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Edward Zigler is a Sterling Professor of Psychology, emeritus, at Yale University. He was one of the founders of Head Start, and served as head of Office of Child Development and the U.S. Children's Bureau during the Nixon administration. He lead Nixon's effort to pass a national, comprehensive, center-based child care program to complement his Family Assistance Plan, a welfare reform proposal that would have provided a guaranteed minimum income to welfare recipients who work. The effort ended with Nixon, at the urging of his adviser Pat Buchanan and the religious right, vetoing a comprehensive child care bill that had passed through Congress.

Zigler has been involved with the debate over child care ever since, including the late '80s and early '90s fight over the Act for Better Child Care Services (ABC) bill, which ended in the passing of the Child Care and Development Block Fund, which provides money for states to subsidize child care. He most recently co-authored the book "The Tragedy of Child Care in America," which tracks the history of efforts to pass a national child care policy and proposes solutions going forward. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

There seems to have been two main pushes for a comprehensive child care bill: the one you were involved with in the Nixon administration, and then the ABC/block grants debate in the late '80s, early '90s.

EZ: The ABC was a fairly decent bill but what they finally settled on was the Child Care and Development Block Fund. I always have to support it because something is better than nothing. These people need some subsidies. But it’s, in my estimation, not offering a real solution.

First of all it’s just for poor people. I wish people would learn that the problem of child care is not just a problem of the poor and near-poor, it’s a problem right up through the lower middle class. It doesn’t do anything for those people. Most industrialized countries have a child care system. We do not have a system. We have this hodge podge of for-profits, not-for-profits. Nobody can even understand this non-system, never mind try to utilize it.

The costs are just prohibitive for parents. I saw some new figures from the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies (NACCRRA). They keep studying child care in America. I was worried that calling it a “tragedy,” the prose was too purple. Linda Smith at NACCRRA says that’s not strong enough. They’ve read work that shows just how bad it is.