‘Crossroads for Child Care’

It was with a heavy heart that I read the articles about the three toddlers found in their sitter’s pool. Just the week before, I had removed my 2-year-old daughter from her sitter’s home because she had just put in a pool and refused to fence the pool from the house. Because she was unlicensed, there was no one to tell her “she had to have a fence built.”

I spent one full week looking for replacement care and what an education that was! I checked only licensed homes, and since 9 out of 10 day-care centers had no room, the pickings were indeed slim. What I did find were beautiful $300,000-plus homes where 12 children are grouped in a section of the garage . . . not to “track through the house” or homes that were messy and unkempt and children seemingly checked on only occasionally.

The day-care centers interview you, not the other way around. The prices are high, i.e., $85 a week average, which makes child care almost unattainable for most of us single mothers. There are pages of instructions and ironclad contracts written for the benefit of the day-care operators to be filled out. One of my other discoveries was that the day-care operators only want “easy” children who are passive and nap daily.

I feel as if there is indeed a market out there for day care and the money to be made is excellent, but are these operators exploiting the need and the children for the benefit of the dollar? They follow the rules but somehow I feel that they lost the “motherly” touch that we hope to find in our caretakers. I finally placed my child in a preschool because I knew what I was getting there.

My heartfelt sympathies to the three mothers.

PEGGY SYLVIA

Mission Viejo