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461 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 9 (1982)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0461 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE There is some merit in the assertion that the twentieth century is the century of the child.' In this regard, industrialization has represented both unprecedented opportunities and special problems. As a consequence, social policy for the young child, the newborn to 5- or 6-year-old, is fraught with paradoxes. The combination of declining birthrates and infant mortal- ity rates is associated with increased parental concern about the health, nutrition, and development of their children. In contrast, the ascendance of out-of-home economic activity has altered traditional child care systems and weakened family support structures. Furthermore, the competition from mass media, schools, and peers has placed severe strains on the bonds between parent and child. One result has been an increasing social concern with supplementary services to families. There are few areas of social policy that do not have at least some ramifications for young children, for example, housing, health, welfare, and education. The variety of relevant programs presents problems of policy coherence, gaps, and redundancies. Recently, child advocates have been trying to addess these and other related issues as part of the global agenda under the International Year of the Child in 1979. In the past, addressing such issues appears to have been an outgrowth of economic abundance in advanced industrial societies, but now these same societies are moving from accelerated growth to very slow or zero growth. This is not only leading to an abrupt retrenchment in public programs, but is also being reinforced, at least in the United States, by mass alienation from big government and the reemergence of a laissez faire or libertarian outlook.' Such a trend results in contradictory policies for the young child. For instance, more young mothers are working both out of economic necessity and self-fulfillment; the latter is a libertarian attitude. Yet this attitude, when translated into opposition to public supported facilities for child care, becomes an obstacle to pursuit of individual opportunity. In such an envi- ronment, proponents of early childhood programs, for example, Head Start, must provide either cogent cost-benefit analyses mixed with sophisticated advocacy, and/or be innovative in exploring alternative nonpublic arrange- ments to meet the varying needs of the young child. American policy focused on early childhood has certain distinctive fea- tures. First, the rearing of children has been the historic monopoly of the family. Families have been regarded as the best means of realizing at least two fundamental societal functions, the inculcation of basic societal values in the young and the protection of dependent family members. It is not surprising that the care of young children is a core societal concern. But children have only recently become the focus of more explicit public enact- ments as well as a clear target population for public intervention, for example, the growth of interest in and thus laws on child abuse. 1. A. H. Halsey, Change in British Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 106. 2. Joseph Veroff, Elizabeth Douvan, and Richard A. Kulka, The Inner American: A Self Portrait from 1957 to 1976 (New York: Basic Books, 1981). 9

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