logy, but a change in the way the American economy works.
As Dionne notes, it is pointless to blame the childcare problem in the U. S. on ideology. As Dionne points out, while traditionalists "say the problem is that parents, especially mothers, are working too much outside the home . . . there are many two paycheck families--earning, say, $35,000 or $40,000 a year" in which parents would like nothing better than to be at home when their children return from school (5). But these families cannot survive without two incomes and employers are seldom interested in flexible work arrangement that would enable parents to be at home from 3:00 on. The effects of economic necessity increase, of course, in many one-parent families. As Mergenbagen notes, Americans have had more than 4 million babies per year in the 1990s and there are over 2 million marriages per year. But the annual divorce rate is approximately half that of marriages--around 1 million annually--and the children of broken marriages generally become the daily responsibility of their mothers rather than their fathers (30). In marriages and divorces, "even in this era of gender equity, women remain more involved than men" in the family's operation--childcare, elder care, and the running of households (Mergenbagen 5). Thus caring for the children of working mothers becomes a "women's issue" whether the individual woman has any ideological interests or not.
As of 1997 the Children's Defense Fund estimated that working parents had 13 million children of pre-school age who were in some form of day care ("Women's Issues"). Forms of care include children placed with relatives, children placed with semi-professional or unlicensed individuals, and professional care facilities--including government programs and a growing number of corporate-sponsored efforts. But the great majority of working parents are not satisfied with their present arrangements and, in a recent Harris p...