On January fifth of this year, 13 month old Melvin Davis Jr. was forgotten at the Step by Step Development Center in Memphis, Tennessee as workers locked up for the day. A half-hour later a passerby saw Melvin crying inside the glass front door and alerted the police. Fortunately – though crying and upset – Melvin was otherwise unharmed and was safely in his father’s arms within the hour (The Commercial Appeal, January 6, 2000).

This story taps into one of the fears of a growing number of American families, and it is also a touchstone for a discussion of the political salience of children. Rather than being an aberration, after all, Melvin’s plight is only one of many instances of child neglect and abuse in poor quality child-care situations in this country. In Memphis alone, there have been a number of high profile child-care tragedies in the past year, including the deaths of two toddlers left in hot vans last summer. Child-care, in turn, represents only one facet of the broad range of social and economic problems facing growing numbers of children and families.

What do instances like this one suggest about the ways in which children’s issues generate widespread concern, mobilize interest advocacy, and lead to demands for political change? The central assumption of pluralist democracies such as our own is that there is a direct relationship between public concern with an issue, its level of political salience, and political responses. Theoretically, widespread concern with a policy problem leads almost inevitably to public, expert, and media outcry around that issue. Mobilized by their shared concerns, new citizens groups form and – as their message resonates with the public – they attract mass memberships and critical political resources including funding, prestige, access to policy-making venues, celebrity and elite support, and policy legitimacy (Dahl 1956; Truman 1951).

In practice, the link between policy problems and political salience is more tenuous. As we might suspect, only days after his ordeal, Melvin’s name had faded from the national press and, presumably, from our public consciousness as well. More generally, this case illustrates another critical facet of children’s policy making: children’s concerns become politically salient as a function of a complex set of framing and environmental factors, including the ways in which policy issues are given voice, as well as the social and political contexts that shape the reception of those same messages. This dynamic means that children’s concerns will be heard in politics in ways that are largely independent of any measures of the objective condition of children.

In part this is because interest representation depends on resources and civic skills that are distributed unequally in society (Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995). As E.E. Schattschneider noted in 1960, "the pluralist heaven" of interest representation "sings with a decidedly uppercrust accent." The implication of this disparity is that patterns of political salience may reflect the organizational and political resources of representative organizations rather than any specifics of the causes and constituencies that those advocates represent (Costain 1992; Jenkins and Perrow 1977; Walker 1991).

In the remainder of this paper, I draw from the literature on social movements to assess the ways that children’s issues gain political salience and lead to public mobilization. Second, I return to the example of quality child-care to suggest that aspects of contemporary social and political context undermine efforts to create a collective understanding of the best interests of children. Finally, I argue that one way to build such a shared understanding is by working to link children’s policy simultaneously to individual, community, and governmental responsibility and action.

The emergence and decline of children’s issues in our national political consciousness can be traced through historical patterns of formation and decline of national organizations speaking for children. Those historical periods when children’s advocacy groups were more likely to form were characterized by higher levels of public interest, philanthropic support and governmental concessions. The history of political mobilization for children in this country has been episodic – with groups of political organizations forming during specific periods and disbanding during others. Historically, children’s advocacy organizations were most likely to form between 1915 and 1920, between 1935 and 1940, and since 1965 (Skocpol and Dickert 1999; Imig 1996a). Commenting on the significance of this pattern, Gilbert Steiner observes:

Steiner acknowledges the importance of social context for understanding patterns of mobilization on behalf of children – particularly in terms of the significance of other waves of social activism – which can heighten our sensitivity to social issues, and may lead to patterns of social reform. In this respect, broad patterns of social mobilization in this country establish a context that contributes to the ebb and flow of political advocacy for children.

What other factors help to explain these periods of heightened political salience for children? We can point to several influences, including shifting social and demographic trends, specific cataclysmic events, evolving political alignments, the emergence of influential allies, developments in the policy environment, and patterns of public concern.

Social Trends. Broad trends in politics, society and the economy have lasting implications for the ways in which children’s issues are understood. The growth of public and political support for child labor restrictions, compulsory public schooling, and early childhood education during the early decades of this century, for example, reflect the convergence of several streams of political economic development, including the Great Depression, the Progressive Movement, and Women’s Suffrage.

Contemporary discussions around child-care policy likewise reflect the influences of changing family structures, the increasing number of women in the workforce, declining real wages, and an increasing reliance of middle-class families on two incomes. As more and more middle-class mothers have entered the work force, public and political support for income assistance to low-income mothers has diminished (Imig 1996a, Wildavsky 1998). These demographic shifts have fundamentally altered the political understanding of the best interests of children. Thirty years ago, President Nixon vetoed the Family Support Act because it would encourage poor mothers to leave their children and enter the workforce. Today, in contrast, welfare to work programs are mandated for low-income mothers with young children.

Critical Events. Students of social movements and interest representation argue that the public becomes attuned to shared grievances through specific, jarring events. Activists seldom control the ways in which individual events are framed by the media, and they certainly cannot control how coverage of these events will be interpreted by the public. As a result, critical events are seldom presented in social or political context (c.f.: Iyengar and Kinder 1989), though, with hindsight, these events may seem to have "triggered" social and political concern (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). Melvin Davis’ story made the front page of the local paper because it was a minor tragedy. Significantly, this story was not presented in terms of the social trends that it underscores, such as shifting family structures, changing patterns of workforce participation, or increasing income bipolarization, all of which have contributed to the current systematic pattern of understaffed, under-trained, and under-equipped centers.

Probably the most important historical triggering event for children’s policy was the horrific 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York, which killed more than 140 young women and children. This tragedy generated national newspaper attention and helping to galvanize a public outcry against child labor and unsafe factory conditions, contributing to passage of the (short-lived) 1916 Keating-Owen act regulating child labor (Hawes 1991; Sarbaugh-Thompson and Zald 1989). Though the fire was only one of a configuration of forces that led to child labor reform, it provided an emotional, visceral, and public dimension to the dangers confronting children working in factories.

Similarly, the outbreak of World War One sparked concerns over the "Americanization" of immigrant children and contributed to the adoption of kindergarten programs across the country (Beatty 1995: 105; Skocpol and Dickert in press). Likewise, the increasing use of x-ray machines by pediatricians in the 1950s led to the "discovery" of child abuse and subsequent child protection campaigns. More recently, outrage over childhood cancers provoked community mobilization efforts in the name of "environmental justice" (c.f.: Harr 1995).

Children’s concerns historically have also been framed through the tragedies that befall individual children. The suffering of Ryan White, for example, contributed to crafting public support for HIV/AIDS policy. More recently, the plight of Elián González; or the tragedies of recent waves of school shootings have been layered with multiple political dimensions and interpretations.

Political Reception: The extent to which policy issues will become politically salient also depends on the reception that issue advocates receive from policy makers. There is an ongoing debate over the strength of the link between public opinion and policy making (c.f.: Graber 1997; Iyengar and Kinder 1989; Lenart 1994; Popkin 1994; Rice and Atkin 1989; Sharp 1999). To gloss this literature too briefly and with too broad a brush: the relationship between opinion and policy is often flawed. On many issues, the public fails to hold coherent informed opinions. For other issues, public attitudes do not reflect evolving conditions and policy making. Nevertheless, on those issues where we can identify an enduring public preference, sequences of policy development are seldom far removed from popular preferences (Sharp 1999).

Research on social mobilization suggests that challengers are likely to gain higher levels of access to – and concessions from – government when there is uncertainty within dominant political coalitions. Highly contested elections and unstable political alliances cause uncertainty, leading parties and candidates to pay more careful attention to the appeals of marginal constituencies, in the attempt to reconfigure a winning, and stable, support base (Hansen 1991: 16-17; Piven and Cloward 1979: 28). During these periods of uncertainty, children’s advocates have had greater opportunity to leverage their voices by offering a cause and constituency around to rebuild a solid support base. For example, the uncertainty inherent in extending the vote to women represented a major challenge to national political alignments. As the political parties tried to strategize around the uncertainty brought about by the "woman’s vote," they gave serious consideration for the first time to such issues as child labor, and infant and maternal health policy (Hawes 1991: 50; Sutton 1996: 210). In the same way, the massive dislocations caused by the Great Depression, including staggering adult unemployment rates, contributed to increasing support for child labor regulation, in part as an effort to placate unemployed, adult, voters (Hawes 1991: 53).

Influential Allies: At the most basic level, children are represented in politics only by proxy. Moreover the marginalization and political silence of low-income communities means that those families in which children are most at risk are doubly removed from direct participation in politics, increasing their reliance on allies for representation. In terms of political salience, this means that the voice of children in politics will bear the strong stamp of their allies.

Medical and family care professionals, for example, have played a significant role in children’s political representation, and, in turn, the development of society’s conception of the best interest of children partly reflects the processes of professionalization and institutionalization of pediatrics, social work, and public education (Michel 1999). Barbara Beatty suggests, for example, that the development of American early childhood education policy reflects the debates between professional groups – and between factions within the professions – over the efficacy of mothers pensions versus early child-care and education programs (1995). Similarly, tensions between the medical and social work communities found their way into debates over maternal and infant health policy early in this century (Skocpol 1992; Stone 1996).

Children can also gain political voice through the efforts of influential allies within government. Edwin Amenta discusses the importance of governmental supporters for the development of the Aid for Dependent Children program in the 1930s, for example (1998: 115-16). More recently, Georgia Governor Zell Miller and his staff built a lottery-funded universal prekindergarten program (Raden 1999). The Georgia experience suggests that a small group of political elites can organize a program that, once it is understood and implemented, will – in turn – engender strong public and political support.

But efforts championed by political elites are more difficult to sustain than those backed by widespread community commitment. Amenta finds, for example, that the lack of a mass support base for ADC ultimately led to lower levels of funding and administrative support than was generated for programs backed by a combination of both bureaucratic support and movement mobilization (1998: 257). In time, public support also can be expected to wither on those policy dimensions where government appears responsive, making interest representation seem increasingly irrelevant (Piven and Cloward 1979).

The Policy Environment: Ongoing policy agendas and political rhetoric constitute a filter through which children’s issues are heard or muted. Highly charged political rhetoric and visible antagonists, for example, serve as a lightning rod for mobilization. Children’s Defense Fund president Marian Wright Edelman acknowledged this dynamic on the eve of the 1996 Stand for Children rally: "Without Newt Gingrich … we would never have been able to bring folks together in this way" (Gleick 1996: 31).

Children’s issues are also more likely to engender public demands for action either when well-established programs are threatened or when new policy initiatives raise expectations of success. This past autumn, Michigan Governor John Engler’s efforts to liberalize the state’s child-care center licensing requirements were met by a state-wide, internet based mobilization effort. Within a month, children’s advocates delivered 3,200 petitions to the Governor’s office, and their cause had gained the editorial endorsement of all but one of the major newspaper in the state. In turn, the Governor agreed to pull the proposal "for reconsideration and revision" (Interview with Michele Strasz, JumpStart Michigan, October 30, 1999).

The creation of new programs can also channel and focus the way children are heard in politics. Formation of the Children’s Bureau in 1912 both created an access point for children’s advocates seeking a federal hearing, and at the same time significantly skewed the debate about the best interests of children toward maternal support programs, as favored by Children’s Bureau officials, and away from proposals for universal child-care and early education. Similarly, President Johnson’s declaration of a War on Poverty both legitimized vigorous federal intervention into welfare politics in the United States and also expanded the range of federal grants available to advocates for social justice (Katz 1989: 79-123; Walker 1983). In the same way, the short-lived Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families provided both an opportunity and target for advocates seeking a congressional audience.

Raising Public Consciousness: Ultimately, for an issue to become politically salient, it must not only resonate with the public but also move people from complacency to action. The media is critical to this process. Expanding media and public concern with a policy issue can lead to expanding resources for advocates and relaxed barriers to government access. Media coverage also provides a narrative that has the capacity to establish a causal dimension to social problems, linking them to particular causes and possible solutions (Stone 1997). In consequence, media attention helps to rally supporters to action around certain issue positions and behind specific policy demands.

Media coverage both heightens public awareness and reflects public and policy agendas. In this sense, it both shapes and reflects public consciousness. Over the past decade, the share of print media coverage devoted to children’s issues has risen (Media Strategies Group 1999: 4). At the same time, the media – taken as a whole – does an extremely poor job of connecting children’s issues to policy dimensions (Chen, Kunkel and Miller 1999). In this respect, stories like Melvin Davis’ are reported as independent episodes rather than in terms of their relationship to social trends and conscious public and political decisions.

Political consciousness is also infused by the work of research groups, both as these groups provide the background for policy discussions and as their research is invoked in political debates. The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual Kids Count Data Book and the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, for example, establish a baseline understanding of the welfare of American children. Meanwhile, The Benton Foundation’s Connect for Kids E-Zine, provides a closely followed weekly newsletter on advocacy efforts for communities and families.

Activists pursuing child labor legislation recognized the importance of public concern to their prospects for success. In 1908 the National Child Labor Committee hired Lewis Hine to document the lives of working children. Hine’s photographs allowed the public a glimpse into the lives of children toiling behind locked factory doors, and provided child labor reformers with a powerful tool with which to appeal to the sensibility of both the general public and policy makers.

These elements of political context suggest that the story of a forgotten child is likely to become politically salient as a function of the ways it is framed and presented by advocates and allies, represented by the media, understood by the public, and received by political actors and institutions. Collectively, these factors shape the degree to which an issue is understood to be public or private, is understood as a shared or as an individual problem, as critical and chronic or fleeting, and as amenable to human action – tied to specific policy solutions – or as beyond our control.

Returning to the example that opens this paper, how does political context help us to understand the political salience of child-care quality? Certainly this issue is both critical and chronic. More specifically:

• The problem is shared: By 1995, more than 60% of children under age six were in some form of non-parental care (CDF 1999: 3; Wildavsky 1998: 168). Further, concerns with quality child-care appear to have the capacity to span the fragmenting political divides of race and economic class that splinter many communities. As one state legislator noted recently: "This issue crosses economic and cultural lines. White and Black: all … people are having trouble. There’s a perception that this is only a [poor people’s] issue, and that’s not the case" (Quoted in Fantz 1999).
• The problem is also urgent: With the demise of AFDC, state welfare to work programs have led to an explosion in the number of child-care programs across the country.
• The problem also has a policy dimension: In many states child-care workers do not have high school diplomas, prior child-care experience, first aid or CPR training. Workers are usually paid minimum wage and turnover is high. Market by market, those care settings that are exceptions cost substantially more (White 1999).

In these respects, the need for quality, affordable child-care has both public and shared dimensions. Where the system fails, we are – all too often – confronted by frightening stories about endangered children, and these critical events are emblematic of underlying demographic and social trends.

Does the issue of child-care quality – then – present an opportunity to mobilize widespread political salience for children? In practice, this opportunity is likely to be frustrated by the difficulty of building agreement on the public dimensions of the issue; both in terms of where responsibility for the child care lies and in terms of linking this problem to particular policy solutions (Harrington, 2000). Reasons for this complexity include:

• A divide between low-income and middle class families (in many communities this division is present physically in the divide between urban and suburban neighborhoods). Significantly, this divide undermines efforts to mobilize across the boundaries of race and class (Covington in press; Waste 1998). If the most important issues for most families are close to home, then geographic separation undermines efforts to united parents across communities. Put simply, more affluent families can afford quality child-care, and neighborhoods configured by class share similar visions of appropriate family policy and available care alternatives.
• A deep public distrust with governmental solutions to social problems, and a belief that many of the problems confronting children are the responsibility of those children’s parents (Public Voice 1999; Starobin 1999; Amidei 1993).
• The political power of families is declining. Families with children under 18 make up a diminishing share of the American population – dropping from approximately 45% of households today to less than 42% of households by 2010 (US Census 1998a). Further, those families most at risk for raising children in poverty are concentrated in urban areas – further distanced from the suburban and rural political base of both parties (Waste 1998).

Taken together, this set of factors suggests that it will be extremely difficult under current social and political conditions to build a public or political commitment to children’s policy. Yet this same set of factors may also allow us to begin to unravel a paradox: Poll after poll suggests that children’s issues already are highly salient (Coalition for America’s Children 1999; Hewlett and West 1998; Public Agenda 1998; 1999; Yankelovich 1998). Why, then, is there so little public support for coherent, progressive, government action on their behalf (Starobin 1999)? To what extent is this paradox a product of the ways children’s issues are bound up with cultural understandings about the status – and responsibility – of families, as well as about distinctions between economic classes in this country?

This paradox is particularly significant given the relationship between children’s issues and the plight of low-income families. Children in low-income families are at greatest risk in our society. Across our history, consequently, relief efforts have been focused on the children of the poor. This has been the arena for the charity work for the majority of the past century and has led to much of what contemporaries considered progressive social policy (e.g.: Settlement Houses, Orphan Trains, and Day Nurseries).

Today, however, understanding children’s issues in the context of family poverty may stand in the way of mobilizing mass concern or generating political salience. To the extent that children’s issues are perceived to be poverty issues, children’s advocates are working against strong anti-government and anti-welfare regime values. If the public sees children’s advocates as fighting for aid for poor families, advocates confront both public antipathy toward paternalistic government, and a suspicion that the problems of other people’s children are really problems of other parents.

Recent political initiatives including the Contract with America and the Personal Responsibility Act underscore the current political distaste for progressive policy-making. Further, between a quarter and a third of the country currently identify themselves as "fundamentalist Christians," who are disturbed not only by changing family structures and working mothers, but also by a reliance on "stranger care", alienating this cohort further from policy appeals that seem to absolve other parents of responsibility for the care of their children (Hardisty 1999; Media Strategies Group 1999, Talbot 2000).

As children’s advocates have argued for years, in order to begin to build public support for a progressive policy agenda it is necessary to frame children’s issues in ways that cross class lines. The power of cross-class mobilization is evident in the successes of the movement for children with special needs, for example. Significantly, public education may present a second possible opportunity for cross-class mobilization. Though much maligned, public schools currently educate 55 million children (89 percent of all children in the United States) – more than at any time since World War Two (Carnevale and Desrochers 1999).

In short, where political power is concentrated in middle-class suburbs rather than in the low-income neighborhoods where children are at greatest risk, generating enduring political concern for children ultimately depends on framing issues and tapping into social structures that transcend class, in an effort to build both collective identity and collective political action.

One hope for achieving this type of cross-class mobilization may be found in a more community based conception of public policy. Although we generally conceive of policy solutions in dichotomous terms – either in terms of state or market mechanisms – the reality of social life is more complex. To paraphrase Robert Putnam, while Americans are sensitive to the actions of states and markets, we live in neither, but instead in communities made up of rich networks of association and responsibility (1994). In practice, the ways in which we respond to policy problems reflect this interrelationship between communities, states, and markets. In terms of maximizing public safety, for example, we employ a combination of solutions that draw from each of these three sets of institutions: government action (e.g.: more police and calls for gun control); market choice (e.g.: private security forces and walled and gated suburbs); and communities (e.g.: neighborhood watch and community policing programs). Across society, as this example suggests, we are likely to see conceptions of effective policy that draw from these three sets of institutions at once.

A parallel dynamic is at work in the effort to improve public education. There are calls for government solutions (e.g.: the standards movement, and national testing efforts); calls for more individual, market-based choice (e.g.: suburban flight or voucher systems); and there are calls for interventions based on community involvement (e.g.: the Texas Interfaith Alliance School movement, or the Children’s Aid Society’s School Community Partnerships). Returning to the case of child-care we can identify the same dynamic at work: for example in calls for greater government subsidization and regulation of child care; in efforts to promote choice and efficiency through market mechanisms (e.g.: the shelved Michigan effort); and through community involement (e.g.: through child-care alliances or though efforts to maximize parental involvement in child care) (White 1999; Zigler and Muenchow 1992).

These examples suggest that one hope for overcoming the disconnect between high levels of public concern for children and low levels of support for social policy may be found in building upon the complex interplay between individuals, communities, and governments – both in terms of assigning responsibility and designing policy interventions. The shared concerns of parents, in other words, may serve as a better basis for mobilization where solutions are framed in terms of the responsibilities of individuals, communities, governments, and markets.

Such an effort is also likely to receive aid from an unexpected quarter: shifting economic forces are causing cities and states to re-conceptualize economic competitiveness in terms of the demands of high technology and a knowledge based economy. Robert Reich argues that in twenty years fully a third of all jobs in the U.S. will be in knowledge based industries (1998). Significantly, unlike a smokestack-based economy, the principal productive capacity of knowledge workers is completely transportable. Consequently, for cities as well as for businesses, efforts to build local economic health are likely to shift from market inducements (e.g.: "smokestack chasing" tax abatement strategies) to efforts to build the types of infrastructure that attract knowledge workers (c.f.: Harrington 2000). These factors, which include good schools, safe streets, livable neighborhoods, recreational opportunities, affordable housing, a clean and healthy environment, and reasonable commutes constitute a new type of soft infrastructure (Clarke and Gaile 1998; Reich 1998). The need to build soft infrastructure, in turn, suggests an opportunity to make all levels of government as well as the business community into allies for child advocates.

For the advocacy community, this economic shift and its political implications present an opportunity to place a community based children’s agenda in the context of state and market forces, without setting state and market solutions and responsibility against each other. At a broader level, linking individuals, communities, and governments in this way is attractive precisely because it recognizes that self-interest is best served by collective and community based action rather than recourse to either individual exit or strong government based strategies for resolving policy problems. Where individuals attempt to flee social problems, society is further polarized along class lines and the prospects for achieving the benefits of collective action are further eroded. Government based strategies, in turn, are likely to breed suspicion and, in the current social and political context, are unlikely to generate sufficient political support. By resituating children’s policy within the communities where we live, we may recapture the opportunity to define responsibility and policy interventions in terms that will increase the commitment not only of governments and businesses but also of communities and families.