[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 144 (Thursday, October 23, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11027-S11028]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               CHILD CARE

  Mr. COATS. Mr. President, today the White House is sponsoring an all-
day conference on child care. I believe the President and First Lady 
have correctly identified this as an important issue to families, and 
particularly to working families in America. A number of experts have 
been invited to testify and to participate in panel discussions 
throughout the day.
  This is an important but yet also a very complex issue. The 
complexity of the issue is that there is one segment of our population 
that seriously needs high-quality day care in order to work--work that 
for many has been required through welfare reform. Others work out of 
economic necessity; both mother and father need to be employed. And 
again for others, who are single parents raising their children, they 
need to provide the financial wherewithal to do that. The focus on the 
child care conference at the White House correctly focuses on this 
segment of our population.
  The conference will focus on three questions: how to increase access 
for child care; how to make it more affordable; and how to guarantee 
the quality of child care so that children will be safe.
  But, what the conference did not focus on was another segment of the 
population, in fact a majority segment of the population, the nearly 50 
percent who do not have both parents working and another 25 percent who 
do not work out of the home full time. One of the questions, 
unfortunately, that will not be discussed at the White House today is 
how we can ensure that we are not discouraging or sending the wrong 
signals to the second segment, those parents, those mothers who stay 
home and do not work and those parents who keep one parent at home 
raising the child while the other works or they take separate shifts or 
they have worked out arrangements to raise their own children.
  There is a legitimate need, I believe, to address the first question, 
how we provide child care for working families, for single mothers, for 
welfare mothers and others. But there is also a legitimate and 
essential question that needs to be discussed along with that, and that 
is what can we do to help those who have made the decision to stay at 
home?
  We have recently had some exciting developments concerning infant 
brain development, about the much earlier than originally thought 
development, the connection of synapses that occur, the billions of 
these connections that occur at very, very early ages and how important 
it is to recognize that and to make sure that children receive the 
correct upbringing, stimulation and so forth to foster that 
development.
  Again, unfortunately, there has been little discussion along with 
that about the critical nature of the emotional development of the 
infant, because, after all, as many experts have told us, it is the 
emotional development of the infant that is the fuel that drives the 
automobile, to use a metaphor. Unfortunately, there has been little 
discussion about this in the recent child care debate that focuses on 
those early years and the need for correct and effective childhood 
development. Recently, as chairman of the Subcommittee on Children and 
Families, I held a hearing in which we heard testimony from Dr. Diane 
Fisher, who is a practicing clinical psychologist. I want to quote from 
her:

       Imagine a brilliant, stimulated, optimally educated child 
     who is lacking in self-esteem, self-control, identity or 
     discipline. This in fact is what we are hearing about in our 
     schools today--privileged, indulged children who are wired to 
     the Internet but without a moral compass or a sense of 
     connection to the adults who are supposed to be present in 
     their lives.

  Our committee heard about how mothers are biologically hard wired to 
form a close emotional tie with their children; that this bonding 
experience is not a quick experience, something to be accomplished in a 
matter of weeks or even months, but something that is a gradual process 
that proceeds slowly and over time. Anybody who is a parent knows that. 
We don't need studies or experts to come and testify as to the kind of 
bonding that takes place between parents and children, particularly 
mother and child, in those first critical early months and years and 
then throughout their growing experience for the next 15 or 20 years or 
so.
  For the last 15 years I have been involved, first, as the ranking 
Republican on the Early Childhood, Youth and Families Committee in the 
House of Representatives during my service there and in the last 9 
years as chairman or ranking member of the Children and Families 
Subcommittee here in the Senate. Over that time I have listened to and 
read and personally visited experts in the field--sociologists, 
psychologists, child development experts, and so forth--who have 
impressed upon me the absolutely critical element of the emotional 
attachment, the emotional connection, the bonding process between 
mother and child with infants, and mothers and fathers with their 
children, and how absolutely essential this correct attachment is for 
successful childhood development.
  Most of this is not accomplished through a complex formula. It is not 
accomplished through a lot of educational training, academic training, 
or how-to books. It is accomplished intuitively by a mother motivated 
by love and enjoyment of that child. It takes an enormous amount of 
love and motivation to want to pay attention to the subtle cues that an 
infant or a young child sends on a moment-by-moment, hour-by-hour, 
daily basis. Frankly, it is very rare to find a caregiver who is either 
able or motivated by that same degree of love and attention and 
motivation to pay that kind of attention to a child. Often they have a 
number of children to look out for, and it is just keeping some 
semblance of order in the child-care facility that becomes the 
paramount challenge for the child-care provider.
  We talk a lot about and they are talking today at the White House a 
lot about the term quality. Often that is used by the experts, or those 
who are discussing this, as a code word, ``quality'' meaning we need 
more control, we need more regulation, we need more oversight of child 
care facilities.
  The quality of child care, for those children, especially children 0 
to 3, is more than just having developmentally appropriate materials or 
an effective well-located site staffed by trained individuals that is 
important in child care, although it is only one form of child care, 
but quality is, I believe, more clearly related, and according to the 
experts we had testify before our committee, more clearly related to 
love and nurture and, as such, I believe, we have to recognize that it 
is a child's mother, a child's father that are in the best position to 
offer that love and nurture to their children.
  As one mother told me, and this is someone who holds an advanced 
degree in family therapy, an expert in the field of raising children, 
she said a baby, a young child, needs to be adored. There isn't a child 
care provider in the world that can adore my child like I can adore my 
child. Only a mother can truly adore a child, provide the kind of 
nurturing that children need when they are growing up. We know that and 
most American people know this.
  A recent Gallup poll for the Los Angeles Times said 73 percent of the 
American public believes too many children are being raised in day care 
and not nearly enough are being raised by their mother at home, and 
children fare best when raised by their mother at home. That figure was 
up from 68

[[Page S11028]]

percent who responded that way in 1987.
  If we truly believe in quality child care, then I believe we should 
focus much of our attention, not just on ways in which we can provide 
improved quality care for children in day care settings, for those 
mothers who have no choice, for those families that have no choice, for 
those welfare mothers who have no choice but to move into the 
workplace, but we should also provide equal attention to those 
initiatives that can make it easier for families to have at least one 
parent remain at home, those families that can juggle their work 
schedules so that the primary care for their child is from parent to 
child rather than from paid provider to child.
  The White House is going to be issuing a number of initiatives, 
according to reports, about how we as a society, both the private 
sector and the public sector, can provide assistance for child care 
facilities to improve the quality and access to child care. But 
shouldn't we also be discussing the positive family friendly policies 
that can provide assistance to those who have the ability or make the 
choice to stay at home with their children, like extended job protected 
leave?
  As a Republican conservative, I broke with many of my fellow 
colleagues on the issue of family leave. I believe it is an important 
provision to guarantee that mothers have the choice of taking at least 
12 weeks after the child is born to be with that child, but beyond 
that, the initiatives of part-time work, flextime, comptime, job 
sharing, telecommuting, and other corporate policies which a majority 
of families would prefer if they had the option, because many parents 
are willing to work less and provide more care for their own children 
if it is possible for them to do so and still maintain economic 
viability.
  According to a 1991 survey sponsored by the Hilton Hotel Corp., two-
thirds of Americans said they would take salary reductions in order to 
get more time off from work. There is another way we can focus Federal 
attention appropriately on making it easier for families to provide 
care for children at home: Tax fairness.
  In my time in the Congress, I haven't agreed on too many issues with 
former Representative Pat Schroeder, but one thing she said that I did 
identify with and I have always remembered is she said you can get a 
bigger tax break for breeding racehorses than you can for raising 
children, and she was right. The Tax Code over the years has penalized 
parents for spending time with their children by narrowly linking tax 
benefits to day care expenses and provisions on the other side of the 
equation. The dependent care tax credit, for example, is constructed in 
such a way that the more time a child spends in day care and the 
higher, therefore, the family's day care expenses, the greater the tax 
benefits.
  Mr. President, I don't want to ignore the reality that growing 
economic and cultural pressures make it difficult for parents to spend 
as much time with their children as they would like. We all face that 
problem. Tying tax benefits to day care expenses makes matters worse, 
not better. It penalizes parents for caring for their own children by 
redistributing income by those who make extensive use of out-of-home 
professional day care services. Tax benefits which favor day care over 
parental care should be replaced, I suggest, by increasing benefits for 
all families with young children.
  While I fully expect that the White House Conference on Child Care 
will emerge with new policy recommendations, such as model standards 
for quality care or the expansion of the military model of child care 
in the private sector, I would caution that we need to pay equal 
attention to the facts that we have learned about the critical 
importance, especially in early years, about the need of strong 
attachment between mother, father and child.
  We also must ask the question: Are there policies which we can 
support and provide leadership on that will, in fact, make that 
attachment a true priority? Because if we have learned anything over 
the past couple of decades, it is how critical that attachment between 
child and family, mother and child, father and child is and the 
uncomfortable fact that for many, quality child care, though important, 
can never be an effective substitute for parental attachment.
  I hope, Mr. President, that in this day of focus on provision of 
child care, we can also focus our attention on what true quality care 
is and look for ways in which we can initiate and implement policies in 
the Congress and in the workplace that can provide mothers and families 
with this very, very important and essential element to successful 
child raising.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  Mr. ABRAHAM addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
  Mr. ABRAHAM. Thank you, Mr. President. I also thank the Presiding 
Officer for giving this Senator the opportunity to speak at this point 
as opposed to presiding. I appreciate his consideration.

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