Post by Moses on May 10, 2004 10:00:02 GMT -5
------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 10, 2004
Women Who Leave Welfare Find Few Day Care Options
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
Since the nation's welfare system was overhauled in 1996, New York City has received hundreds of millions of additional state and federal dollars intended to help women leave welfare for work and to greatly expand the city's low-income child care system.
But the money has not significantly increased the number of licensed day care slots, for which the waiting list is now over 36,000. Instead, more than two-thirds of the 14,400 slots created in the last five years are in so-called informal care, the lowest-cost, unlicensed form of child care, which is not inspected or regulated by the state.
There are many reasons for the growth of informal care: it costs the government about one third less per child, it is flexible enough to meet the unconventional hours many poor parents work, and because it is usually provided by a relative or a friend who receives checks directly from the government, women coming off welfare often prefer it to other choices.
But the explosion of informal care in New York and in other parts of the country has been met with concern by advocates for welfare recipients. They cite studies showing that informal care is less stable than licensed care based in centers and homes, and its safety and educational value are unknown.
Worse, they argue, parents leaving welfare do not really have a choice in care, as federal law demands, because they are given a limited time to find child care, and because center-based day care is so oversubscribed.
"By spending limited public resources on informal care, we are failing to invest in the programs that give the poorest children the best opportunities for gaining fundamental learning skills," said Nancy Kolben, executive director of Child Care Inc., a New York-based nonprofit advocacy group. "We could have created child care centers with trained teachers, equipped playgrounds and enriched learning environments. Instead, more children are in unsafe environments or parked in front of a TV."
Because the federal government tracks only some of the money used by the states for child care each year, it is not clear that informal care is increasing throughout the nation. But independent studies indicate that New York is hardly alone in expanding informal care, particularly for people on or just leaving public assistance.
California and Ohio, two other states with large concentrations of welfare and former welfare clients, have also seen sharp increases in similarly unregulated care.
"The incentives for states to expand informal care are much stronger than to expand center-based programs," said Bruce Fuller, co-director of Policy Analysis for California Education, a nonpartisan research group that has studied child care for former welfare families in California, Florida and Maryland. "In the wake of welfare reform, states tried to spread limited money over as many families as they could. The center-based system is stagnating in many states."
Informal care has always been the wild card in the national child care debate. It clearly fills a need for some families; studies consistently show that roughly a third of women leaving welfare take jobs with irregular hours like weekends or late-nights, shifts that licensed daycare centers or even licensed family care often do not cover. And low-income communities are often underserved by child care centers.
Rachel Zawadzki, 27, a Bronx resident with a 7-year-old and a 5-month-old baby, has felt the frustrations of inadequate openings in her neighborhoods. The two children are cared for by a friend in an informal arrangement because she cannot get them into a center.
"I really like my girlfriend," Ms. Zawadzki said, "but she has a small apartment and three kids of her own, and they barely go out."
Moreover, informal care allows the state to subsidize friends and families as caregivers, arrangements that work well for many mothers. Officials at the city's Human Resources Administration, which administers child care payments for women leaving welfare, say that despite encouragement from social workers, mothers leaving welfare often resist licensed care with strangers.
Grandmothers, in fact, account for roughly half the informal child care in New York City, officials say.
But informal care has also long been held suspect by some advocates for the poor, who fear that low-income children, already at risk for low performance, are more likely to be parked in front of a TV and less likely to be taught preschool skills like knowing their colors and numbers.
"We know from the research that low-income kids need a high educational setting," said Deborah Stein, director of federal policy and advocacy for Voices for America's Children, a Washington-based nonprofit group. "And when you start using state money to move kids into settings that are not licensed, which means that they are potentially not safe and not educational, that is a problem."
Such groups say federal law has not really been neutral on the kind of day care a mother can choose. Because states were under pressure to move women off welfare rolls quickly, they say, federal dollars were attracted to the least expensive, most convenient form of day care.
A 2002 study by Policy Analysis for California Education found that as spending on child care in that state quadrupled from 1996, subsidized informal care grew eightfold.
By comparison, subsidized day care in centers grew anemically, leaving enormous waiting lists - particularly in immigrant communities.
Wade F. Horn, the assistant secretary for children and families at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, said informal child care was not consciously favored by the states but was often preferred by mothers, particularly former welfare recipients in Latino communities.
"Ninety percent of parents report being satisfied with current care," he said.
But many child-care advocates, pointing to long waiting lists for center-based care in New York and California, say that even though people may be satisfied with their current arrangements, it does not mean they are getting their first choice.
Barbara Edinberg, director of the Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition in Connecticut, said poor women often really want centers but cannot get them.
"We interviewed 140 low-income parents and found that the vast majority of parents we surveyed - 70 percent - preferred to put their children in licensed, center-based care, but there wasn't a space available for them or they couldn't afford the cost," she said. "These parents are forced to use informal child care, not because they want to, but because they have no choice."
One hot question in New York is why more child care slots have not been created with the additional federal and state money - some $284 million since 1999, according to the City Council. Part of the answer can be seen in the city budget, which shows that the city simply swapped some of the federal money to reduce its own share of child care spending.
For the fiscal year 2005, for example, New York City is slated to receive another $65 million increase for child care from a federal block grant. But the city proposed using about $40 million of that to reduce the city's share of the expenditures.
"For years now, federal and state money has come into New York to create more slots," says Bill de Blasio, chairman of the general welfare committee of the City Council, "but the city has been supplanting those dollars.
"The intention to create more slots is unmistakable, but on the ground it is not happening."
www.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/nyregion/10child.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=
