Changing times:

The writing on the wall:
The explosion of excellent media coverage on women and work-life issues, and what it means for the mothers' movement

Child care:

Child care standards fall short on basic measures of safety and quality in all 50 states

National Women's Law Center releases new guides on strengthening family, friend and neighbor child care, organizing home-based child care providers

Other child care news & reports

Worklife:

One-third of U.S. jobs are low wage, low benefits, low flexibility

Labor Project for Working Families releases Flextime Tool Kit

Selected news and commentary on worklife and the workplace

Mothers & Mothering:

New online magazine for college moms

Other news and commentary on mothers & mothering

Women's issues:

Notable news and commentary on feminism, sexist language, women's rights, the high cost of manliness

Society:

Notable news on child well-being, children and immigration policy, U.S. health care

Family violence:

In single day, U.S. domestic violence programs provide critical services to over 50,000 children and adults. Plus: related articles

Reproductive health & rights:

Mom, Dad I'm Pregnant

More reproductive health & rights news

Child care standards fall short on basic measures
of safety and quality in all 50 states

An evaluation of standards and regulations covering center-based child care providers found that most states are not meeting basic requirements needed to protect the health and safety of children in child care, and to promote their school readiness.

The study, which was conducted by the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies (NACCRRA), compares state standards and oversight regulations to benchmark standards set by early education and child development experts, including staff-to-child ratios, minimum educational requirements of child care staff and administrators, health and safety requirements, and inspection standards. Out of a possible score of 150, the average state score was 70. The DoD (which has its own child care system) received the highest score (117), followed by Illinois and New York (90). The lowest ranking states were Idaho (15), Louisiana (37), Nebraska (49), and Kentucky (51). California, Kansas, Utah, and New Mexico scored between 54-55; Maine (57) and New Hampshire (58) were also ranked among the bottom ten.

Only two states (Illinois and Nevada) require a full background check of child care staff. Only eight states (plus the DoD) address all 10 basic health and safety benchmarks, such as fire drills, administration of medication, prevention of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, diapering and hand-washing, and safe playground surfaces. Four states either allow or do not specifically prohibit corporal punishment. Only three states (plus the DoD) conduct quarterly inspections of child care centers; eight do not even conduct inspections annually. 21 states have no minimum educational requirement for child care teachers.

The report also includes data on the number of center-based care providers and children served in each state, as well as average cost of care for infants and preschoolers. A future report will address state standards and oversight of home-based child care providers. State-by-state data, background information on standards of evaluation, and the full report are available from the NACCRRA web site.

National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies
www.naccrra.org

We Can Do Better:
NACCRRA’s Ranking of State Child Care Center Standards and Oversight
Index page

We Can Do Better: State Scorecard
7 pages, in .pdf

State-by-State Profiles
105 Pages, in .pdf

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National Women's Law Center releases new guides on
strengthening family, friend and neighbor child care,
organizing home-based child care providers

Two new advocacy resources on improving low-income families' access to quality child care and organizing home-based child care providers who receive state funds are now available from the National Women's Law Center.

"Close to Home: State Strategies to Strengthen and Support Family, Friend, and Neighbor Care" offers a summary of key research and an range of strategies for supporting child care by family, friends and neighbors, which millions of working parents depend on. In particular, many low-income children -- who are often most at risk for starting school behind their more advantaged peers and stand to benefit the most from a good early learning environment -- are in family, friend and neighbor (FFN) care arrangements. FFN providers may be a relative or non-relative, paid or unpaid, have a close relationship with the family or not, and caring for just one child or several children. An FFN provider may also be a grandparent helping out her child and grandchild for a short period of time or may be someone who has made a long-term commitment to providing child care as a primary source of income.

"By focusing a portion of state resources and attention on FFN care, states can help improve the quality of care these children receive," writes Helen Blank, NWLC Director of Leadership and Public Policy. "Increased investment in FFN care also matters because many FFN providers are low-income women who themselves are in need of support and resources." Recommendations include setting quality and oversight standards for FFN providers receiving public funds, ensuring that child care assistance programs help parents pay for FFN care, supporting initiatives to improve the quality of child care, including FFN care, making Child Care and Adult Food Programs and home visiting and family support programs available to FFN providers, and permitting unionization of FFN workers.

"Getting Organized: Unionizing Home-Based Child Care Providers" analyzes the recent and growing trend to unionize home-based child care providers. These providers include both regulated home-based child care providers and family, friend and neighbor care providers who are exempt from regulation but receive public funds. The report shows that the drive towards unionization is a promising strategy for improving working conditions for these providers, who are overwhelmingly women and have low earnings and few benefits, and also for securing increased resources for child care centers and for families needing child care assistance. "Getting Organized" also provides detailed information about the progress of campaigns to organize child care providers in the states.

National Women's Law Center
www.nwlc.org

Close to Home:
State Strategies to Strengthen and Support Family, Friend, and Neighbor Care
February 2007, 36 page, in .pdf

Getting Organized:
Unionizing Home-Based Child Care Providers
March 2007, 40 pages, in .pdf

Also from NWLC:

2007 Tax Credits Outreach Campaign
Federal and state tax credits can put thousands of dollars in the pockets of families with children to help them pay for child care and other expenses. The National Women's Law Center has launched a campaign with state advocates to help eligible families take full advantage of these credits. NWLC has created a tool kit for child care advocates, plus flyers and fact sheets in English and Spanish on federal and state tax credits -- all ready to distribute in your community. Help spread the word!

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Other child care news & reports:

Unstable Funding Mars Advances in State-Funded Preschool
NIEER, Press Release, 14.mar.07
A new report from the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University shows that while states are embracing pre-school, they aren't necessarily providing the stable funding necessary to ensure the quality that is needed. Press release includes link to full report.

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One-third of U.S. jobs are low wage, low benefits, low flexibility

A new report from the Mobility Agenda finds that over 40 million jobs in the United States -- about 1 in 3 -- pay low wages ($11.11 per hour or less) and often do not offer employment benefits like health insurance, retirement savings accounts, paid sick days or family leave. Moreover, these jobs tend to have inflexible or unpredictable scheduling requirements and provide little opportunity for career advancement.

"All too often these low-wage jobs are replacing jobs that have supported a broad middle class," according to Margy Waller, director of The Mobility Agenda and one of the paper's co-authors. "The economy and our democratic society are strongest when no one is falling too far behind the rest. Unfortunately, we find that, in 2006, 44 million workers were employed in low-wage jobs paying much less than the rest of us get paid."

The authors of the study define a low-wage job as one paying substantially less than the job held by a typical male worker. The trend since 2001 has been a sharp decline in wages for these jobs. Reviewing the evidence on economic mobility, the authors concluded, "In the U.S. labor market, it is not possible for everyone to be middle class, no matter how hard they work. Moreover, it has been getting harder to do over time."

The Mobility Agenda is a special initiative of Inclusion, a virtual think tank affiliated with the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Center for Economic Policy Research
www.cepr.net

Over 40 million U.S. Jobs -- 1 in 3 -- Pay Low Wages
Press release, CEPR

Understanding Low-Wage Work in the United States
Heather Boushey, Shawn Fremstad, Rachel Gragg, and Margy Waller
The Mobility Agenda, March 2007. Full report, 24 pages in .pdf

Related articles:

How to Save the Middle Class from Extinction
Paul Krugman, AlterNet, 9.mar.07
Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman explains in simple terms how the American economy went from having the world's most dynamic middle class to being on the verge of a rich-poor state in only 30 years.

U.S. economy leaving record numbers in severe poverty
Tony Pugh, McClatchy Newspapers, 22.feb.07
"The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five straight years… About one in three severely poor people are under age 17, and nearly two out of three are female. Female-headed families with children account for a large share of the severely poor."
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16760690.htm

The Haves and the Have Lots
Christopher Howard, Democracy Journal, Spring 2007
The American welfare state is bigger than you think, and more unfair than you'd want. "A number of social policies make a mockery of the goal, enshrined in the Constitution, that government exists to 'promote the general welfare.' Our long-standing commitment to equal opportunity rings hollow when certain programs help people with good jobs and incomes to get health insurance, housing, parental leave, and retirement pensions, but offer little help to the poor and near-poor. We may disagree over how hard government should try to reduce poverty and inequality. Surely, however, when millions of Americans live in poverty and inequality has reached record levels, we can agree that public policies should not make these problems worse."

Small Steps for Big Problems of the Middle Class
David Nather, CQ Weekly, 12.mar.07
"The prescriptions Democrats are pursuing -- for the next two years at least -- aren't exactly the second coming of the Great Society… Instead the new majority is focused on bite-sized, narrowly targeted designed to address one part of a larger problem, or provide first steps that may lead to more ambitious initiatives down the road." Article available from Georgetown University Law Center Workplace Flexibility 2010.

Caretaking Bills Steam Open Political Fissures
Allison Stevens, Women's eNews, 18.feb.07
Women's rights advocates are scrambling on the suddenly broader labor policy playing field. The Family Medical Leave Act is being threatened, even as the Democratic Congress is pushing for mandatory paid sick leave.

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Labor Project for Working Families releases Flextime Tool Kit

The Labor Project for Working Families has released a new toolkit for union organizers on organizing, bargaining and legislating for worker controlled flexibility. The Flex time tool will help union leaders and representatives learn why union members want and need more job flexibility, how to tell genuine flextime from “fake flex” gimmicks, what specific flextime options are worth bargaining for, and when flextime can be used as a powerful organizing tool.

Although the Flextime Tool Kit was prepared specifically for union organizers, it includes general information on workplace flexibility that is useful to other workplace flexibility advocates.

Labor Project for Working Families
www.working-families.org

LPWF Flextime Tool Kit
February 2007. 14 pages, in .pdf

Related article:

Challenging the Workplace Dictatorship
Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet, 12.mar.07
George Orwell's "1984" is already here and it's called the American workplace, but finally there's a law in the works that might make jobs livable.

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News and commentary on worklife and the workplace

Do Parents Make Better Managers?
Forbes Magazine, 27.feb.07
"According to new research, parents--at least those committed to family life--actually perform better in the office. Researchers from Clark University and the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C., interviewed 347 managers and executives, mostly from large public companies, about their family lives. Then they talked to the participants' colleagues, subordinates and bosses about their work performance. Those who were committed to family life achieved significantly better reviews. The reason: Parents learn to multitask, handle stress and negotiate."

The key is to embrace instability
Penelope Trunk, Boston Globe/BostonWork.com, 4.mar.07
"Workers today will likely have no fewer than three careers in their lives, and they will change jobs frequently when young. After that, they will cut back when they have kids, ramp up when they need money, and switch when their learning curve flattens… The good news is that a large consensus of experts says that this kind of living will not necessarily hurt your career. In fact, changing positions frequently makes you a better candidate."

I Do's and Don'ts:
How Changes in Marriage, Divorce and Childbirth Are Redefining the Workplace
Knowledge@Wharton, 7.mar.07
"The same forces that play a role in marriage and divorce statistics -- namely birth control, partial closing of the gender wage gap, the rising age of first marriages and dramatic changes in home technologies -- have also had a significant impact on businesses and employees" (free registration required).

The word, today, is fluidity
Maggie Jackson, Boston Globe/BostonWorks, 11.mar.07
"What can we conclude from the top crop of work-life terms? In a word, it's all about fluidity -- from redefined families and new ways to work to colossal shifts in the senior stage of life. Check out this sampling to see if you're speaking -- and living -- the latest lingo."

After a time out for child care, I'm glad to have a boss again
Nancy Shohet West, Boston Globe/BostonWorks.com, 18.feb.07
"Now I'm back to professional life -- in a different company but one with the same corporate structure -- and I've discovered that something within me has changed. The overblown weightiness is gone, leaving a sense of perspective in its place. All those hours of being captain of the ship -- which meant not only cooking, cleaning, and transportation but also all the decision-making, budgeting, and arbitrating that it takes to run a household -- caused a transformation of sorts. Now, instead of being distracted by office politics, I'm just relieved to be someplace where I'm not in charge."

The Job Without Benefits
Kris Frieswick, Boston Globe/BostonWorks, 11.mar.07
Yes, some wives have been outearning their husbands for years. But now it's one in every three. So why, in their dogged fight for gender equality, are women their own worst enemy? "This is about breadwinning wives like Susan, uber-women who claim they want their husbands to carry their own weight around the house – but, well, Susan's very particular about how things get done, and she's better than her husband at housework, and he likes to relax more than she does, and so she just does it herself."

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New online magazine for college moms

College Mom Magazine, a new web publication founded by activist/author Katherine Arnoldi, features mothers on college campuses who are fighting for their equal rights to education and who are forging the way for mothers to come behind them. College Mom Magazine offers a forum for college moms to offer advice to other moms and other information of interest to college-enrolled and college-bound moms. "We believe that the denial of equal rights to education to mothers in high schools and on college campuses is a contributor to poverty in the United States," write the editors. "We hope that by fighting for our rights on college campuses we can lift these institutions, many who are now breaking laws, up to our level of responsibility and accountability." Amanda Spector is editor.

College Mom Magazine
www.collegemommagazine.com

KatherineArnoldi.com:
Guide to Colleges for Mothers

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Other news and commentary on mothers & mothering

The Motherhood Manifesto
Caroline Grant, LiteraryMama, Feb 2007
Review of the Motherhood Manifesto DVD.

Mothers Facing Pollution Risks Find Allies in the Religious Right
Teresita Perez, AlterNet, 5.mar.07
The religious right and environmentalists are teaming up to protect women and their babies from the dangers of exposure to pollution and toxic waste.

Spanking mad
Eilene Zimmerman, Salon, 2.feb.06
A California bill could make spanking a crime. But when did a swat on the bum become child abuse? And how far should the government go in telling parents how to raise their children?

The Big Corporate Motherhood Conspiracy
Janina Stajic, AlterNet, 20.feb.07
Retailers have created a new trend and are selling yet another myth: the problem- and pain-free motherhood. Too bad reality doesn't measure up.

Baby Loves Disco: Clubbing for Parents and Kids
Gloria Goodale, AlterNet, 15.mar.07
One afternoon a month, local organizers take over a nightclub -- complete with a cash bar and the regular DJ spinning his normal playlist -- and throw open the doors to anyone under the age of seven, accompanied by parents.

The Overscheduled Child Myth
John Cloud, Time Magazine, 19.Jan.07
"The idea that kids should slow down and trade electronic pleasures for pastoral ones is a fine example of transference. (Aren't you really the one who wants to lose the BlackBerry and go fishing?) But there's not much evidence that the ways childhood has changed in the past 25 years--less unstructured play, more gadgets, rough college admissions--are actually hurting kids. Just the opposite."

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Notable news and commentary on feminism, sexist language, women's rights, the high cost of manliness

Does Being a Feminist Mean Voting for Hillary?
Courtney E. Martin, AlterNet, 26.feb.07
Are feminists obligated to support a political candidate just because she's a woman?

Can the Term "Guys" Refer to Women and Girls?
Heather Gehlert, AlterNet, 28.feb.07
Is this a legitimate issue or has feminism gone too far?

Why Sexist Language Matters
Sherryl Kleinman, AlterNet, 12.mar.07
Gendered words and phrases like "you guys" may seem small compared to issues like violence against women, but changing our language is an easy way to begin overcoming gender inequality.

Women's Rights Week Sparkles With 'New Era' Energy
Allison Stevens, Women's eNews, 11.mar.07
Observations of women's history week, anchored by International Women's Rights Day on March 8, have become the unofficial peak week of female activism and exultation. Speaker Pelosi added a triumphant note to this year's events in Washington.

Making Women's Health an International Priority
Lucinda Marshall, AlterNet, 8.mar.07
It has been said that the health of a society is measured by how it treats its women. Judging from global statistics, it is safe to say that society is in crisis.

The High Cost of Manliness
Robert Jensen, Voice Male, Men's Resource Center for Change, Winter 2007
We can see that the short-term material gains we men get are not adequate compensation for what we give up in the long run -- which is to surrender part of our humanity to the project of dominance.

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society:

Notable news on child well-being, children and immigration policy, U.S. health care

Among Rich Countries, U.S. Child Well-Being Poor, But Optimism Prevails
Caitlin G. Johnson, OneWorld US, 20.feb.07
"The UNICEF Innocenti Research Center Report Card, 'Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries,' looks at six dimensions of child well-being: material well-being, health and safety, educational well-being, family and peer relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people’s own perceptions of their well-being."

Which Babies Are Real Americans?
Priscilla Huang, TomPaine.com, 20.feb.07
"The irrational stance of anti-immigrant advocates echoes that of 1990’s welfare reformers. Both assume that childbearing by immigrants or poor women of color creates a cycle of poverty and dependence on the government. Immigrant women and women on welfare are depicted as irresponsible mothers and fraudulent freeloaders."

Families Behind Bars: Jailing Children of Immigrants
Kari Lydersen, In These Times, 22.feb.07
"As a result of increasingly stringent immigration enforcement policies, today more than 22,000 undocumented immigrants are being detained, up from 6,785 in 1995."

Private Health Insurance Is Not the Answer
Phil Mattera, AlterNet, 23.feb.07
Why are we keeping a hopeless, for-profit health insurance system alive?

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Mom, Dad, I'm Pregnant

The Abortion Conversation Project has launched a new web site to assist teens and parents who are dealing with a pregnancy crisis. The "Mom Dad I'm Pregnant" site includes advice for teens on telling parents about a pregnancy, considering options, information in case of a rape, and special advice for young male partners. Advice for parents highlights how to respond and improve relationships with daughters and sons. The site offers sections on minors' rights and what to do if parents may be abusive, as well as information on spirituality, real stories, and additional resources. The website further states: "We believe that parental involvement in the reproductive decisions of young people can bring love and support at a time when a teenager may be in crisis about pregnancy, sex, or birth control. Our intent with this project is to offer support, skills, and advice to both adults and adolescents to promote communication that is not only helpful, but fruitful."

The Abortion Conversation Project aims to reduce the stigma of abortion through open and honest conversations. The "Mom Dad I’m Pregnant" project was funded by reproductive health clinics who are committed to promoting parental involvement through good communication.

Mom Dad I'm Pregnant
www.momdadimpregnant.com

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More reproductive health & rights news

Towards a Real Culture of Life
Lynn M. Paltrow, TomPaine.com, 12.mar.07
"Whether someone is an abortion provider or pro- choice advocate defending the right to choose abortion—or a midwife, doula, or birthing rights advocate seeking to ensure that women have access to health care providers that listen to and support them—they are advocating for the same women, regardless of their position on abortion. …Finding common ground among these two groups, and beginning to build a broad-based coalition of activists were two of the primary goals of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women when we sponsored the 2007 Summit to Ensure the Health and Humanity of Pregnant and Birthing Women earlier this year in Atlanta."

Defenders Mobilize to Assist Teen Who Aborted
Juliette Terzieff, Women's eNews, 12.feb.07
Legal advocates are closely watching the case of a Dominican teen in Massachusetts who faces possible homicide charges for performing a do-it-yourself abortion. Latina representatives say the case dramatizes health care disparities.

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