archival research, and secondary sources, this book looks at the politics behind child care legislation, rather than analyzing child care as a work and family issue. Identifying key junctures at which major child care bills were introduced and debated (1971, 1990, and 1996), Sally Cohen examines the politics surrounding each of these events and identifies the political structures and negotiations that evolved in the intervening years. In addition, Cohen looks at the impact the election of President Clinton has had on child care policymaking, and how child care legislation became part of other issues, including welfare reform, crime prevention, school readiness, and tax policy revisions.

In this important book, William T. Gormley, Jr., argues that child care is a social problem of critical importance and that there are compelling reasons for government intervention. Because child care quality affects how children grow up - for better or for worse - the government has a ...

In this important book, William T. Gormley, Jr., argues that child care is a social problem of critical importance and that there are compelling reasons for government intervention. Because child care quality affects how children grow up - for better or for worse - the government has a responsibility to improve and reshape the child care system. Gormley offers a balanced, comprehensive analysis of market, government, and societal failures to ensure quality child care in the United States. He finds that unreliable child care contributes to family stress and undermines efforts to achieve educational readiness, welfare reform, and gender equity; that regulators and family support agencies do not distinguish sharply enough between good and bad child care facilities; and that government and businesses provide inadequate financial and logistical support. As a result, children suffer, as does society as a whole. Everybody's Children presents evidence on how different states and communities have responded to child care challenges. Gormley prescribes the roles to be played by federal, state, and local governments, for-profit and nonprofit child care providers, churches, schools, and family support agencies. He offers a number of reform strategies and argues that different levels of government and societal institutions must work together to achieve the goals of efficiency, justice, choice, discretion, coordination, and responsiveness - and, ultimately, to create the best system possible for our children.

America has long been heralded as the land of opportunity, but for our very youngest citizens, it is too often a land of despair. Every year, a shocking 32,000 American babies die before they reach their first birthday. More than one-quarter of the children under age three live in families with ...

America has long been heralded as the land of opportunity, but for our very youngest citizens, it is too often a land of despair. Every year, a shocking 32,000 American babies die before they reach their first birthday. More than one-quarter of the children under age three live in families with incomes below the poverty line, and only 67% of children under two get the necessary series of immunizations needed to protect them from life-threatening illnesses. Despite America's world leadership in research in child healthcare and development, in all the statistical indicators of children's well-being--physical, developmental, educational and behavioral--we lag well behind most advanced industrialized societies. While recent years have seen some piecemeal attention paid to policy issues affecting preschoolers aged three to five, our infants and toddlers are still perilously ignored, largely invisible in American social policy. In Starting Right, internationally recognized child and family policy experts Sheila B. Kamerman and Alfred J. Kahn present the pressing practical, political, and moral reasons why we must invest more time and money in America's youngest children, and their families. Singling out the best of current childcare policies and practices in the U.S. and western Europe, they call for a three-pronged approach to helping parents raise young children well: ensuring adequate income through strategies such as a child tax credit; providing essential services such as children's healthcare, child care, and family support programs; and offering working parents more generous leaves to spend time with their children. Kamerman and Kahn carefully assess the costs of implementing each of their proposals, demonstrating that the price is neither unreasonable nor beyond our means. Drawing on their own studies and all the latest research, the authors show that this investment in our children's early years is ultimately cheaper in both financial and human terms than the alternatives we live with now. For example in 1950, when Finland was just establishing its healthcare system, the infant mortality rate was 43.5 per 1,000 live births. The Finnish system emphasizes free and universal access to healthcare for all citizens, including family planning services, prenatal care, and home visits by nurses to families with newborns. Contagious childhood diseases have now been virtually eliminated, and by 1990 the infant mortality rate had plunged to 5.5 per 1,000, making Finland the world leader in the conquest of infant mortality. A clarion call to action and a reasoned and attainable prescription for change, Starting Right lays the groundwork for providing all of America's youngest children with the fighting chance they deserve to lead happy, healthy, and productive lives. At stake are our children's futures, and America's future as well.