Day-care disgrace.

It's about 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon, and inside My School, a child-care center in Portland, Oregon, seventeen children between the ages of two-and-a-half and four are wandering aimlessly in a large, empty room. There are few books or toys in sight, and the carpet is dirty and frayed. Most of the electrical outlets are uncovered, and there is only one teacher in the area - two direct violations of state day-care regulations. (Oregon, like most states, requires a staff-to-child ratio of one to ten for groups of children under five years of age.)

"We just don't have enough resources," says Joyce McClendon, the director of My School. McClendon, who also serves as teacher, cook, and janitor, says she would like to have an aide for each classroom. But the center, which enrolls fifty children from low-income families, can't afford to hire more workers.

"As it is, we have a very high turnover," she says. "Every six months the whole staff leaves, mostly because of the pay. And I wish we could get people who wanted to work with children. A lot of people just come in because it's a job, and they don't need many qualifications."

Ruth Mena, the teacher who is watching over the children, shows little enthusiasm. A former hotel housekeeper, Mena says she became a child-care worker "because I don't know how to do anything else."

The uninspired and haphazard care at My School is typical of this country's shoddy, patchwork day-care system. There are no national standards for day-care centers, and most states fail to enforce even minimum health and safety regulations. Media accounts of day-care centers tend to focus - misguidedly - on child abuse. The real story is less sensational but more prevalent: child-care staff tend to be inexperienced and overloaded, and children suffer from constant, low-level neglect.

"It's not just that we're not doing anything," says Edward Zigler, director of the Bush Center on Child Development at Yale University. "It's that we're perfectly satisfied in this country to every day put children in settings that compromise their growth and development. It's a tragedy, and the cost to this country down the track is going to be immense."

Seventy per cent of all child-care settings were "barely adequate" in 1988, according to the National Child Care Staffing Survey, the most comprehensive study of its kind conducted during the last decade. Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that licensed day-care centers consistently violate health and safety regulations by exposing children to raw sewage, scalding water, and household chemicals.

Outside the Grace Collins Memorial Center, an inner-city, Portland child-care center housed in a crumbling building with a churchfront facade, a neon sign flickers weakly, CHRIST DIED FOR OUR SINS. Inside, forty-five preschool children are watching afternoon cartoons in a cavernous basement room. As the preschoolers chatter and giggle, an exhausted-looking teacher stands up and threatens to turn off the television. "Anyone who talks will have to sit at a table with their head down, where everyone can see," she warns.

Seven toddlers are cordoned off in a small corner of the room, wandering in circles as another staff person watches from behind a desk. On the floor, an infant in a bassinet cries incessantly, but is only picked up - carelessly - a couple of times over the course of two hours.

"We usually have five teachers, but two were out sick yesterday," says Dorothy Beasley, the head teacher at Grace Collins. "So three of us had to take care of fifty-eight kids." She points to empty shelves lining the cracked walls. "We don't have enough toys or books, and we don't have money to keep up the facility. Right now, the kids are sleeping on mats that are more than fifty years old."

Changes in the American economy and family structure over the last couple of decades have triggered an enormous increase in the demand for child care. More than 70 per cent of the nation's mothers work outside the home, and single-parent households make up more than 25 per cent of all families in the United States.

But the failure of our child-care system is ultimately rooted in our nation's chronic indifference to the well-being of young children. In many cultures, children are considered a national resource, and quality child care is viewed as a service to the community. Not so in the United States, which is the only country except for South Africa that lacks a clear national policy on parents and children.

In most European countries, as well as Canada and Israel, the government helps pay for child care and requires private employers to provide paid maternity leave. In France, families receive a monthly child-rearing allowance and children go to school free starting at age two-and-a-half. In the United States, child-care costs are absorbed by high parent fees and subsidized by the poverty-level wages of daycare workers - a system that conveniently allows business and government to ignore the economic and social necessity of child care.

The recent Carnegie Corporation report on the status of children paints an alarming picture. The United States ranks below most other industrialized nations when it comes to providing medical care, family leave, and quality learning environments for young children. Americans may wax sentimental about youth and family, but when it comes to matching rhetoric with action, as a society we are unwilling to invest in children.

"This country is just in shambles in terms of the support it gives parents and children," says Pam Smart, a legal secretary and mother of two who was involved in a battle to keep her neighborhood daycare center open. Smart and her husband are reasonably well off, and have the means to provide good care for their children. The family settled in a Portland neighborhood known for its high-quality schools. The Smarts felt especially lucky to find space for their son in the top-ranked Mountain Park child-care center.

But last year, when Mountain Park decided to expand to accommodate a growing waiting list, the neighborhood homeowners' association launched what Smart calls an extremely hostile - and successful - campaign to prevent the expansion.

"The entire ordeal was a real political eye-opener for me," says Smart, who is still so angry that her voice shakes when she tells the story. "There was just an astonishing backlash, especially from senior citizens. I remember one gentleman saying to me, |When I was young I worked and my wife stayed home, so I don't know what your problem is.' I mean that was the level of discussion on this issue. To have to justify the importance of quality child care in a community of this size...it was like a personal attack."

Most parents aren't as fortunate as the Smarts. With the cost of day-care running an average of $570 a month for infants and toddlers and $435 for preschoolers, child care, especially quality care, is completely out of reach for a significant number of American families.

Janine Stevanin, a single mother who until recently worked as a waitress, sums up her child-care situation this way: "I could either stay home and be on public assistance all the time, or work and make a living. Child care put me back on assistance again." In an effort to break this cycle, Stevanin put her daughter in a series of cheap, unlicensed day-care homes. "As long as I kept my eyes closed, they were okay," she says. "But had I the money, I would have put her somewhere else."

Asking parents to find and pay for child care on their own is like asking individuals in the late Nineteenth Century to organize and fund their own schools, Edward Zigler argues in Working Mother magazine. "It just doesn't make any sense," he says. "It's a societal problem that society must address."

Barbara Reisman, executive director of the New York City-based Child Care Action Campaign, a national research and advocacy group, concurs: "As long as what parents get is dependent on what they can pay, children are not going to get the quality they deserve."

Across the country there is a chronic shortage of child-care facilities. In Seattle, more than 24,000 young children require day care. But in 1992, licensed child-care centers could only accommodate 51 per cent of them. Day-care slots for infants and toddlers are particularly scarce. "Many parents put them on the list as soon as they conceive," says Susan Wilcox, the director of a YMCA day-care center in downtown Portland.

Inadequate compensation for child-care workers contributes to the problem. Early childhood education teachers (98 per cent of whom are women) make $5 an hour. Few receive health insurance, and almost none receive retirement benefits. Not surprisingly, turnover rates are enormous, and the effect on children is cause for serious concern. According to the National Child Care Staffing Survey, children in centers with high staff-turnover rates are less likely to interact with their peers and score lower on language-development tests.

"The worst thing about this field is trying to find qualified people who are willing to work for such low pay," says Esther Stone, an assistant director at a large daycare center in Portland. "You can work at McDonalds and make more than you do taking care of children."

Stone earns $5.80 an hour. To make ends meet, she lives with a family in exchange for night-time babysitting - an exhausting activity after eight or nine hours at the day-care center. "On weekends I babysit for the children of neighboring families," she says almost apologetically.

Thanks in part to ideological exhortations about government intrusion into the sanctity of the family, there is little precedent for child-care legislation in this country. In 1971, President Nixon vetoed a bill that would have provided a nationwide system of Federally funded child-care centers. In his veto speech, Nixon said the bill was "the most radical piece of legislation" to emerge from that Congress. It would have placed "the vast authority of the Federal Government on the side of communal approaches to child-rearing, over against the family-centered approach," Nixon said.

Almost twenty years later, using the same logic, President Bush said he would veto any bill calling for Federal regulation of day-care centers.

The Clinton Administration has done little to improve on the record of its predecessors. While Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant finally received full funding in 1994, no major child-care initiatives have been introduced at either the Executive or Congressional level. Under Clinton's back-to-work welfare-reform plans, an estimated 10 million more children will require day care. But the funds set aside for such an increase are grossly inadequate.

It will take an enormous shift in the nation's attitude toward the relationship between family and society to solve the child-care crisis. Even in the 1990s, Americans tend to view child care as either a non-issue or a socialist plot to take children away from their parents.

"To me, the saddest thing about this issue is that parents don't think they have a right to quality care," says Rosalie Street, executive director of Parent Action, a national lobbying group based in Baltimore, Maryland. "But the problem is not going to go away."