Sick Child, Job Create a Day-Care Nightmare

The young mother, her voice tight with desperation, put up a fight when the director of a Laguna Niguel day-care center called her at work, interrupting a meeting.

“She’s not sick!” the mother argued when asked to pick up her 3 1/2-year-old daughter, who was enrolled at the center. The little girl had been sent home burning with fever and frightened by a bad stomachache the day before, and was now showing more signs of the flu.

“She’s not!” the mother insisted. “She played with her brother last night and was fine this morning. Do you want me to take another day off work?”

There was a pause, then a groan as she added, “Oh, God, my boss . . . “

Anne Leets, 38, a mother and owner of the All American Child Care Agency in El Toro that places live-in nannies, has known desperate moments such as this. “You wake up at 7 a.m., your 5-year-old has a raging fever and you have to be at work. You are utterly panic-stricken!” she says. “Mentally, it’s terrible. You feel guilty enough working, and as a mom you just can’t send a sick child off. They’re so pitiful.”

No one warns you about this in parenting school, Leets adds, but “a sick child is absolutely the toughest thing you have to deal with.”

It’s a major problem for working parents. By law, children cannot attend any one of the 751 licensed child-care facilities in Orange County if they have colds, coughs, the flu, chicken pox and other illnesses that visit the average child six to nine times a year.

With precious few and usually costly alternatives, working parents--predominantly mothers--use their own sick, vacation and personal days to stay home with their ailing child.

Many local companies, child-care experts and health care facilities are searching for a solution for the problem--some already having tried and failed.

But if given a choice, most parents confronted with what one mother called “the one problem that shoves your back against the wall” trust only themselves with their child’s well-being. They stay home.

Says Gail Gonzalez, president of the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based National Assn. of Sick Child Daycare, a networking organization striving to offer parents solutions to the dilemma: “When you’re sick, there’s no substitute. You want your mommy.”

Unfortunately, not all working parents have the job security and flexibility that allow them to stay home the average 21 days a year that a child has symptoms preventing him from attending day care, according to Mary Kaarmaa, supervisor of the day-care unit at Orange County’s Social Services Agency.

“A lot of parents are caught in some really bad situations,” Kaarmaa says. “Not every employer is understanding. And unless you have an extended family where grandma can run over at a moment’s notice, there are not a lot of options for sick children.”

Of course, parents of infants and preschoolers enrolled in one of the area’s 2,200 licensed family day-care homes (where a maximum of six children are cared for in a day-care provider’s private home) may fare better. The laws governing sick children in these facilities are a lot less specific, according to Elda Lavinbuk, licensing supervisor for family day-care at the Social Services Agency. They require only that an ill child be separated from the others (usually in another room) until it’s determined if he or she is contagious. Basically, she says, “it’s up to the person running the home under X,Y or Z circumstances if they’ll care for a sick child.”

Indeed, admits Darlene Milek, 36, who runs a day-care center from her Cypress home, “it’s an agreement between parent and provider how sick is sick. We all have a few rules that don’t sound too pretty: Like I let my kids throw up a few times; they can have icky diarrhea twice; maybe a fever of 102. After that, they’re too sick and have to stay home.”

Of her regular group of children who are in contact with one another all day, every day, “I often let my kids be sick, and care for them, because by the time they have symptoms they’ve contaminated everybody anyway. That’s the boat we’re all in.”

For working parents, however, the boat comes close to sinking. Many say they are forced to use all their available sick leave or vacation days to stay home with an ill child (who is sometimes followed by a sick sibling). Or they find themselves trying to cover absences from their employers.

Says Dennis Hudson of Irvine’s Child Care Planning Associates, consultants to companies exploring the day-care needs of their employees: “Unfortunately at some workplaces, if you reveal it’s your sick child that’s keeping you at less than full speed, it’s subtle, but there’s this whole resentment thing. Your co-workers and supervisors can tend to think, ‘If she can’t take care of this problem, why is she working?’ Even the more compassionate and supportive people in the company somewhere along the line say, ‘This has got to stop.’ ”

Other parents, specifically working couples, say they must decide who has the more “important” job or the more lenient boss, in negotiating who goes to work and who stays home.

Susan Schneider, 35, a Mission Viejo single mother, has known parents who “are scared to death of losing their jobs and are very much at the mercy of their employers.”

“When my child is sick, there’s no waiting until 5. I’m history,” says this mother of two boys, one with a chronic asthma problem that has kept him in and out of emergency rooms for years. “And one employer got to the bottom line. He said, ‘It’s either the job or the child.’ I chose the child. And quit.”

That’s not always the choice parents make. Kaarmaa at the Social Services Agency has known parents who “drop the kid off at day-care, turn around so fast and run off before they can be stopped. They know the kid’s sick and hope the center doesn’t notice.”

Some parents leave the sick child at home alone or in the care of an older sibling. “Sometimes,” she says, “parents who do the best they can don’t do very well at all.”

There are other options. Rainbow Retreat has two day-care centers in Orange County designed specifically for “mildly ill” children: those too symptomatic to pass the daily health inspection required by law at those day-care centers not in private homes, but who are not seriously suffering with such communicable diseases as mumps or measles.

Opened in January, 1986, in Newport Beach and March, 1988 in Huntington Beach, Rainbow Retreat comforts, entertains and cares for as many as six children a day, age 2 months to 12 years, who are limp and mopey with colds, earaches, flu, runny noses or diarrhea--the minor illnesses said to account for 95% of children’s afflictions. The cost is $3.50 to $5 an hour.

Surprisingly, “utilization is still down,” says Dr. Sheri Senter, director of Irvine’s National Pediatric Support Services, owner of Rainbow Retreat. “Even in flu season, Rainbow Retreat doesn’t run full. It seems to be for the working parent with no alternative whatsoever.” After all, she adds, “given the ideal, a mom would rather stay home than dump her child off, even with a nurse.”

Nurses have failed before in their attempts to help working parents. At the Kids Klinic at the Orthopedic Hospital and Super Care for Kids at California Medical Center, both in Los Angeles, special nurse-staffed pilot day-care programs have tried to offer a strictly hygienic environment, fun and educational amusements, and in the words of one nurse, “lovin’ and cuddlin’.” Both programs were stopped after a few months.

Says a former Kids Klinic nurse: “We were all excited and thought it was a great idea, but we didn’t have kids we thought we would. No interest, I guess.”

Two of the more successful in-hospital day-care programs--TLC (“Torrance Loves Children”) at Torrance Memorial Hospital and the Kidfirmary at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Long Beach--credit Orange County commuters who work at nearby companies like Xerox and Hughes Aircraft for showing interest in the facilities. But, say the directors of each, parents who work at the two hospitals make the most use of the centers.

“If a baby is coughing and needs a lot of holding--among the things moms do best--or we can’t give the sick child the full attention he requires, we say: ‘Mom, you really should stay home. Your child needs your attention,’ ” says Charlene Cotrell, clinical director of pediatric services at Torrance Memorial.

Two factors keep hospital programs inaccessible to many working parents: their out-of-the-way locations and the daily cost of $24 to $40 to parents who already are paying $60 to $125 a week on regular day-care, according to Gonzalez of the National Assn. of Sick Child Daycare. And, she adds, the very word “hospital” is enough to drive away parents.

“From the child’s perspective, going into the hospital has always been the most traumatic thing, and to do that to a kid with a snotty nose seems like overkill. As a mother, you need a whole lot of convincing when you look at your child’s weepy eyes to leave him there--or anywhere,” Gonzalez said.

Sharon Gastel, owner of the Orange County branch of Sitters Unlimited, a baby-sitting agency with eight offices in the area, receives at least two calls a day from parents who are “panic-stricken,” she says. “They say, ‘Oh, my god, chicken pox. What am I going to do now?’ ”

The services of a private sitter are available from one of the many local agencies eager to help at a cost of at least $6.50 an hour, or a minimum of $12 an hour for the care of a nursing assistant from an out-call health care company.

“We’re really happy to help these people, but the cost is usually too exorbitant,” says Linda Gowler of Home Caregivers at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center, Laguna Hills.

Sitters, says Leets of All American Child Care Agency, “can’t turn on a dime. Most agencies have answering machines on until 9 a.m. By then you’re out of business for the day. Suppose a sitter is found early. You can’t walk out the door leaving your child to freak out over a total stranger. You need to spend time, acquaint them. Then when you finally get to work, it’s really all over.”

What is a parent to do? “It always comes down to how blessed you are with friends or family members,” says Schneider, who has relied on a network of non-working friends--arranged in advance--who will either take her children in or run over to care for them when needed. “If not yourself, this is as close to what every working mom wants.”

“In study after study, the care of sick children is right up there as one of working parents’ biggest needs and most important concerns,” says Hudson of Child Care Planning Associates. “And over and over it has been proven that if a parent does get to the point where they themselves can’t get sick, can’t take a vacation because they’ve used their paid leave, then they’re living with the gnawing feeling of lying to their bosses. Or else they’re saying: ‘I can’t work when my child is sick. I’m constantly worried.’ The anxiety, the stress: It takes a toll on the productivity and emotional stability of many employees.”

Yet some companies, from Hughes Aircraft’s microelectronic circuits division to the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co., both located in Newport Beach, are beginning to address the sick-child issue.

Early in 1989, Hughes set up a task force to explore day-care options and now offers employees a guide to finding satisfactory care for their children. Pacific Mutual subsidizes 10% of whatever solution parents choose when their children fall to colds or flu.

Still, Hudson says, “this is (a) go-slow thing. While now we aren’t anywhere near meeting the child care needs of the American worker, eventually, in the ‘90s, child care--including that of sick children--will be just as much a part of the work scene as the cafeteria or the parking lot. It’ll just be there.”

At the same time, he adds, many child-care experts seem divided on the issue of what’s best for sick youngsters. “A lot of people think kids shouldn’t be away from home,” Hudson says.

Many parents seem to agree. Says Joyce Bunge, employee relations manager at Pacific Mutual. “At this time there’s not much interest” among employees to take advantage of the subsidy the company offers for sick-child care.

Bunge explains what seems to be the prevailing attitude: “It’s a hard thing to leave a child who doesn’t feel well. There are many things a parent will do so as not to.”