Kids Can’t Vote or Work, says Pat Schroeder, They Can’t Explain Moms Need Day Care
Legislators give children short shrift, question need for Head Start, lump it all under their abhorrence of “welfare money” to the poverty stricken
WASHINGTON, August 8, 1975: This is a Question and Answer interview with Rep. Patricia Schroeder, Democrat of Colorado. She is cosponsor of several pieces of legislation concerning children’s rights.
Question: You have said that legislation for children fares worse than any other kind of legislation that you have encountered since coming to Congress. How has that come about?
Mrs. Schroeder: I think the first problem is children don’t vote and so it’s very hard for children to come and see their congressmen and say, ‘Hey, you know we like Head Start.’ How would 4-year-olds even know where to approach that or how would 6- or 7-year olds be able to come in and say, ‘Hey, Follow Through is a terrific program: it’s kept us up to date.’ So as a consequence you don’t have a pressure group pushing for that so much. And the people that you do have pushing for it, even the teachers, don’t quite understand where all the money comes from because they’re getting it from their school boards. Often, the money that is supposed to go to help children here is called welfare money or for people who won’t work. Well, obviously children can’t work. Yet, politically, it gets lumped in with welfare services.
Q: Do you think that the role of the mother, particularly the working mother, is really appreciated in this country?
A: I think in our society, women have always been taught to be very conscious of their children even if they’re working — much more so than men. Men just assume that someone out there is taking care of them, so why worry about it? With women it’s always a constant thing on their mind. I always think that one of the things we’ve created in America that other societies haven’t — it’s the Great American Institution that no one ever mentions on the Fourth of July — is the mother with two or three children home and she’s bringing in the whole income. I think women tend to be incredibly sensitive to that. When I visit a military base and want to go see the day-care center, they always look at me and say, no congressman wants to go see the day-care center, what is the matter with you? I usually find they’re abominable and you often find the wives have known that and they want to protest and they’re afraid to protest for fear it will hurt their husband’s career. And the thing goes on and on and on.
Q: Didn’t a number of very important services to children go by the board with OEO? How much of that has been got back?
A: Very little of it’s been picked up. In Denver, for example, we had health-care centers in the center of the city. Now, if you look at infant mortality before those health care centers and after, you’ll see infant mortality in our low-income core city suddenly came down to the same level it was in the suburbs which was very interesting. And yet they cut back the funding. Head Start, you’ve seen what that’s been. It just seems that they’re out to kill it. They say, well, it isn’t the answer to everything. Well, no one ever said any of these things were the answer to everything. The poverty families are headed by women. Now, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about most of the money that goes to children is to the poverty stricken.
Q: Are most of those women on welfare or public assistance because they are unable to work because they have no place to leave their children?
A: There was a policy that we were going to subsidize day care and get them back into the working areas through the social services program. We got many mothers back into the mainstream. They were working and were very excited. Subsidizing day care, anyone knows, is much cheaper than subsidizing the whole family. Then what do they do, as an economy measure, but cut back the subsidy of the day care. So if the mother isn’t getting subsidized day care and has to pay full measure, she can’t afford to work. Like in Denver, it was a $4 difference between working and being on welfare.
Q: Who makes decisions like that?
A: I think an awful lot of it is nonfeasance — it’s not malfeasance. It’s not that they’re evil. It’s just that they haven’t thought about it. They believe the myths that women are just working for a hobby, and so if we’re going to do away with frills, one of the frills we can do away with is day care. Or, one of the things we can do is cut services to day care. Well, that’s also not a frill if you know how important child development is. I think it’s that men are just not as aware of those kind of things, and in the hysteria to cut money, and children can’t lobby, and we’re back in the same old quagmire. I’d like to see us encouraging employers to have day care on their premises. It would certainly be easier for both men and women who are working and then the day care, too.
Q: How does the federal government encourage something like that?
A: You could do that with tax incentives. You could do that with any number of things. And we just haven’t even tapped that area. We can also encourage them to create what they call block mothers, which are mothers that watch for the children between the hours of 3 and 5, before the mothers come home from work. That’s a tough time, too. We could also work very hard on having more apartments with day care in them and afterschool care in them for working parents or single parents. We’ve gone to work with the problems of the elderly in housing, and we’ve worked very hard on those and we’re starting to work a little bit on the handicapped. But we haven’t gotten housing projects directly geared to the problem of the single parent family. And we could certainly do housing complexes with that with a lot of input. There’s a lot of very creative things that we could be doing in education and a lot of very exciting things — children’s’ museums, where they can feel and touch and create — and the different things we could be subsidizing that way.
[This article originally appeared in The Washington Star, August 8, 1975 as Schroeder: Children Get Short Shrift. #76 in a collection of more than 100 newspaper articles by Judy Flander from the second wave of the Women’s Movement reflecting the fervor and ingenuity of the women who rode the wave.]
