Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum held its seventeenth annual leadership training conference in late September in St. Louis, Missouri. Over 400 of Schlafly’s “Eagles” gathered from across the United States to attend the three-day conference which focused almost exclusively on the topic of day care and its effects on the family. Delegates includes homemakers, lobbyists, chapter presidents and political hopefuls whose dedication to small c conservative values and Mrs. Schlafly in particular, was evident.
Highlight of the first day’s agenda was a banquet in honour of its guest speaker, Lt. Col. Oliver North (retired). The $50 dollar-a-plate dinner was held as a fund-raiser for the former Marine who left the Marine Corps. To defend his name in court, perhaps for many years.
A tightly-organized agenda which included platform speakers representing the fields of education, psychiatry, home schooling, law and economics outlined the variety of hazards associated with institutionalized day care.
William Bennett
Secretary of Education, William Bennett declared child care “a family issue” and told delegates that government should “resist policies that hurt families which choose to raise their children at home.” He encouraged measures to help parents care for their children in the home, such as flex-time and part-time work. Contrary to the position of both American and Canadian day care advocates, Bennett identified the family as “the main educational agency of mankind” and the place which provided “the child’s best protection.”
Department of Education specialist Dr. Raymond Moore, an authority on home schooling, looked at the history of day care in relation to the family. Early American day care, he said, consisted of placing the children in the care of black slaves. Moore lambasted modern day care saying “Animals (in the wild) take better care of the children…The earlier you institutionalize your child, the earlier he will institutionalize you!
Moore called for a radical attitudinal change in America’s approach to divorce: “Easy divorce has made marriage a second thought and children (get) in the way.” Children institutionalized in day care feel “rejected” by their parents, said Moore, noting that little boys find day care especially difficult due to a 13-fold increase in learning problems in boys over girls.
Turnover
“A bad home is better than a good institution,” said Moore as he quoted British psychologist John Bowlby. Perhaps his most damning criticism of formal day care is the toll it extracts from those it is meant to serve: young children. Moore points to the high rate of staff turnover, which allows a child to become attached to a child care worker, only to lose that “friend” to another in a series of replacements. The end result, he says, is a child who learns not to depend on anyone for permanency after successive attachments have been broken. A receptive audience applauded Dr. Moore at the close of his address for the pure passion and concern he demonstrated for the needs of little ones.
Make-believe Crises
Douglas J. Besharov, professor at Georgetown Law School and formerly of Osgoode Hall in Toronto, called the current push for universal day care a reaction to a “make believe crisis.” Universal day care, he said, if run according to federally imposed standards, would inflate current costs. “Even minor changes will drive up the cost of the programme.” Another layer, in the cost of day care is the shifting of the U.S. tax burden to middle-class, two-income families, he pointed out. Without changes to existing tax structures middle class families would carry the burden for the added cost of government operated day care.
Ideally, said Besharov, “If families had the extra $5,000 tax break, maybe more women would choose to stay home (to care for their own children). However, he conceded such a programme would mean taking “$100 billion from the Yuppies and General Motors….the Yuppies are the swing vote” (in an election).
Citing his own family’s experience, not all day care centers are sub-standard. Besharov told the story of his young son’s brief stay in a New York City programme known as Head Start. Having been served veal and shrimp for lunch at the centre, young Master Besharov sat down to dinner one evening, eyeballing his plate of spaghetti. He pushed his plate away and asked, “Now what’s for dinner?”
Bottom Line
The bottom line, according to Besharov, is the government standards will out-price day care for many families who need it. Alluding to some hidden government agenda, he warned that “it is the church the community-based centers that government wants to regulate.”
In their eagerness to create a crisis, day care advocates, says Besharov, have fabricated the illusion of “need” by relying on statistics which show an increase in the number of “households” in America. Households as opposed to families. According to government stats, there has been an explosion of the former, thus fuelling the feminist fire for a federal day care programme.
Besharov contends that these statistics are seriously “inflated.” Again, using his family as an example, he said that his mother had retired to Florida (household No. 1), his sister shared an apartment with a girlfriend (No. 2) and he had married and started his own family (No. 3). Out of one “family” came (in this case) three “households” – but only two children – his!
Three-fold increase
Of course, any politician seeing a three-fold increase in the number of households may easily assume more families are having children or will have them. There we have the beginning of Besharov’s “created crisis.”
Dr. Eric Brondin’s impressive resume indicates his expertise in the fields of English literature, Scandinavian studies, political science, international relations, economics and law. A columnist and lecturer, Brodin stirred his St. Louis audience with his discussion of ay care and family life in the modern Swedish welfare state.
Ironically, North American day care advocates continually use Sweden as their shining example of the feminist day care wish-list. According to Dr. Brodin, a native of Sweden, day care costs in Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden climbed so high that cutbacks became necessary. As a result, there has been a shifting of responsibility for the cost from federal to the local level of government. He pointed out that in Denmark, 68 per cent of every tax dollar went to pay for child care. The figures in Sweden stands at 78 per cent, making day care there the highest per capita tax burden.
Brodin accuses the state of attempting to regulate every aspect of family life in Sweden – even leisure time. For example, Sweden proposes to compensate the husband who stays home to care for the children, while his wife takes a vacation. Should he or the children join her, he forfeits the compensation.
Homemakers are viewed as being “disloyal.” As Dr. Brodin explained it, the woman who “bakes her own buns” takes away from the government the 23.4 per cent tax on all goods bought in Sweden. Feminists there refer to homemakers as “unworthy parasites” and “spiritual cripples.” Despite the objective of “full employment,” unemployment is high, due mainly to the generous unemployment benefits provided by the Swedish welfare state. Unemployed persons receive 90 per cent of their previous earnings – hardly an incentive to return to work!
Early day care placement of infants is encouraged so mothers can return to work. While the state encourages child care to be divided equally between a husband and wife, it prefers the use of public agencies, says Brodin. Swedish day care is tightly regulated. Each child is allotted five square meters of floor space. In setting up these standards, government ignored input from both parents and experts. On an average, children placed in these centers “were sick four out of twelve months,” said Brodin.
As we approach another federal election, we can only hope that the next Minister of Health learns from the failing Swedish model and ignores the pleas of those who are blind to its fatal flaws. Those who, in the words of Phyllis Schlafly, promote and pursue their ultimate goal – “Government babysitting.”
