Junior Partners : Some Mothers Cope With Orange County’s Growing Child-Care Problem by Bringing Babies to Office

When Morris (Dutch) Wertenberger learned within the space of a few weeks in late 1987 that two of his employees were pregnant, he didn’t know whether to pop the cork or slit his wrist.

At the time, Kim Smith and Kathy Butterfield represented half of Wertenberger’s work force at Slide Link Inc., a 35-millimeter slide graphics business in Irvine. Both women made it clear they wanted to spend at least the first few months at home with their newborn babies--the first child for each.

So after a couple of obligatory hip-hip-hoorays, Wertenberger disappeared into his office and began pounding the table with both fists.

Not really, but Wertenberger did have a problem on his hands: how to keep two employees he valued (Smith was his manager of operations), yet be accommodating to their personal wishes.

The solution proved to be remarkably simple: Since last September, when both infants were just several weeks old, Smith and Butterfield have been bringing their baby daughters to the office in Irvine.

For the women, it meant not having to forgo income during a maternity leave period or look for day care that can run up to $7,000 a year in Orange County for infant children. For Wertenberger, it meant not having to replace two employees.

Such win-win situations are not common in the increasingly worrisome world of child care. “We’re far behind, we’re really far behind,” said Carol Hatch, executive director of the Orange County Commission on the Status of Women.

“The commission has been screaming about the need for day care since the late ‘70s,” Hatch said. “Everybody’s been saying, ‘Well, it wasn’t a political priority until last year.’ Now, everybody is screaming about day care.”

Hatch said a huge disparity remains between day-care availability and the child population in Orange County. Commission statistics show that there are 3,636 licensed spaces for 66,400 children under the age of 2, and 36,291 spaces for 137,000 children ages 3 to 5. For children 6 to 14, there is one spot for every 25 children, Hatch said. Even conceding the fact that not all children need day care, the numerical gap is significant, Hatch said.

Employers who want to help with the day-care problem often get frustrated, Hatch said. “I think the problem is so overwhelming that it really frightens them. What might be beneficial would be if we’d see more joint efforts--companies large and small, working with city and school officials.”

At Slide Link, Wertenberger decided to try the “don’t worry-be happy” approach. “At first, there was a slight hitch in the stomach, but then we thought, ‘Why not? What can go wrong?’ ” Wertenberger said. “It’s not like you’re committing yourself to discovering the New World with three ships sailing west. If you don’t like it the third day, you can call a halt to the whole thing.”

That was 5 months ago and so far the experiment has worked, although Wertenberger says the company is “just winging it” with its makeshift day-care program.

Child-care officials applaud Wertenberger’s initiative, while acknowledging that the idea would not lend itself to many work situations. But in a county woefully short of child-care services, any idea that works is cause for celebration.

“There are a lot of ways to help employees in child care, aside from using on-site child care,” according to Ann Tanouye, the county’s child care ombudsman for the state Department of Social Services. For example, she said, employers can reserve slots in existing child-care centers, subsidize their employees’ child-care expenses or use a federal program that lets employees’ deduct child-care expenses from their paychecks before being taxed.

While authorities said they are not aware of any other company that lets its employees bring children to work, they said it may be occurring with no fanfare. In addition, some other public agencies and private companies sponsor day-care facilities.

Among them:

Fairview Developmental Center claims the first employer-sponsored child-care center in Orange County, converting an old ward at the center into four classrooms that opened in 1983. It now has about 80 children, ranging from infants to preschoolers, and is available both to center employees and the general public.

The Internal Revenue Service in Laguna Niguel has a day-care center in the federal building, available both to children of IRS employees and the general public. Sixty-two children are enrolled.

Tracor Flight Systems Inc. in Santa Ana has five children in an on-site day-care center, which is available for employees’ children up to 2 years old.

Three companies--Pacific Mutual Insurance, Hughes Aircraft and Pacifica Community Hospital--joined to sponsor a child-care center in Huntington Beach for their employees’ children and the general public. The center now has 52 children but room for 100 more.

The city of Irvine has financed a day-care center now handling 100 children of city employees and the general public.

A privately run day-care center opened last fall on the UC Irvine campus and currently serves about 120 children of students, faculty and the general public. Space is available for another 80.

While Wertenberger has taken on-site day care to its extreme by allowing babies in the office, the next best thing, experts say, is an employee-sponsored on-site center.

The IRS opened its center last June and sees it as a way to offset higher salaries that private employers can offer.

Bill Baker, an IRS branch chief, said the program is chock-full of advantages.

Having her child in the same building with her enhances an employee’s workday, Baker said, largely because of the peace of mind of knowing the youngster is close at hand. In addition, the parent eliminates drop-off and pickup stops at another day-care center. Parents can visit their children in the center during work breaks, Baker said. Such easy access improves employee morale and productivity and does not impair their concentration on the job, said Baker, who supervises 65 employees.

Becky Vandenbergh is an IRS purchasing agent and has brought her daughter Laura, now 17 months old, to the child-care center since it opened last summer. “It’s a total plus, just in the fact she’s far enough away (on another floor) that it doesn’t distract me, but close enough that I can visit her a couple times during the day,” Vandenbergh said. “I had her in another child-care center before this opened, and I like this 100% better. It’s just the fact that you feel if something happened, you’re that much closer to her. It adds to your peace of mind.”

Nancy Noble, the city of Irvine’s child-care coordinator, said studies have shown that an employee’s job performance is enhanced if high-quality child care is available. Productivity and employee retention increase and absenteeism decreases, Noble said.

Yet, for myriad reasons, employers are reluctant to set up on-site or near-site child-care services, Noble said. For example, a national car rental chain was going to set up an on-site child-care center in Irvine. The company initially agreed to do it, but then changed its mind when it began pondering such things as liability insurance and the precedent it might set for its other companies around the country, Noble said.

She suggested small companies which find child care too prohibitive or otherwise impractical consider forming consortiums with other companies to provide a center.

That’s an idea that Wertenberger is willing to explore, he said. He and his two worker-mothers have not settled on a plan for when the two babies get older, although there seems to be an unwritten agreement that as the children become increasingly mobile, they will have to be cared for elsewhere.

In the meantime, however, Smith and Butterfield have saved a few thousand dollars in child-care costs by bringing their babies to work.

Both they and other Slide Link employees say the experience has been largely delightful. “The rest of us kind of grab the kids whenever we can,” said Becky Burner, a saleswoman at Slide Link and the mother of two. “We’ll carry them around just to play with them. The kids have kind of grown on us. Dutch didn’t have much of a thing for kids, but now he’s reaching out and picking them up. Now, he’ll put them on his lap for 10 or 15 minutes. We dread the day they have to go to day care.”

In the meantime, Smith and Butterfield are just thankful that Wertenberger was willing to try something different. “I was really relieved (when he made the offer),” Butterfield said. “That was like a 100-pound block off my head. No matter what happened, I knew I had this job and could be with her. It took the pressure off of having to find child care.”

In hindsight, any problems caused by the infant girls is now the kind of stuff everyone laughs about. Like the time Smith was working with a client in one room and both babies decided to wail at the same time. Butterfield grabbed one on each hip, headed for a back room and began alternately cooing and pacing the floor to quiet them.

Wertenberger said he has not noticed any clients being adversely affected by the occasional outburst from one of the infants. “If a kid’s making noise back there, just shut the door,” Wertenberger said. “Sheesh.”

Butterfield brought her daughter Kandice in when she was just a week old. It proved a mistake. “I only worked 2 hours that day,” she says, laughing at the memory. “I was so tired from having been up all night that I went into the back room and fell asleep on the couch. So I waited till she was 6 weeks old before bringing her back.”

At 24, Butterfield was perhaps a little more naive than Smith, 35, about what to expect from her first-born. “When I was pregnant,” Butterfield said, “I thought I’d be able to come in to work, say ‘Go to sleep,’ and she’d go to sleep and I could do my work.” Laughing about it now, she added, “I didn’t know it would be so difficult.”

On worst-case days--those days when Kandice has not slept well or been sick during the night--Butterfield’s strategy has been to put her in the car and “drive around the circle about 15 times” outside the office. “I would have loved to have stayed home with her, but sometimes I feel she’s learning a lot by being here,” Butterfield said. “She has a lot of visual stimulus, she’s watching my hands reach out to touch the keys. I feel like I’m giving her the love--although it’s not direct--she is sitting in my lap, she feels my presence, she knows I love her. It’s better than her being with somebody else who has six other kids, sticking them in a crib and letting them cry all day.”

For Smith, Wertenberger’s offer lets her continue a career that is important to her. “I thought I’d enjoy being home,” Smith said. “I was even a little leery of having to tell Dutch that I didn’t think I was going to come back to work. But after the first 2 weeks at home, I sort of felt I was losing the interesting part of me. . . . I need to do the creative stuff I do. By the time 5 weeks had come, I welcomed coming back and having that other dimension of life in the office.”

From the start, Smith was confident things would work out. “She (daughter Suki) is very even-tempered. I had sort of built up in my mind that I really didn’t want to take her to day care. I wanted to give her personal care, at least for the first few months.”

So, Wertenberger said, life around Slide Link has not changed much since Suki and Kandice joined the work force. A playpen was set up in one corner of the office, and the moms can nurse their children or change diapers or console them in privacy in a large adjoining room.

“I must tell you that when you’re in computer graphics,” Wertenberger said, “you get used to doing things that nobody has done before. Doing new things is no big deal.”

But looking to the future, when the lovable Suki and Kandice are old enough to move around, Wertenberger says with a smile, “We may have to build the W.C. Fields Memorial Child-Care Center.”

Child-care programs, costs. Page 2.