Safe and Sound? : Working Mother magazine says L.A. is one of the top cities for child care. But try telling that to parents facing issues like affordability and quality.

Jennifer Austin remembers the first few years of motherhood as a blur of fatigue and depression. Eight years ago, when her first child was 5, she gave birth to twins. Her marriage started to fall apart. And that was only the beginning.

Within two years, she was single, in school, working as a secretary and desperately trying to arrange child care for three small children.

Her oldest child, Tony, was 7 and in school most of the day. He came home each afternoon to a neighbor.

“I paid her to take care of Tony. He didn’t like it and she wasn’t a very nice woman,” said Austin.

Twins Rachel and Sherman, then 2, who had been watched by their father during the day, were suddenly spending their days at the home of a stranger. “The first child care that I found, I came early one day to pick them up and the woman was gone,” said Austin.

“She had left this 10-year-old girl in the house to watch them while she ran to the store to get milk. And she was a licensed child-care provider! Licensed! I was paying her about $400 a month!”

Austin immediately switched care-givers. She said she could have reported the woman but didn’t: “At that time in my life, I was feeling very desperate. She was the only kind of child care I could find. I really felt like a victim. Victimized by my financial situation and by the fact that child care is so outrageously expensive and she wasn’t that cheap. It was awful.”

As awful as it was for Austin, and still is for many Southern Californians looking for child care, this isn’t the worst place to be. In fact, a panel of experts convened by Working Mother magazine just chose Los Angeles as one of the top five cities in the country for child care. (The other four were Irvine, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Seattle.)

When told this news, working parents responded in one disarmingly similar way: They widened their eyes in disbelief.

“It was voted as one of the top cities in terms of what ?” asked Austin. “Availability? Quality? There is a lot available, but the problem is quality and affordability.”

Actually, Working Mother rated cities on a more objective scale, ranging from number of licensed spaces to availability of funds, zoning laws and local government response.

What’s more, the city and the county--unlike many others--both have child-care coordinators, policies and centers. But there is no getting around the stark fact that thousands of Los Angeles children receive substandard care or no care at all. According to experts, at least 155,000 children in this county do not have licensed care.

The fact that some call Los Angeles one of the best and that others dispute not just that ranking but what best really means illustrates the complexity of the child-care dilemma.

The critical issues facing parents are availability, affordability and quality. There are shortages of care for infants and school-age children throughout the county. Many children are left to fend for themselves or are cared for in patchwork arrangements because their parents cannot afford licensed care--the third largest expenditure in many family budgets, after food and shelter. And working parents are hard pressed to monitor the safety, nurturing and educational aspects of child care.

“I think Working Mother is right,” said Karen Hill-Scott, an expert on local child care and one of the few people who has attempted to quantify child-care supply as well as demand here.

“Los Angeles is probably better than other cities around the country for a number of reasons. Our city has developed policies which improve the profile of child care, and to some extent there are providers out there who may want to live up to that expectation. The policies are significant because all those other cities don’t have them. However little the city’s contribution . . . other cities are doing zero, so it makes an impact.”

Still, said Hill-Scott, a founder and director of Crystal Stairs Inc., a nonprofit child-care resource and referral agency in Los Angeles, this area has nothing to crow about when it comes to meeting the needs of all its children.

Hill-Scott, who calls herself “the encyclopedia” only half in jest, has at her fingertips--in colored ZIP code maps, charts and graphs--comprehensive data on the state of child care in this county. Although her figures on the demand are nearly six years old, she estimates that the situation is the same or worse than in 1985 because of shifting demographics and the price of real estate.

“Our population has increased somewhat since ’85 and the area in which it has increased has been lower-income families, which are statistically higher-need families,” said Hill-Scott. The cost of real estate has stayed uniformly high in the county, she added, so it has not become any cheaper to start child-care centers.

“Less than half the number of children who belong in licensed day care are there,” said Hill-Scott.

The children who do not have licensed supervision are cared for in a patchwork of arrangements or sometimes not at all. The populations of parks, playgrounds, public libraries and shopping malls swell with unsupervised children on weekday afternoons. Lee Walling of the Child Care Resource Center of the San Fernando Valley said her agency recently helped find child care for a man forced to leave his toddler locked in the car while he worked nearby.

Parents have the best chance of finding care in relatively affluent Westside and South Bay areas. They have the worst chance in South Central and Southeast Los Angeles, where average family incomes are lower. Huntington Park and Bell have the greatest shortages of licensed day-care spaces. “It is unbelievable how many thousands of kids are unsupervised in those areas,” said Hill-Scott.

Certain ages are harder to find care for as well.

“The biggest problems are the youngest and the oldest children--the infants under 2 and the school-aged kids,” said Patsy Lane, Los Angeles city child-care coordinator. “Part of that is because nursery schools and Head Start have been around for so long” and they traditionally take children between 2 and 5.

Infants, for example, make up between 15% and 20% of those who need care but occupy only 10% to 12% of the licensed spaces, said Hill-Scott. And while half the children in the county are between the ages of 6 and 12, only 12% of the county’s licensed child-care spaces serve that population. (Parents of school-aged children face another child-care dilemma this August when the Los Angeles Unified School District will finally have all its campuses on a year-round schedule. The traditional three-month summer will be replaced with two eight-week breaks--one in winter and one in summer.)

These shortages are why some parents are astonished that Los Angeles is so highly regarded by child-care experts.

And yet, the city gets high marks for several reasons.

Consider: In 1987, after years of discussion, the City Council adopted a child-care policy. Among its components are a day-care center (primarily for children of city and federal workers) on city property, a commitment to allow unused or under-used city property and buildings to be made available for child care, an effort to encourage developers to include child care in new projects, and a decision to streamline the licensing procedure for people who want to become providers.

Much of the debate over child care turns on two adjectives that are virtually always used in the same breath by parents: affordability and quality.

Even when the cost is not a problem, quality issues are the stuff of nightmares for parents.

The care-giver who left Jennifer Austin’s twins alone while she drove to the store was licensed by the state. So was the care-giver who spanked the twins when they were being toilet trained. So was the woman who managed to have Austin’s then-2-year-old son remarkably clean at the end of the day.

“One day, I said, ‘Tony is always so clean when I pick him up, it’s amazing. How does he stay so clean? She said, ‘Well, when I bring the other children to the sandbox, Tony stays in his stroller and I just strap him in and I don’t let him go in the sand because I don’t want him to get dirty.’

“I was just floored. Now, this is not child abuse , but to me that’s like emotional abuse. He was a toddler! She would make him sit there and watch the other kids while they played. She thought she was doing the right thing, when indeed she was depriving my child of some really important play experiences.”

Five years ago, Crystal Stairs surveyed the quality of child care for children up to age 6 in Los Angeles County.

“About 25% of all kids in licensed care, are, by our estimates, in good-quality care,” said Hill-Scott. “Another 50% are in fair to middling care, and another 25% are in facilities that ought to closed.

“People perceive that centers are better than family day care, but lots of people who are taking care of children in their homes are doing a fabulous job. And there are centers that are overcrowded, that have no equipment, that don’t turn on heat. Now, some lady down the street who is not licensed and is taking care of kids--maybe she charges less than anybody else--but I have no idea what she is doing with those kids.”

Affordability is almost as elusive an issue as quality , although cost is easy to quantify. Kena Kelley, program director of Equipoise Endeavor, the resource and referral agency that serves an area that stretches from Compton to the Palos Verdes Peninsula, said care is much less expensive in the inner city than it is in the suburbs. According to her agency, inner-city infant and toddler care ranges from $55 to $65 a week, while in the suburbs, it ranges from $90 to $150 a week. But average family incomes are proportionately lower in the inner city than in other areas.

Dodie McCarthy of Newbury Park, feels forced to take her 7-month-old daughter Colleen to work with her because child care is prohibitively expensive.

“I intended to bring her to work temporarily while she was young, and now I can’t afford a sitter, so I’m stuck with her,” said McCarthy. “It’s our fault for getting so deep in debt, but day care is so expensive. My friends are paying $75 to $100 a week for sitters and sometimes that’s not even for full-time care.”

California doles out about $350 million a year in child-care subsidies, but the children who qualify for that money come mainly from low-income households or are at high risk for abuse. To qualify by income, families cannot earn more than 84% of the state median income adjusted for family size. This means that a single mother with three children, for instance, stops qualifying for any subsidy if she grosses more than $2,380 a month or $28,560 a year.

“Just a small number of the children who could use subsidized child care receive it,” said Susan Thompson of the California Child Development Division of the state Department of Education, which administers the state’s subsidized child-care and development programs. “In our programs, we have about 100,000 children in subsidized care. We estimate that that is one-ninth to one-seventh of the eligible children.”

In the San Fernando Valley alone, the waiting list for subsidized care is 3,000 children and about two years long. Not a single child has even been enrolled in the subsidy program for a year.

“The truth of the matter is, only the people who make below $1,000 a month get in. Priority goes to the lowest income first,” said Alma Lerner-Visser, director of the Child Care Information Service in Pomona, the resource and referral agency serving the western cities of Los Angeles County and the eastern cities of San Bernardino County.

“Child care hits the middle class person who doesn’t qualify for the state subsidy more than anyone else,” she added. “I feel sorry for the waitress out there, the person making $5 an hour. They are paying $2.50 an hour for child care!”

For some poor parents, it makes more economic sense to stay on welfare than to get jobs and pay for child care.

“A lot of my friends in the neighborhood who were on AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) didn’t work because the cost of child care versus getting a job came out to the same wage as AFDC pays,” said Michelle McKinney. The 24-year-old Reseda mother of two receives subsidized care for her children while she works and attends college. “It wouldn’t have benefitted them at all to get a job. You have to really want to get out of that situation.”

But Karen Hill-Scott says the whole issue of cost needs to be rethought.

“The per-capita cost of child care does seem high coming out of somebody’s pocket,” she said. “I think our mistake is that we assume it ought to cost less. We pay $15 for a movie for two people to go out and be entertained for an hour and a half. People go out and get a haircut and pay $50 to $100 for an hour’s worth of inconvenience and beauty. And they don’t want to pay $75 a week for 50 hours’ worth of child care.

“I really think our consumer value system is upside down. We are really paying only lip service to this concept that we really care about our children and our children are the most important things in our lives.

“I am saying that child care should be subsidized and that it should not be cheap. Why is everybody trying to get the cost down? The point is, there is no way to make it cheap. Nobody is trying to get the cost of a Rolls-Royce down. You don’t even walk into a Honda dealer trying to talk a deal, you know? So why are you trying to talk a deal on your kids?

“It’s disgusting. I think that we as child-care advocates do it, and it’s a very dangerous thing. I call it the ‘We shot ourselves in the foot syndrome’ because we constantly promote accessible, affordable, quality child care and there is no such thing. “

People resent paying for child care for a number of reasons. For one thing, it may never have crossed their minds before becoming parents that child-care costs would eat up between 10% and 14% of their household budgets. For another, child care is traditionally women’s work, done for free.

“This is women’s work, and women who have been homemakers have been extremely undervalued by society,” Hill-Scott said. “Theoretically, they have been working for free. The value of their labor or the opportunity cost that they paid in order to be at home and not in the labor force has never really been counted as real money to the family. So it has been assumed that if mothers do it for free, then if you have to go out and purchase child care, it shouldn’t cost very much.

“This whole issue about the cost of care needs to be looked at in a very different way, and I think we need to get away from discussing cost avoidance and deal with cost realities, and then figure out a way to come up with the money,” said Hill-Scott.

In the meantime, parents struggling with child care for the first time may find some solace in the happy ending of Jennifer Austin and her family. Her three children, who commute from North Hollywood to magnet schools in West Los Angeles and Granada Hills, are bused each afternoon to Valley Cities Jewish Community Center in Van Nuys, which runs what Austin says is “one of the best child-care facilities in the Valley.” She was referred to the program by the Child Care Resource Center of the San Fernando Valley--which she credits with helping solve her dilemma.

“I have the best of both worlds now,” said Austin. “I work for a good company that is sensitive to my needs as a parent. I don’t feel I will get fired if my kid is sick and I have to stay home. I feel like we have finally reached the end. This is where they will stay. But it has taken me so long.”