A Word of Warning to Working Parents : Child care: Lack of exposure to adults shows in the intellectual and moral development of kids, observers say. Their language skills, in particular, may suffer.

“The schedules of these little children are so depressingly long. They go off at 7 in the morning and don’t get back till 6 at night. Their little backpacks are like briefcases. All day long they are cooped up with groups of children but have hardly any close interaction with adults. The chances for gathering wool, for daydreaming, doing things quietly and creatively are not there.”

The children whose harsh lot is thus deplored by an Alexandria, Va., kindergarten teacher are the offspring of today’s working parents, who commonly deposit them in day-care centers in the dawn’s early light.

Most parents are not sanguine about farming out much of the rearing of their kids to a series of nannies, day-care providers and other surrogates. How guilty should today’s parents feel over the fact they are spending 40% less time with their kids than their own parents spent with them? If you take the long view, perhaps not much. There was never a golden age of parenting.

Still, there are real reasons for concern that today’s children are not receiving the continuing adult attention that seems to be essential for their moral and intellectual development in a close-packed, complex world.

Many educators believe that the evidence is already in and that it is not good. Some believe that even highly educated parents are taking enormous risks. “There’s a real contradiction in the behavior of these parents,” says an Alexandria elementary schoolteacher. “They have laser radar when it comes to getting the best for their kids in school, but before the kid is school-age they will leave him for 10 hours a day with baby-sitters who have limited language skills. And it shows. Kids coming in from middle-class homes are not as expressive or creative in their language as they were 10 years ago. They don’t have mothers chattering away to them in fluent English.”

Howard University linguist Richard Wright finds middle-class children “coming into school with language deficiencies that used to be seen only in poor minority children. Language is being replaced as a stimulation for kids by toys, TV, nannies--often foreign and semiliterate--who entertain the kids in play groups.”

Day-care centers, says Wright, are “notoriously weak” in giving kids language experience. “The kids do most of their talking to each other. . . . A child can’t move ahead unless he talks to someone whose language is more developed than his.”

“Many parents are not taking on the parents’ role; their kids are more playthings or objects,” says early-childhood specialist Millicent Miller, who ran a day-care center in her home. “They get back from work and ‘have a visit’ with their kids before they go to bed; they rush through a ritual of questions hoping to get only great answers. Young kids know their parents’ time is limited so they want to make the most of it and not make any waves.”

These primarily “ritualistic” encounters, Miller says, can retard a child’s moral development. “Values don’t come up then; the values come out when there is nitty-gritty stuff, when there is a conflict--the ‘he called me a name,’ ‘he took this from me’ stuff--which happens during the care-taking hours.”

“Kids brought up by a maid or a series of maids are frequently terrors--outrageous, controlling, manipulative people,” says Bethesda, Md., psychiatrist Lawrence Brain. “They have been able to get what they want at any time. Parents find they have little control.”

Inattentive parents, says pastoral counselor Rod Landes, start a cycle that is hard to break. “The less kids are with parents the more they will learn from TV and their peers, where the values are consumerism and immediate gratification,” says Landes.

If parents really want to, they can find time to talk to their kids. Though two teen-agers in an Alexandria neighborhood, Charles and Mark, live close to a Metro stop, their dad drives them to Washington’s Gonzaga High School every day. “He doesn’t let us have the radio on. We are always talking about what is going on in our lives--it’s like he is coaching us through our lives,” says Chuck. And the coaching doesn’t end in the car. “If there is a good TV program on, he makes us watch it together; he questions us about the news; gets us to reflect on it,” says Mark.