Child Care

In modern societies where most parents work outside the home, families often have trouble finding affordable, quality child care. The parents of children with disabilities have historically faced even greater hurdles, since almost no formal child care services accepted disabled children during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. Accordingly, many families have found no other alternative but to place their disabled children in full-time institutions. With the rise of the deinstitutionalization and disability rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s, disabled children in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan have increasingly gained access to child care, albeit often through segregated programs. In industrializing and developing nations, however, child care for those with disabilities remains deeply problematic.

In the United States, the limited supply of child care overall is the result of its public-private organization (a pattern typical of much social provision in the United States). Formal child care originated in charitable day nurseries in the mid-nineteenth century and did not become a matter of public concern until World War II, when the federal government funded centers for the children of defense workers. This arrangement, however, lasted for the duration only, and direct federal funding for child care did not again become available until the 1960s, when it was linked to efforts to move public aid recipients into the labor force. In the meantime, the government encouraged the growth of private child care (either voluntary or commercial) through tax breaks to providers and parents paying full fees. Federal subsidies for child care for poor and low-income families declined in the 1980s under the administration of President Ronald Reagan but rose again with passage of President Bill Clintons welfare reform plan in 1996; current funding is, however, still inadequate. Because of resistance to setting federal standards and weak regulation in many states, the quality of both public and private services is uneven. By contrast, in many other advanced industrial societies, the state has played a more active role in organizing, funding, and regulating child care. Particularly since World War II, France, Sweden, Denmark, and parts of Italy and Canada have developed model services that are affordable, high in quality, and universally available.