Finding Care for Ailing Children Is Special Challenge to Working Mother
Before she became a mother, Marcia Manker never realized how difficult it could be to find day care for a mildly ill child.
She learned quickly, though, after her twin daughters were born last October. They not only battled the normal childhood colds and infections, which can exclude children from regular day care centers, but they were also born 12 weeks early and needed special medication for several weeks.
Her eyes opened by the experience, Manker, administrator of FHP’s sub-acute hospital in Westminster, decided that she and her staff needed a place to bring mildly ill children.
She spoke with the operators of a day-care center that serves many of FHP’s employees, Step By Step in Huntington Beach. The center said it could offer a discount to FHP’s Westminster hospital employees who wanted to use its area for ill children, called Rainbow Retreat.
Rainbow Retreat charges them half-fees, or $2.50 an hour. FHP subsequently agreed to allow all of its employees to use the service.
Companies can provide some family benefits for employees--some at little or no cost. Here are a few ideas:
* Offer a list of child-care referral services. They can locate high-quality day care, with vacancies, in as little as 24 hours. Ill-child referrals can often be made within two hours. Some well-regarded referral services are National Pediatric Support Services in Huntington Beach (714) 965-1819, and Boston-based Work/Family Directions Inc. (800) 253-5264. The latter is a national network, with 300 subcontractors. Free referrals are available through Children’s Home Society (714) KID-CARE or, in South County, (714) 364-6605.
* Provide a list of elder-care referral services. One local service is Care Options in Irvine, (714) 253-4140. Owner Elana Peters also conducts seminars and facilitates support groups for a fee.
* Open a reference library. Pamphlets are published by the Children’s Home Society (numbers above) and the National Assn. for the Education of Young Children (800) 424-2460 (ask for the publications department). A handy guide, the Orange County Children’s Directory, is available from the Capistrano Beach-based publisher, (714) 496-2068. Another book recommended for a reference library is “How to Talk So Children Will Listen and Listen So Children Will Talk.”
* Provide employee assistance programs to counsel over-stressed parents.
* Arrange to subtract dollars for child care or elder care from paychecks before taxes are taken out. The service, which is allowed under the Internal Revenue Service Code, Sections 125 and 129, pays for itself, say those who have put it in place.
* Offer lunchtime seminars about parenting, caring for an older parent, communicating with teens, and more. National Pediatric Support Services and Care Options (numbers above) can conduct seminars or make referrals.
* Make schedules flexible to match school hours.
* Allow job sharing, in which one or more person shares a full-time position. At the Seattle Times, for example, three reporters share a beat, each of them working for two months, then taking four months off.
* Contract with child-care centers for discounts. Usually, the centers are willing to offer a discount in exchange for the company referring its employees there. A 10% discount is standard.
* Provide a lactation lounge. Nursing mothers can save their milk in refrigerators for later.
* Change in personnel policies from sick time to “family” or “personal” time. Employees who must take care of a sick child, for example, won’t have to lie and say they are sick themselves.
* List adoption agencies. A list of licensed agencies can be obtained by calling (916) 322-3778 and ask for the director of California Adoption Agencies.
