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COMMENTARY: Kids Behind The Eight-Ball

From grim and Crime,

His eyes, he hid;

It didn't pay,

To be a kid.

None of us, especially politicians, wants to seem hard-hearted toward

children. That's why many do-good organizations, in the face of growing

charity-fatigue, couch their appeals in terms of the damage poverty does to

kids. Forget the suffering of their presumably indolent parents. We're immune

to that.

Conservatives, too, employ this "kid scheme." The intrusiveness into private

lives of their "family values" crusade, is purported to be justified by its

beneficial effect on children.

And luckily, some governments actually live up to this kid-oriented rhetoric.

Take Hartford. This fall it began offering free breakfast and lunch to all its

students, no questions asked. Bridgeport is close behind. With luck no child

will not suffer a learning shortfall due to being hungry.

Surprisingly, the State of Georgia has gone us one better. Every four-year-old

there is now offered free pre-school. Again, no questions asked. It's early

yet, but preliminary test scores are already higher, and parents are already

getting more involved with school.

Those are the good cases. You can look to Norwalk for a bad one. Its Board of

Education has decided that sex education is bad for kids and should be left to

families, not teachers. Not surprisingly, the teenage birth rate is high, and

many youngsters start off life behind the eight-ball.

Other public policies hurting children may be less blatant, but in the end,

even more destructive. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, has

concluded that the median wage of child-care workers is $6.12/hour. That's 26

cents below parking lot attendants, and 78 cents below veterinary workers. Our

own family can vouch for that. Our daughter-in-law is a truly gifted nurturer

of both child and beast, but she could never afford to work at a day-care

center. Her income is much greater dealing with pets.

Some observers even perceive a conspiracy between the current rush of welfare

repeal and those poverty wages in child care. It seems that a large percentage

of women being forced into jobs have limited skills. Often child-care work is

all they can find, since standards there are so low. Their addition to the

work force blessedly increases the availability of care overall, thus helping

to relieve one of society's nagging shortages.

But this scheme has two serious problems. First, the quality of care offered

by untrained, low-skill workers does no favors for the kids. Second, the

workers make such low wages, that they live in serious poverty themselves. So

do their children. The state, it turns out, is the chief beneficiary, having

finally unloaded those clients from the welfare budget.

By way of mitigation, our state is putting more money to child-care subsidies

for the poor. But at the same time, because of our legislative chintzyness,

the number of poor children here continues to grow. In 1985, 12 percent of

Nutmeg kids lived in poverty. By 1995 it was 19 percent. Despite being rich,

Connecticut went from the second-best state to the 29th-best in just ten

years.

This data suggest a certain lack of commitment to the well-being of our

children, let alone their parents. Despite the rhetoric, and despite the

pleasant increases in school lunch and child-care budgets, Connecticut's

overall posture toward children has been that of neglect. It shows up across

the board, in housing, transit, education, and other social service budgets.

So unless you're well off, it still doesn't pay to be a kid in our state.

(Bill Collins, a former mayor of Norwalk, is a syndicated columnist.)