Woman Loses Custody of Child Because She Relied on Day Care

A judge’s order taking a 3-year-old girl away from her college-student mother because the woman had put the child in day care has outraged feminists and day-care advocates.

“It illustrates an attitude toward women about where they should be--the bedroom, kitchen and those kind of places, not at college,” Jacquie Steingold, a board member of the National Organization for Women, said Tuesday.

Circuit Judge Raymond Cashen ruled Monday that the girl’s father, Steve Smith, deserves custody because his own mother, a homemaker, has promised to take care of the child full time.

Living with her mother, the girl would be “in essence raised and supervised a great part of the time by strangers,” the judge said. “A child gains the feeling of security, a safe place by virtue of permanency.”

Smith, 20, and the girl’s mother, Jennifer Ireland, 19, never married. Ireland moved to Ann Arbor with the girl, Maranda Kate Ireland Smith, last fall and put the child in day care for about 35 hours a week while she took classes at the University of Michigan. The girl stays at a home near campus, where a woman looks after five children, including her own.

The judge was expected to sign the order today. It would take effect 15 days later.

Ireland, who would get visitation on alternate weekends, holidays and other times, planned to appeal.

“It’s just unfair. It’s a decision based on the 1950s,” Ireland said. “She loves going to day care. She wouldn’t be with strangers.”

Levona Whitaker, a spokeswoman for the child advocacy program Michigan’s Children, said the order encourages single mothers to stay home and collect welfare instead of bettering their lives.

But Philip Holman, vice president of the National Congress for Men and Children, said the judge was admirably “gender blind” and placed the child in the most stable environment.