Study Finds Most Child Care Lacking : Family: Of children cared for in someone else’s home, 56% of the providers were called only adequate. Another 35% were rated as inadequate.

The nation’s most prevalent form of day care for young children of employed mothers has received unimpressive marks in the topic’s first major study in more than a decade.

Of child care that takes place in someone else’s home--called family child care--in a five-year study released Thursday by the New York City-based Families and Work Institute. The study was funded by groups that included the Annenberg Foundation, the Carnegie Corp. of New York, Dayton-Hudson Foundation, Mervyn’s and Target stores.

Only 9% of the 226 care providers examined in the San Fernando Valley, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Charlotte, N.C., were ranked as good, meaning conducive to the growth and development of a child. Fifty-six percent of the home providers in the study were described as adequate.

To Ellen Galinsky, who conducted the study for the Families and Work Institute, the findings were startling--and troubling.

“Once again, we find that although we know how to provide quality child care, we still are not doing it,” Galinsky said in an interview.

“Since this is the foundation of future learning and school success for many of our children, it’s hard to think that they may not be in a good situation,” she said. “But many are not.”

Thirty-three percent of U.S. families with employed mothers use child care in someone else’s home for children under 5. In nearly two-thirds of these cases, the provider is not related to the child.

By contrast, 28% of U.S. children under age 5 with working mothers are cared for in child-care centers.

The survey of 820 mothers and their children also revealed that:

* Only half of the children felt securely attached to their providers. Surprisingly, children were not more likely to be securely attached to providers who are relatives than to non-relatives.

* Of the parents who looked for alternatives when selecting care, 65% believed that they had no choices. Twenty-eight percent of the mothers in this sample said they would use other care if it were available.

* Children from low-income homes are in lower-quality care than their higher-income counterparts.

* Children from minority families are in somewhat lower-quality care than “non-minority” children.

Care in the home of a provider breaks down into homes that charge for care and where the providers have received a state license, and homes where the providers are not regulated and are not related to the child or children. The Families and Work Institute study found that most were non-regulated because they had more children than rules allow. Ninety-six percent of these providers charged for child care.

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Non-regulated relatives who provide care make up a third category, with 52% of these providers charging for their services. Related providers averaged 52.9 years of age, as opposed to an average age of 40.5 for regulated non-related providers. Related providers also had significantly less education and lower family incomes than regulated providers.

Carollee Howes, a professor of education at UCLA who worked on the study, said many of these relative care providers were working on an ad-hoc basis, sometimes reluctantly filling a need for a working family member--and not necessarily taking pride or pleasure in what they were doing.

Many of these caregivers lacked training as well as what the study termed “intentionality,” or a purposeful “commitment to create home environments in which children can be nurtured and can learn.”

Howes said the report showed that these arrangements are often vastly less satisfactory than might have been assumed.

“We have this idea that family-based child care can take up the slack,” she said. “We just blithely assume that it’s there, and it’s fine--when in fact it’s very heterogeneous, and not all of it is fine.”

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One positive outcome of the study, Galinsky said, was to ascertain “a working definition of quality “ in child care that came from parents and practitioners alike. Galinsky said that across ethnic, income and geographic lines, parents and providers agreed that “a warm and attentive relationship” between provider and child was the key to quality care.

In evaluating quality, parents and providers also placed significance on the child’s safety and on the providers’ and parents’ communication about the child.

“It comes down to someone who cares about your child, and someone your child cares about,” Galinsky said.

But she added that while “it has been an assumption that because care is in a home, it is by definition more caring and more sensitive--it can be, but it is not necessarily that way. Just like center care, it is variable.”