Childcare in America is a patchwork - uneven in quality, unaffordable to most and failing many of our youngest children and their families.
Once Upon a Time allows us to imagine how things might be different if all the nation’s children had access to high-quality early care and ed for the past four decades. That’s because we almost did.
During WWII, the Lanham Act funded a national network of child development centers which served 600,000 children whose mothers, known as Rosie the Riveters, were turning out armaments in the nation’s factories. But when the War ended most of the women were terminated and, despite protests, the childcare centers shut down.
In 1971 the number of working mothers was growing rapidly once again. The U.S. Congress, pushed by the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements and Pres. Johnson’s earlier Great Society successes, including Head Start, passed a bill providing high-quality childcare and early ed, home visiting and other services for each and every family which wanted them, all on a sliding scale. It was called the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CCDA).
But for the bill to become law, it needed Pres. Nixon’s signature. The White House was split and no one knew what Nixon would do.
Patrick Buchanan, a young White House speechwriter at the time, reveals how a group of powerful conservatives went to work behind the scenes to secure the president’s veto, re-casting the bill as government intrusion in the family.
On camera, Buchanan reads the veto message he wrote for Nixon. It tarred the CCDA as “a communal approach” to child rearing. Two of the bill’s authors, then-Senator and former Vice President Walter Mondale and Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, explain how Nixon’s veto was the first time ‘family values’ were invoked to undermine families and marked a seminal inflection point from our nation’s progress towards a more inclusive society to the ‘fend-for-yourself’ America of today.
But there is a federally-funded childcare program serving the nation’s largest employer: the U.S. Military. The armed forces’ childcare was once as abysmal as the rest of the nation's. In 1989, 18 years after Nixon’s veto, Congress mandated that the military provide child-centered care to any family that wanted it. At Camp Pendleton Marine Base we witness some of the best childcare in the country, all of it affordable and strictly regulated.
If those who provide for our military security can have universal childcare, what about those who provide our economic security, our civilian workforce? We came achingly close once. What will it take to enact effective child and family policies today?
RESOURCES For Toolkits, Discussion Guides and more information about The Raising of America documentary series and how to become involved in the public engagement campaign, visit the companion website now under development: www.raisingofamerica.org.
Producer / Director: James Rutenbeck Associate Producers: Liz Shea & Leigh Lanocha Senior Producer: Christine Herbes-Sommers Series Executive Producer: Larry Adelman
CRITICAL COMMENT
“In this brilliant, powerful and moving film we learn the wrenching story of the political forces which hijacked childcare for all in 1971, and still keep us down today. Why did a bill supported by virtually every civic group concerned with children and passed by both houses of Congress, a bill that would have done so much for child well-being, fail so miserably to secure Pres. Nixon’s signature to become law? On a #1 issue, this is the #1 film!”
Arlie Hochschild, author, The Outsourced Self and So How’s the Family?
“Serves as a powerful call to action, challenging us to renew our commitment to our children and secure a brighter future for our country. The investments we make in our children today have a direct impact on how strong, prosperous, and dynamic America will be tomorrow.”
House Democratic Leader, Nancy Pelosi
“The extraordinary but widely forgotten story of a time when childcare for all wasn't just a fairy tale has been brilliantly told in this film. In the decades since, the evidence documenting high-quality child care as a critical ingredient in determining whether young children, their families and, indeed, the nation are to flourish has grown ever stronger. Once Upon a Time will inspire us to act so that childcare and preschool for all, finally back on the national agenda, will at long-last become a reality.”
- Lisbeth B. Schorr, author, Within Our Reach
"In this thought provoking film, we learn how an initiative which would have opened a path towards a better future for our children while it supported working families was vetoed, marking a turning point in our nation’s history and leading to the false dichotomy between care and education which still haunts us today.
"Once Upon a Time is a powerful, must-see film which will inspire anyone seeing it to redouble their efforts in behalf of quality early care and other initiatives which ensure all families the support their children need to succeed.”
Joan Lombardi, Director, Early Opportunities, LLC; former Deputy Asst Secretary for Early Childhood Development, U.S. Dept of Health & Human Services
"It's hard to believe there was once a national, bipartisan consensus about what America owes its children. This gripping film shows how our commitment to children and working families was derailed by a concerted fear-mongering campaign. But it also reveals what can be done if we set our minds to it. It should be seen by parents, teachers, policy-makers, and especially by the children and teenagers who will shape our future.”
Stephanie Coontz, author, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
