Finding Child Care: Nightmare on Your Street

If your family’s well-being--or your company’s bottom line--depended on an unreliable, overpriced product, you’d look for an alternative, right?

What if you couldn’t find one?

Welcome to the world of child care. It has a blanky-soft sound but a hard reality: Price, quality and accessibility are inconsistent, employers lose billions in child-related absences and families are physically and emotionally stressed as they try to find care, pay for it, feel good about it and make it work.

Ask your neighbor, your best friend, the supermarket checker, your doctor--anyone with kids, never mind their income level--and you’ll hear child-care blues.

Oscar-winning actress-turned-director Lee Grant asked. The answers, from real parents across the country, appear tonight in her Lifetime documentary “Confronting the Crisis: Childcare in America,” a resonant and reasoned film about an issue that affects millions of one-parent and two-parent families.

“What I wanted was across-the-board representation [so] people in the audience could look at this and say, ‘Oh, my God. That’s me,’ ” Grant said.

That spark of recognition may come while listening to the divorced secretary in New Jersey who spends half her paycheck on care for her two children. She worries that an emergency will spiral into a day-care crisis. Unable to stay current with her day-care payment, she tries, too, to hold onto her self-respect.

The widower dad in Pennsylvania might strike a chord. He works long hours and gets himself and his young son up early in order to get to the day-care facility and be on time for work. He can’t always get back before closing time, so he relies on a reciprocal baby-sitting arrangement with his sister.

As they speak, both struggling parents poignantly reveal a hunger for adult companionship. “I don’t think that in keeping their noses to the grindstone,” Grant said, “people look up and say, ‘Where am I? Is this happening to somebody else? Why am I getting sick so often, why am I so dissatisfied, why do I feel I don’t have enough time in my life, in my day?’ ”

Grant went to law enforcement, health professionals and child advocacy groups, who testify to the toll it takes when families are thrown into turmoil by illness or any unforeseen event, when care quality is shabby or when lack of supervised after-school programs puts older children at risk.

“It’s really time that people looked around and saw that there’s a problem that needs to be addressed,” Grant said.

It doesn’t go away at higher income levels, either. Grant interviewed one upscale couple--he’s a doctor, she’s a Harvard PhD--who must work to pay staggering student loans and are deep in credit card debt after going through nanny agencies to find care for their preschooler. They finally found Miss Right, but her visa will expire a few months after the birth of their second child. Soon, they’ll be back where they started.

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Lifetime, the cable network that calls itself “Television for Women,” commissioned the documentary as the 1999 cornerstone in its major on-air, online and outreach campaign to make child-care policies an issue in the 2000 elections and to amplify parents’ voices that may have been muted by guilt, isolation or fatigue.

“When you talk to families about their child-care situation,” said Meredith Wagner, Lifetime senior vice president of public affairs, “they’ll go, ‘Oh, it’s fine; we had a really great day yesterday.’ And a ‘great day’ is when you call your boss and say you have a flat tire because you have to take your kid to the doctor. And then you meet someone who you hand the kid off to before and after school and then you run during lunch.

“Families are so busy making all these connections on a daily basis,” Wagner said, “that at the end of the day they go, ‘Yea, we won’--when in fact everybody’s losing. The kids aren’t necessarily getting the best situation. You’re not doing well. It’s not the way you’d think you would treat a priority.”

Grant is passionate about a segment she did with some Boston moms in a welfare-to-work program. Child care is a priority in helping moms succeed, but the program’s strict limitations can undermine its success. One mom missed a day because of her asthmatic child. “Here they are breaking their asses to make it in jobs,” Grant said, “and if her child has an asthma attack two more times, she’s out.

“And it’s so bizarre that, on the one hand, they’re doing what the government is asking them to do. They’re thrilled to be in that work situation. But they only have the child-care voucher for the year. Then what are they going to do?”

A look at France’s free, enriched day care and affordable infant care--available to all of its citizens--provides painful contrast to the patchwork of baby-sitters, day care and after-school programs that parents here must cobble together, care that can cost between $6,000 and $15,000 a year.

In the U.S., child care “is still viewed as an individual’s problem,” said Faith Wohl, director of the national Child Care Action Campaign. Her organization is one of 150 nonprofit child advocacy groups that have joined Lifetime in its effort. “You suffer with it alone. I think a lot of that [comes] through in the film. Every one of those parents felt it was on their necks to figure out an answer.”

But the world has changed, and so has the work force. “We have to rethink some pretty basic assumptions about what’s in the interest of our society,” Wohl said.

“If you care that much about your children, you take care of them,” Grant said. “Put them in a place where it’s safe, where teachers are paid well to take care of them, keep them so that when parents come home, they don’t have stress and anxiety. And they will grow up to be the kind of citizens that you want to live next to.”

* “Confronting the Crisis: Childcare in America” airs on Lifetime at 10 tonight. It will be repeated Wednesday at 6 p.m., Friday at 12:30 a.m. and Sunday at 10 a.m.