While presidential campaigners Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton argued about who had the best cookie recipes one day in 1992, a new movie was scaring the heck out of the American family. Had Hill been as smart as she is clever, she might have cut the cookie competition, studied that fear and then moderated her strategies for new health and childcare measures accordingly. But she was not, so she did not. Her plans were embarrassingly shredded.
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle featured a vengeful widow called Peyton (Rebecca de Mornay) masquerading as a nanny to the children of a woman called Claire (Annabel Sciorra) who, she believed, had caused her doctor husband's death and her own subsequent miscarriage. It was complicated: he had committed suicide after Claire reported him for digitally abusing her during a routine pregnancy check-up.
The movie pressed every button in the family gothic genre. Bad enough that Peyton tried to seduce Claire's husband and daughter, worse still that she killed Claire's childless-career-woman best friend - using the family's House and Gardens conservatory as her weapon.
Taboos went tumbling altogether at the moment when Peyton slipped into the nursery and actually breast-fed Joe, the brand new baby. By the end, you could bet safe money that Claire would never trust childcare again.
The report by the Expert Working Group on Childcare steers clear of family gothic, but the debate it provokes presses the same buttons. At its most superficial, the debate is a contest between competing parenting styles, particularly those of mothers. At its most uncomfortable, it amounts to a possible conflict of interest between the welfare of children, the State's most vulnerable citizens, and those of the market, the State's favourite toy.
Whom shall it benefit? What are its desired outcomes? If, as stated, its overt impetus was to increase the pool of workers, will similar economic imperatives excuse the Government from developing a cohesive strategy on family and childcare? And why not implement its uncontroversial recommendations now?
THE crowd-pleasing aspects of this report are its resolution to introduce tax reliefs and credits on some childcare costs, to professionalise childcare providers - with the major exception of parents who care for their own children - and to offer employers limited tax incentives on their childcare costs. In this, the report simply rushes to keep up with the pace of change already set by working parents.
But the catches are worrying. In the first place, there is no assurance that this historical turnabout in childcare provision will last longer than a baby's infancy. A seven-year limit is proposed, with no plans for what happens next.
One can also wonder how costs and reliefs will be affected by the knock-on pay consequences of professionalising the childcare sector, a move which will inevitably increase salaries for childcare workers.
Calculating average costs of childcare as ranging from £44 to £71 a week, the report sets an upper limit on the amount of tax relief which can be claimed and staggers that according to the age and number of children in any one family. In my own imprecise straw poll last week, phrases words "peanuts" and "monkeys" spring to mind.
Most of all, the report fails to address wider issues of child poverty and of family rights. That was not its brief, strictly speaking: both are already subjects of existing Government reports which will be considered by the same inter-departmental committee to which this one is being referred.
But given the report's firm placing of future responsibility and authority within the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, the question raised is whether there is sufficient structural and political will overall to make it part of a cohesive strategy on childcare and family issues.
Apart altogether from the considerable vision and imagination needed to deliver wise strategies, recent experiences make it hard to see how the complex issues of childcare will survive competition for funds and for policy priority against more traditional and potentially more disruptive claims on the Justice vote such as prisons and pay.
Experience suggests an ethos there which has been more geared towards systems of control than of flexibility.
And the issues here of poverty and family rights are anything but straightforward.
The Report of the Commission on the Family insisted that employers have responsibilities to the family. But without strategies to make workplaces more family-friendly, childcare provisions could actually work as a cosmetic device to protect the workplace from the needs of families, just as their stay-at-home wives once did.
At on average 50 hours, Irish and British fathers whose partners work exclusively in the home already spend more time at work and have less time with their children than parents elsewhere in Europe. Some choose to, most have to.
Denmark introduced a parent wage which rewards stay-home parents in the only way the market can acknowledge - cash in hand. In the absence of Government comment so far, we can only guess about whether such innovations will be introduced, with or without increased support for existing measures such as child benefit.
Perhaps such issues will be addressed within the family unit of the Fianna Fail parliamentary party when it meets on Wednesday. Perhaps the Taoiseach or his Justice Minister will then confide in us as to their strategic thinking, if any, as we wonder whether Ireland is becoming more an economy than a society.
That's how the cookie crumbles, economists may say, in the same spirit as Barbara Bush watching the failure of Hillary Clinton's recipe for the American family. Not very friendly.
But without a portfolio of cohesive family strategies, a market-driven childcare policy could and probably will mean that in future there will be no reason why all parents should not work long hours, and every pressure to make them do so.