Everybody's Children: Child Care as a Public Problem

In this important new book, Gormley offers a balanced and comprehensive analysis of the market, government, and societal failures to ensure available, affordable, high-quality child care in the United States. Unreliable child care, he says, contributes to family stress and undermines efforts to achieve educational readiness, welfare reform, and gender equity. Neither regulators nor family support agencies distinguish sharply enough between good and bad child care facilities. Meanwhile, government and businesses provide inadequate financial and logistical support. Children suffer as a result, as does society as a whole.

Gormley presents evidence on how different states and communities have responded to child care challenges and he prescribes the roles to be played by federal, state, and local governments, for-profit and non-profit child care providers, churches, schools, and family support agencies. Gormley recommends a number of reforms, including information sharing, flexible enforcement, targeted subsidies, and family-friendly workplaces. He contends that different levels of government and societal institutions must work together to achieve the goals of efficiency, justice, choice, discretion, coordination, and responsiveness.