Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

balancing work and family life. While raising Chelsea, I had relied on friends, family and a series of caregivers who came into our home when Bill and I were at work. Most parents are not so fortunate.

I met with women who had participated in the survey to learn more about their lives.

One single mother from New York City described the key to her daily survival: “Everything is timed,” she said. She outlined her schedule: rise at 6:00 A.M., get ready for work, make breakfast, feed the cat and wake up her nineyear-old son. Catch up on ironing while he gets ready for school. Walk her son to school, go to work until 5:00 P.M., and then pick him up from his afterschool program. Make dinner, help with homework, pay the bills or straighten up the house and then fall into bed. She took pride in the fact that she could support her family and had managed to work her way up from part-time bookkeeper to fulltime executive secretary, but it was a demanding and exhausting schedule.

As one thirty-seven-yearold intensive care nurse from Same Fe told me, “We have to be a wife, a mother and a professional, and to be ourselves, which usually takes last place.”

The New York mother was grateful for the afterschool program run by the Police Athletic League (PAL). Local police told me they supported such programs because they understood that if a working parent wants to keep a child out of trouble, there has to be a safe, productive environment in the afterschool hours. Yet many parents did not have access to good afterschool programs or quality care for preschool children. Not enough workplaces provided or subsidized child care; day care centers often turned away sick kids; and most charged high fees for late pickups. A mother from Boston told me that she sometimes skipped her lunch break so that she could leave work in time to pick up her three-year-old from day care. Hers was a common predicament. An assistant bank vice president I met in Atlanta told me, “I nearly kill pedestrians trying to get to the day care center on time, trying to avoid the late fees after 6:00 P.M.” A federal judge and mother explained: “When I was a lawyer, all of the partners had wives who didn’t work.

They didn’t have to worry about picking up the dry cleaning or picking up the kids.” That sounded like what Albert Jenner had said to me in 1974 when I suggested that I might want to be a trial lawyer and he told me I couldn’t because I didn’t have a wife.

In 1994, Dr. David Hamburg, President of the Carnegie Corporation, encouraged me to use my role as First Lady to highlight the deficiencies in American child care and encourage greater federal support for working parents. During the welfare reform debate in 1996, I had insisted that the administration retain access to child care as an essential ingredient in helping poor mothers move from welfare to work. I would later broaden my message as I studied the results of new research indicating the importance of stimulating children’s brains in the early years. The idea was to learn how child care could reflect this research and enhance early childhood development in the early years. I supported the innovative program, Reach Out and Read, which encouraged doctors to “prescribe” that adults read to babies and toddlers. I met with numerous child care experts and key children’s advocacy organizations and traveled around the country to see different approaches to improving the quality of child care and remedying the paucity of child care options available to working parents. In Miami, I met with business leaders to discuss corporate responsibility for child care, and followed up with a White House event highlighting the successful programs of different businesses. At the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, I visited one of the U.S. military’s impressive child care centers for military families, which I hoped would be seen as an example for the rest of society.

I convened two White House conferences, the first on Early Childhood Development and Learning and the second on Child Care. We assembled experts, advocates, business leaders and politicians to focus the nation’s attention on critical areas of family life and outline federal initiatives to give working men and women the help they needed to be productive employees and responsible parents. My staff continued to work closely with the President’s domestic policy advisers to develop the groundbreaking policies that Bill announced in his 1998 State of the Union Address. I was proud that the Administration put forward a $zo billion investment in improving child care over the next five years. The funds would be used to increase access to child care for low-income working families and afterschool opportunities for older children, expand Head Start and provide tax incentives for businesses and institutions of higher education that invest in child care. An Early Learning Fund was established to provide financial assistance to states and communities in their efforts to improve the quality of child care providers, reduce child-to-staff ratios and increase the number of licensed providers. I worked hard to make afterschool care more accessible, and in 1998, the Administration introduced the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which provides enriching afterschool and summer school opportunities to approximately 1.3 million children. Afterschool care has been shown to increase achievement in reading and math; it also decreases youth violence and drug use and gives parents much needed peace of mind.

I continued to promote domestic initiatives through public appearances, speeches and in meetings and phone calls with members of Congress as well as outside organizations. Over the course of eight years, my talented domestic policy staff-Shirley Sagawa, Jennifer Mein, Nicole Rabner, Neera Tanden, Ann O’Leary, Heather Howard and Ruby Shamir―was invaluable. Bill and I also convened White House strategy sessions on how to curb media violence directed at children, improve education for Hispanic students who had a high dropout rate and