Consumer Affairs labels nanny placement a "free-for-all," a marked contrast to the current regulations covering day care. Meanwhile, Dominique, the nanny Ms. Cheever interviewed, described one place where she worked as having "no milk and no cereal and no money for groceries." She concludes "But you shouldn't have kids if you're not ready to make adjustments" (87). Dominique also described a situation where the child she was caring for was almost taken from her by a stranger with obvious thinking problems.
These two problems alone, security and providing for the children, are serious enough problems that the government ought to be willing to intervene in order to guarantee that its children will grow up well-adjusted and prepared to be citizens and contributing members of society. That this is necessary is obvious in that these children are going to be paying taxes when they are adults. To spend some money now to prepare them to be able to pay more in taxes later sounds mercenary but is how the economics of government operates. It is logical, as has been shown by many educational studies using this fact to support the provision of additional money for public schools. The children that go to public schools often are in day care first, and so the same reasoning that applies to them in Kindergarten applies in
Perhaps the single most important day care program is the Head Start program. So well-respected is it that even the Reagan administration wanted to retain it (1985 Model Child Care Standards Act). The program begun by Democrats as a child care and ghetto improvement program, appeals to a Republican because it seeks to ameliorate the effects of poverty by providing the food and education poverty robs the child of. The "head start" for the impoverished child actually is designed to put the child closer to an equal footing with the child who can take food and education for granted.
This being the case, that the current go...