Firms Offer Family-Friendly Summer Child Care
For millions of youngsters, the end of the school year means more time for baseball, swimming, mall hopping or lazin’ around the neighborhood. No tests. No homework. Few cares.
But for their working parents, it may mean more expensive, haphazard child-care arrangements, a few missed days on the job and a drop-off in productivity as they fret about where the kids are during what used to be school hours.
“Each year, parents scramble when it’s time to make summer arrangements,” said Denise Nelson, community coordinator for the Washington-based National Assn. of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies.
“They feel frustrated by a lack of options . . . and the cost of care when a child leaves school. They may have only been paying for 10 to 20 hours a week and now they’re paying for 40-plus hours.”
The economic impact can be significant for many of the nation’s 13.7 million dual-income households with children. Child-care expenses already eat an average 10% of annual income--right behind food, taxes and housing. The cost is considerably more for those earning under $15,000 a year--about 25%--though far less for those making more than $50,000--about 6%.
While circumstances vary, the most recent Census Bureau study, conducted in 1986, found that parents of school-age children spent roughly 22% more for child care in the summer months compared with the rest of the year.
To help offset costs, the federal government offers, among other things, tax-reducing dependent-care credits of as much as $720 per child and $1,440 for two or more children under age 13. Some employers also offer dependent-care assistance accounts that let you use up to $5,000 pretax to pay for child care.
But not all families exploit the tax break since they must provide their care giver’s Social Security number or taxpayer identification number. Many care givers want to be paid “off the books,” in cash, so they can avoid taxes.
“I think we need to talk about a new system of incentives to bring parents to the aboveground child-care system,” said Nelson. “We need to develop . . . a value for quality child care.”
“Quality child care is expensive,” said Barbara Reisman, executive director of Child Care Action Campaign, based in New York. “But we’ll pay an even higher price for the cost of neglect. Our future work force will be less competitive with other countries.”
With an eye to the future, more companies have been reaching out to employees by providing family-friendly benefits.
About three-quarters of 1,026 large companies recently surveyed by Hewitt Associates, a benefits consulting firm in Lincolnshire, Ill., said they provided some form of dependent-care benefits to employees. They range from referral services to child-care centers at the workplace.
“It’s a standard thing with large companies. (But) it’s still a small percentage of employers who have responded,” said Dana Friedman, co-president of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research group in New York.
The scramble by working parents with school-age kids to get through the summer is contagious. Even parents with preschool toddlers worry about it.
Steve and Kathy Gaertner of Minneapolis, for example, say they’ve begun to investigate likely summer arrangements although their eldest daughter Kelly is only 4.
“It just seems like it’s going to be a step backwards from the environment they’re in now” at the day-care center, said Gaertner, 36, a partner in the Minneapolis marketing firm Added Value. “I know we’ll plan accordingly, but at this point we don’t have a solution.”
Child-care advocacy groups, meanwhile, give high marks to efforts from companies like Fel-Pro, a maker of auto and industrial gaskets.
Every morning during the summer, Fel-Pro buses employees’ school-age children to a 220-acre retreat 45 minutes from the Skokie, Ill., headquarters. The children spend the day swimming, hiking, playing baseball, doing crafts or learning to cook.
The bus returns them to corporate headquarters by 4 p.m., where they’re met by baby-sitters who watch the children until parents are finished working. The cost: $25 a week per child, with a maximum weekly cost of $75.
Richard Morris, Fel-Pro’s director of communications, says about 200 of the company’s 1,800 employees enroll their children in camp. He said that program, along with other family-friendly benefits, have helped significantly increase worker productivity and reduce absenteeism. Fel-Pro’s employee turnover rate is 7%, versus 9% for the national average.
Another child-care leader is Dayton Hudson Corp. Since 1988, the Minneapolis-based retailer has helped train and accredit 8,000 family child-care providers in 18 states where its stores operate. Dayton Hudson also sponsors Child Care Aware, a nationwide campaign that offers summer child-care tips and puts parents in touch with resource and referral counselors in their communities.
“If we value the future of our businesses, we must recognize the new stresses on the family and try to accommodate them in the workplace,” Stephen E. Watson, Dayton Hudson’s president, said during a recent speech in Columbus, Ohio. “We know concentration can falter when working parents are concerned about the care their children are receiving.”
Last fall, 137 companies and organizations, including big names like International Business Machines Corp. and Xerox Corp., invested $25.4 million in the American Business Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care. The initiative is expected to fund 300 child- and elderly-care programs in 44 communities nationwide.
