Where Children Come First

By Jill Smolowe

SCHOOLTEACHERS LUC AND ISABELLE BENTZ are hardly extravagant. By day, both teach immigrant children in low-income districts of Paris. At night, the couple returns to the working-class suburb of Sarcelles where, across from a busy train station, they live in a three-bedroom apartment with their daughter and son, ages 3 years and 18 months. The flat is cozy but small, typical of the low-rent units constructed back in the 1950s to house French families repatriated from North Africa. Together, the Bentzes take home $3,600 a month, not a lot for a family of four. Yet they are thinking of having a third child -- and, unlike many American parents, are not fretting about the potential costs. They know they can count on the French social contract to see them through.

If Isabelle gets pregnant again, the national social security system will cover the bulk of her prenatal, delivery and postpartum expenses. She is guaranteed a six-month paid maternity leave, two months longer than for each of her prior pregnancies, to cover the added responsibilities of an expanding family. In the third month of her pregnancy, Isabelle will begin to accrue monthly benefits, eventually totaling $343, to defray the cost of another infant. If Isabelle decides not to return to work, she will get $563 in "parental education benefits" to reward her decision to stay home. If she does return to the classroom, she can count on subsidized day care. All of this is in addition to the $394 in family-related benefits and rent subsidies the Bentzes already enjoy each month, and the $1,074 annual tax deduction they receive for child care.

And the Bentzes do not have to worry about Luc's retired father. He collects more than 80% of his former salary in pension benefits and has access to free medical care. While most Americans would marvel at these entitlements, the Bentzes see nothing unusual in any of this. "I guess," Luc says, "you can say we're an average French family."

Small wonder French citizens find the heated U.S. campaign rhetoric about "family values" quaintly irrelevant. While Democrats and Republicans play , their game of dare-to-care one-upmanship, the French look upon the benefits that attend citizens from cradle to grave as inalienable rights. Why has France -- and many other West European countries -- long since reached a consensus about government's obligation to family while Americans continue to argue across party lines? While both cultures regard the family as a precious and fragile unit that requires governmental attention and care, historical and ideological factors make the terms of that obligation very different. French workers pay 44% of each paycheck to their government to ensure the wide range of family-related services that touch all generations. The relative homogeneity of society and the centralization of government make delivery of those services easier. Americans, who generally pay lower taxes, seem to distrust anything centrally orchestrated in Washington. As a result, the U.S. has no national child-care policy.

The French are more willing than Americans to put their money where their values are, largely because they have a heightened sense of their children as conservators of their family traditions and culture. Parents are rewarded for making so vital a contribution to society. "In the U.S., we view children as a strictly private good," says Betty Duskin, a senior economist at the Paris- based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. "In France, they consider children a part of public responsibility."

That was not always the case. The wave of progressive thinking that first brought welfare benefits to Europe at the turn of the century did not reach France until 1936, when the Popular Front government of Premier Leon Blum imposed worker-friendly reforms, including higher salaries, paid vacations and a 40-hour workweek. Still suffering from the Great Depression, the French middle class felt threatened by the worker privileges and contributed to Blum's rapid demise.

Then came World War II. That horrifying experience drew the French together as never before, reinforcing the value of human life and national cooperation. The heroes of the French Resistance put forward a social scheme that both employer and employee would finance to protect workers against three basic contingencies: illness, unemployment and old age. The plan also included specific family benefits to encourage French couples to begin replenishing the depleted population. Underlying all of this was a profound sense of solidarity, a word still heard in French conversation. "The French social security system provides for solidarity between generations," says Michel Lepinay, author of Social Security: Bankruptcy by Prescription. The programs are also a spur to equality by making the same payments available up and down the economic scale.

Benefits have been adjusted to keep pace with such cultural shifts as the increasing numbers of working mothers and single parents. But the commitment to provide basic care for all generations has neither flagged nor been politicized -- a covenant that remains intact in many parts of Western Europe. "With minor exceptions, all the family benefit programs in Europe are respected across the political spectrum," says C. Arden Miller, a professor of maternal and child health at the University of North Carolina. "When governments change, they do not tamper with these programs."

Americans, by contrast, tinker endlessly with their patchwork of entitlement programs aimed largely at the poor. The failure to make a French-style commitment has much to do with the reverence Americans have for self-reliance. They cling to a new-frontier notion of rugged individualism, forgetting that those who actually braved the alien territories of the Wild West traveled in groups of families, not alone. Through the agrarian era into the modern one, Americans have continued to regard the nurturing of families as a personal issue rather than a public concern. "We have this notion," says research psychologist Arlene Skolnick of the University of California, Berkeley, "that a family is inadequate if it is not self-sufficient."

When such pride stands in the way of a child's eating or receiving adequate health care, the French question the wisdom of American values. As President Francois Mitterrand observed after the Los Angeles riots last spring, "it's very nice to promote capital, profits and investment in business, but these riots show that the social needs of any country must not be neglected."

The American tendency to discredit such assistance as welfare handouts owes much to its ethnic diversity. "Racial prejudice has contributed significantly to limiting policies toward children," says Sheila Kamerman of Columbia University's School of Social Work. "The U.S. has to overcome its problems with race before it can move ahead with social policy." Because the population in France and other European countries tends to be more racially and culturally homogeneous, there is less of an us-vs.-them mentality. "In , Europe, family policy means everyone," says psychologist Skolnick. "In America, it's for 'them' -- the poor, minorities and dysfunctional families."

Unlike France's reliable cushion, the safety net in the U.S. is so full of holes that as many as a quarter of American children under the age of 18 live in poverty. One-quarter of American mothers receive no medical care in the first trimester of pregnancy. The U.S. infant mortality rate is 9.8 per 1,000 live births; in France the rate is 7.36. Immunization rates for U.S. preschoolers lag behind European rates by as much as 49%. And 9.8 million American children under the age of 18 are not covered by Medicaid or private health insurance. "The money would come," says Rae Grad, executive director of the National Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality, "if we believed in our heart of hearts that children were important to this country."

Rhetoric often contrasts starkly with action. At the Republican National Convention in August, many speakers praised women who stayed home to tend to children. But six weeks later, President Bush vetoed a family leave bill that would have enabled new mothers to stay home without pay for 12 weeks. The U.S. stands virtually alone among industrialized nations in not mandating family leave.

France, however, is beginning to sag under the cost of those benefits. The social security system faces a $1.44 billion deficit this year, largely the result of escalating medical and pension payments. "The system is so poorly managed that it is inevitably going to go bankrupt," warns Lepinay. France's solidarity could unravel if the $379 billion contributed each year is not handled more efficiently, and if citizens do not start to make do with less. But try telling that to people who have become accustomed to their family benefits. "When you get used to them," admits Isabelle Bentz, "you always think there aren't enough."

One harsh reality is that as the French population ages, the birthrate is not keeping pace. The French have come full circle since the war, once again having to coax citizens to procreate. If they do not cooperate, the next generation of workers will not be able to pay for tomorrow's children. Ironically, as the French commitment to family threatens to falter, recession- weary Americans are beginning to realize that the foundations for a stable society must be built at home.

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CREDIT: TIME Graphic. [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: OECD}]CAPTION: REAL FAMILY VALUES

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington and Farah Nayeri/Paris