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                                                                                EUROPE, Page 58

Where Children Come First


Instead of just talking about family values, France offers a
wide range of programs from the cradle to the grave to promote
a more stable, equitable and caring society

By JILL SMOLOWE -- With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington and
Farah Nayeri/Paris


    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 repatri ated 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.