The Relentless Quest for Quality Child Care

I could hear a note of panic in the answering machine message he left.

“We can’t find a center that can take the baby,” my brother said. “Looks like we’re going to have to go the au pair route. Call me. Tell me. . . . What do we do now?”

I wish I had a road map for him and his wife, one that points out the hazards, the shortcuts, the bumps on the road in the search for quality child care.

One that leads away from Louise Woodward and video cameras hidden in teddy bears, toward mutual respect, trust, kindness and love.

*

They knew it wouldn’t be easy moving cross-country to new jobs as university professors just months after their first child was born.

But child-care centers, my brother was told, would be plentiful and first-rate in their new Northern California hometown. He and his wife launched their search with optimism: They’d find a nice, homey place near campus, with a cheerful, competent child-care staff.

They indeed found places like that as they made the rounds. But the word was the same at each: No room, booked up, waiting list full for months to come. . . .

So, just weeks away from the semester’s start, they face a prospect that sends shivers through their hearts--leaving their new son at home with a stranger, alone, for hours at a time.

It’s been 13 years, but I still can remember traveling that road and the panic I felt as I headed back to work, leaving the daily care of my 6-month-old to a woman I’d met only weeks before.

And I know--from the torrent of letters and e-mail that my columns about child care evoke--that many of you know that panic too.

*

More than a dozen caregivers have tended my daughters in the 13 years since my first was born. I found them through newspaper ads, church bulletin boards, career centers at the local college. . . .

Some were grandmothers, others barely out of their teens. There were professional nannies who wooed me with folders of certificates and recommendations, and housewives who apologized because their only experience was raising healthy, well-adjusted children of their own.

I must have interviewed 100 prospects over the years and learned that even a professional reporter like me--whose job it is to ask tough questions--can be rendered mute and inarticulate by worry and fear.

I learned to trust my instincts, and that brought Rosa into our lives. She was my eldest’s first sitter--a mother of three who spoke little English and had never before held a job but who tended us all so gently that we became a family under her care.

And I discovered that instinct alone is not enough, when I let good vibes substitute for recent references and hired a young woman my kids adored--and who, I later learned, was a drug addict with a criminal record for petty theft.

The clincher came the day she was late getting back from picking up my child at preschool and I dashed home from work in a panic. I was met by a police car. My two children--then 6 months and 4 years old--were in the back seat, their sitter handcuffed beside them.

Turns out she’d stopped at a pharmacy, with the girls in tow, and tried to fill a forged prescription. A suspicious druggist called police, who arrested her and loaded the squad car with kids (my sitter was driving carpool that day and had my daughter’s two classmates along) before hauling her off to jail.

It took a long time for me to trust a sitter . . . and I was never allowed in the preschool carpool again.

*

I wish there were an easy answer, a magic formula. But like most working parents, I’ve made my way through trial and error.

What about you? Do you have practical advice to share--how you found a good caregiver, mapped a smooth path to success?

Pass it along if you can, and I’ll run the best advice in an upcoming column, to help us all. Send your tips--and please keep them brief--by fax to (818) 772-3578, by mail to Sandy Banks, Los Angeles Times, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth, CA 91311, or to my e-mail address below. And please include a phone number in case I have to reach you. Thanks.

* Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.