Day-Care Dilemma : Families: Pending U.S. day-care bill may aid neediest Americans. But only limited help is on the horizon for professionals with families.

At 7:30 each weekday morning, Paramount Pictures employees--actors, executives, electricians--drop their preschool children off at the day-care center on the studio lot.

At the downtown office of Arthur Andersen & Co., a major accounting firm, accountants and other employees have access to free on-site child care between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Saturdays during tax season, roughly from Jan. 21 to April 15.

At Methodist Hospital in Arcadia, children of nurses and other staff start arriving at 7 a.m. daily at the hospital’s nursery school where toys, snacks, formula--everything except diapers--are provided, along with supervised care until 6:30 p.m.

At the large downtown law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, lawyers and employees with a child-care crisis may--in emergencies--use a nearby day-care center, where the firm reserves two slots year-round.

Is this the dawn of the age of corporate day care? Not yet. Of the nation’s 44,000 major employers, surveys show, only about 3,000 offer employees any help with child care.

But there are signs of change. The American Society for Personnel Administration, in a 1988 survey, found that 55% of its member companies were thinking about, had or were planning some kind of child care.

The need is hardly debatable--65% of all mothers now work outside the home and 50% of all new mothers enter or re-enter the work force before their child’s first birthday.

Congress is considering child-care proposals, all of which would expand the federal role in providing assistance, directly or through tax credits. At the same time, the private sector is moving slowly, often reluctantly, to help.

But while proposed federal legislation will provide some relief for low-income families who need it most, professional women and dual-career professional couples will benefit little.

And day-care programs rarely are among the perks offered to lure high-level employees such as lawyers, accountants and television and film executives.

While it can be argued that they can afford to find their own help, their long, unpredictable hours, together with the scarcity of quality care-providers and high turnover, add up to a chronic child-care crisis.

“Money does not buy you out of (child-care) problems,” says Ellen Galinsky, co-president of the Families and Work Institute, a New York-based nonprofit clearinghouse for information and policy research. An institute report last month found that half of all workers who need it have a hard time finding child care, and, Galinsky says, “often they’re making tenuous patchwork arrangements that fall apart.

“That affects their marriages, that affects their feelings of competence as parents, that affects whether they show up at work and on time. The money certainly helps you buy a better quality of child care . . . but it doesn’t buy you freedom from stress.”

If the corporate sector has been slow to respond, workers must share the blame, says Judith Auerbach, director of the institute for the Study of Women and Men at USC and author of “In the Business of Child Care: Employer Initiatives and Working Women.”

As she sees it, “One of the biggest obstacles is that employers perceive a lack of demand from employees because they don’t speak up. That’s true on all levels. Women are still very hesitant to say ‘I have special needs.’ And men are just not asking for it.”

Barbara Reisman, executive director of the national Child Care Action Campaign, says, “We’ve got polls to show that men are increasingly saying that they experience a conflict between the demands of their families and work demands.” Still, “it’s just now beginning to be an issue that can be discussed at the high levels of corporations.”

She cites three reasons: The reluctance of men to take time off for family matters (they disguise it as sick leave or vacation); the fact that “the number of women in higher paid jobs who don’t have children is fairly high”, and that women who have VIP jobs “got there by not bringing these issues into the workplace.”

Galinsky agrees, noting that in high corporate circles, “family issues are your private concern and competent people manage them.” And if they can’t, others are waiting to take their place.

A recent survey of 22,000 women lawyers by the Committee on Women in the Law, State Bar of California, found that, of respondents without children, 42% are postponing motherhood and 27% do not plan to have children; most cited demands of a legal career, with 57% saying they thought that taking maternity leave would hurt their chances for promotion; 89% of respondents said employers provided no child-care assistance.

Says Fran Kendel, president of the Women Lawyers’ Assn. of Los Angeles: “Law firms have been slow to recognize this whole idea of parenting and the profession. The law for many years was a male bastion.”

Today, women are almost half of the entering law school students, she notes, adding, “I think this (child care) will become a very strong recruitment tool. . . .”

But Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker--one of the few, if not the only, Los Angeles law firm with any kind of day-care program--reports that only a dozen or so of its 300 employees has used emergency day care in the year it has been available.

“We thought it would be a lot more,” says Clark Carlson, human resources director. The firm-subsidized program is for children ages 2-5 and is open to all full-time employees; they pay a one-time fee of $12.50 and may use the facility twice a month.

For high-income employees, daily day care at or near the workplace may not be an idea whose time has come, especially in cities like Los Angeles, where, says lawyer Audre Engleman, “You don’t want to schlep a kid half an hour in the car to a day-care center.”

Auerbach agrees, “Most of those women, culturally and professionally, prefer a private arrangement. They probably figure that’s what their salaries ought to be going for. If that’s the case, then it’s probably never going to come up at work.”

Nor, she points out, are they apt to benefit even if Congress passes a bill that permits a credit for documented child-care expenses. Auerbach notes that many child-care providers in Los Angeles are foreigners here illegally or students on expired visas; their salaries are paid sub rosa.

Gail Pezzimenti of Child Care Inc. in New York, the nation’s largest nonprofit child-care resource and referral agency, concurs that the shortage of trained child-care workers affects everybody, “no matter how much money you have. In New York City, some people are paying as much as $500 a week.”

But she sees cause for optimism, in that employers are beginning to see day care--which may be for elders as well as children--as a money-saving benefit, in terms of freeing employees from worry and for retention: “We like to think a parent would think twice about leaving a company if the employer had provided some sort of child-care support.”

“Kiddie-care battles” may soon replace salary wars among America’s big law firms, says Rita Henley Jensen, a National Law Journal reporter whose recent survey found that only seven of the nation’s 250 largest law firms listed child care among perks such as $75,000 starting salaries, health spas, free parking and signing bonuses.

The law profession has company. In Los Angeles, the world’s entertainment capital, Paramount alone among studios provides on-site day care, although other majors are exploring or developing plans, either singly or as part of a consortium.

The October issue of “Working Mother” magazine, in its annual listing of the 60 “Best Companies for Working Mothers,” used criteria that included support for child care. None of the firms chosen has its home-base in Los Angeles, though G. T. Water Products in Moorpark and Ventura-based Lost Arrow Corp. (Patagonia) made the list.

When it is in their self-interests, Auerbach says, firms will come around; it will happen first in companies with a high ratio of female employees, especially young ones. Among these are health care, insurance, banking and real estate.

How are things working out with Los Angeles employers who do offer day care?

Methodist Hospital in Arcadia is a pioneer, having opened its nursery and preschool in 1958. Says Lee Walling, director for 10 years: “It’s amazing how many people have said, ‘If it weren’t for this nursery school, I don’t know if I could stay.’ Nurses tell us right up front, ‘I came here because you have it.’ That’s difficult to evaluate in dollars and cents.”

The facility, licensed for 128, takes children from six weeks of age until they enter kindergarten. Peak demand is for the 57 places reserved for the 2-and-under group, which includes babies breast-fed during mothers’ work breaks.

Although the center is for children of all 1,200 employees on a wait-list basis, doctors’ children are allotted 5% of the places on the theory, Walling says, that “doctors can afford to find and pay for child care.”

The hospital partially subsidizes the center and all parents pay the same--$2.30 an hour for infants and toddlers, $1.80 an hour for preschoolers, including food.

Walling is a past president of the National Assn. for Hospital Affiliated Child Care Programs, whose 350 members include eight other hospitals in the Los Angeles area with on-site centers. Hospitals have been in the forefront of the movement, with 800 U.S. hospitals operating on-site centers. In an era of nurse shortages, this is a competitive edge.

But demographics will dictate an acceleration of employer-aided day care, says Engleman, who chairs the status of women lawyers committee for the Women Lawyers’ Assn. of Los Angeles: “I see a dramatic change coming in the next 10 years” as a dropping birth rate shrinks the high-level labor pool and there’s “even more of a competition for (top) students.”

Many of the best and brightest will be women, and, she says, they will demand a better life style for their families. Their husbands also will take a bigger role in child-rearing.

Engleman, a partner at Rogers and Wells, says young women coming out of law school today usually do not ask interviewers about balancing careers with marriage and motherhood. And if they do? “If the person was absolutely smashing . . . that would be overlooked. Almost everything would be overlooked,” she says. But that person’s commitment could be suspect, and that is “a death knell for your whole career.”

Engleman, who graduated from law school in 1971, has never married, explaining, “The life style is a total commitment.”

Felice N. Schwartz, president of Catalyst, a New York-based group advising corporations on women’s careers (and author of the theory now called the “Mommy Track”), has cited a study showing that 54% of married women working full-time consider child care their responsibility, compared to only 2% of the men. With a diminishing skilled-labor force, she has said, firms will be compelled to reduce family-related stresses on these women.

But is day care economically viable?

At Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, a large Washington firm, lawyer Jane Sherburne, mother of three, initiated a subsidized, seven-day-a-week in-house emergency child-care center for all employees three years ago, a first for a law firm.

In 1988, she says, “we figured that lawyers used our program for about 1,400 hours and the program pays for itself after about 350 . . . hours. It pays for itself several times over, which, frankly, was one of the reasons it was received so favorably.”

The Families and Work Institute surveyed the Fortune 500 companies last fall and found that pharmaceutical firms were most progressive in implementing supportive family policies. Also getting good marks: chemical companies, the computer industry and banking.

Lagging behind, Galinsky says, were “predominantly male-oriented” industries, including forest products and automobiles.

There is growing interest in the consortium idea, in which a number of companies cooperate in establishing a care center.

In Los Angeles, a not-for-profit company called Child and Family Services has a development contract with the Goldwyn Foundation to build a facility in West Los Angeles for 75 children of employees of a consortium that includes HBO, Creative Artists, Act III and ABC Entertainment.

The company developed an on-site center for Union Bank in Monterey Park and is developing with Great Western Bank plans for an on-site center in Northridge. It has a development contract with Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers for an on-site facility at Burbank Studios for 100 children and is talking with 20th Century Fox and MCA-Universal.

Paramount, the pacesetter, opened its 7:30 a.m.-to-7 p.m. on-site center in October, 1986. Partially subsidized, it is available to all employees for a sliding-scale weekly fee averaging $347 a month for preschoolers and $434 a month for infants. There is space for 42 children and a waiting list of 80 to 90.

“At least a third” of the parent-clients are fathers, says director Ruth Mankin. Carpenters’ children and actors’ children play side by side. “We have people making $20,000 a year up to million-dollar producers,” says Mankin.

At Lorimar Studios in Culver City, Mary-Catherine Harold, a “Knot’s Landing” producer, and her actor husband, Kevin McBride, found their own way of dealing with the day-care dilemma.

For the first year of daughter Caitlin’s life, Harold brought her every day to the studio, where the family’s nanny met them. The nanny took charge but, Harold says, “I had the security of being with her, seeing that she was taken care of properly.”

Now, at 19 months, Caitlin needs room to run and the nanny cares for her at the couple’s home in Santa Monica. But 2 1/2 days a week, Caitlin still comes to the studio.

Harold is expecting again in January, a girl to be called Molly, and will repeat the arrangement, with the blessings of Lorimar, and by hiring a second nanny.

“It was wonderful to have the baby here,” she says. “She was like a tranquilizer to everyone. As soon as you saw that little face, you forgot you were behind schedule on the set or a script was late.”

Now 38, Harold had been in the business 18 years, considered herself “a career woman” and was hesitant about motherhood, afraid she would have to sacrifice what she had achieved to raise a family. But, she says, “I had a strong desire to have children, so I just made it work.” She acknowledges she got the kind of help few working women get.

At Arthur Andersen, the company-paid, on-site day care for downtown during tax and audit seasons is part of “a commitment by the firm to try to balance a healthy work and family environment,” says benefits administrator Jeri Underwood. Other family-friendly perks include a plan allowing employees to put up to $4,800 in a dependent-care account every January and to charge against it on a before-tax basis.

Partner Kim Floyd says the firm has explored having an on-site day-care center for years but “it appears that our people are so widely dispersed . . . that we really don’t have a large enough base of personnel who come downtown to one location every day to support it.”

That is a common dilemma in the sprawling Southland, where parents may live 50 or more miles from where they work and may prefer to have their child care close to home, especially for school-aged youngsters. But finding, and keeping, competent help is a continuing nightmare.

Auerbach suggests that employers need financial incentives to encourage them to “take on more of the supply role, or the funding role, or both.”

Andersen’s Floyd agrees and adds, “Both men and women are looking at the type of life style they want. . . . We in business are all learning that we need to provide more flexibility.”