Dan Coats: “Today the White House is sponsoring an all-day conference on child care. I believe the President and First Lady have…”

“Today the White House is sponsoring an all-day conference on child care. I believe the President and First Lady have correctly identified this as an important issue to families, and particularly to working families in America. A number of experts have been invited to testify and to participate in panel discussions throughout the day. This is an important but yet also a very complex issue. The complexity of the issue is that there is one segment of our population that seriously needs high-quality day care in order to work--work that for many has been required through welfare reform. Others work out of economic necessity; both mother and father need to be employed. And again for others, who are single parents raising their children, they need to provide the financial wherewithal to do that. The focus on the child care conference at the White House correctly focuses on this segment of our population. The conference will focus on three questions: how to increase access for child care; how to make it more affordable; and how to guarantee the quality of child care so that children will be safe. But, what the conference did not focus on was another segment of the population, in fact a majority segment of the population, the nearly 50 percent who do not have both parents working and another 25 percent who do not work out of the home full time.”