Unlicensed Providers, the Day Care of Last Resort

The other day, as yet another alarm was sounding on the crisis in child care, the tiny woman they call Abuelita--a friend of a friend--went to her door in the basement of a bungalow. Because her part of Los Angeles is almost as thick with ex-cons as it is with children, the door was 100% metal. “Come in,” she said in Spanish, and then: “Did you lock your car?”

Inside--past Abuelita’s bed with its rows of medications, past her spotless kitchen and beyond the dark living room with its doilies everywhere--there were children. Neighborhood children. Three today, because one toddler’s mom had already picked him up. You could hear them--Alex, Carlos, Aracely--out on the back porch, giggling at the dog, Muchacha.

“Abuelita! We’re hungry!” Alex yelled, stomping his little sneakers. “We want Chicken McNuggets! We want drinks of water!”

“Yes, mi hijo,” the 60-year-old grandma amiably said.

Not that she was the grandma of these children in particular. Some of these children didn’t even know her given name. All they knew was what any kid knows about his or her child care: that this was where they got dropped off in the dark of the working morning. Abuelita was the one who gave them oatmeal and warm milk for breakfast, who tucked them into the special bed with the fuzzy cover when their parents worked graveyard. The bed sat like a shrine at the safest end of the living room, surrounded by a wall and two night stands overflowing with framed Jesuses and Blessed Virgins. “To watch over little children when they are sleeping,” Abuelita said.

It was as cozy as a place could be in one of the densest and most crime-plagued parts of the city, a sector that roughly straddles the notorious Rampart district and Echo Park. Still, the scene at Abuelita’s house had more to do with the aforementioned child-care crisis than the casual visitor might have imagined: Every child there was on a years-long waiting list for subsidized and licensed day care elsewhere. None of the parents could squeeze more than $10 per day per child from their minimum-wage paychecks. And the whole setup at the house was illegal. Though she has been the unofficial sitter of last resort for an entire neighborhood for some 15 years now, Abuelita has never applied for a day-care license. How could she? She can neither read nor write.

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The headlines on that day were about a state-funded study that showed a backlog of five children of working parents for every licensed child-care spot available in the state. In Los Angeles and Orange counties the backlog was more like six children, and in San Bernardino County it was seven. The cost figures showed that a parent earning the state’s median income of $39,979 a year would have to spend nearly a fifth of that for licensed child care; it was half a paycheck for parents earning minimum wage.

In those numbers was a message the study stopped short of explicitly stating: The current crisis in child care has largely become a crisis of the working poor. The well-off can afford sitters and preschools, and federal reform has given dibs on subsidized day care to ex-welfare mothers. It’s the waitresses and gardeners, the seamstresses and furniture deliverymen--the exhausted couples who, every month, it seems, beg Abuelita to please just consider a couple more children--it is those hard workers who can’t win for losing in this boom.

“Es muy dificil,” Abuelita says, and that’s an understatement. The waiting list for a slot at one of L.A. Unified’s 102 subsidized day-care programs was, as of this week, 10,411 names long. The resource and referral agency that handles the swath of L.A. from downtown to South-Central and Inglewood had 11,000 people waiting for a subsidized spot in a licensed center; the list, under the law, must give priority to the poorest people with the most children. Agency workers said they are constantly consoling people who’ve waited for years for affordable, decent--and legal--child care, only to be bumped at the last minute by someone needier.

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Why the shortage? Perhaps the blunt answer is that no one but the altruists, the abuelitas and the all-but-unemployable want to do child care in this economy. There are few things more exhausting than a 12-hour workday in the company of tiny, needy, self-absorbed people--just ask your mother--and even fewer incentives in the average day-care worker’s pay.

Efforts are underway, as they say, to bring underground care into the licensed mainstream, but a bigger question is why--despite reams of cost-benefit evidence and piles of money--there’s such weak consensus for obvious solutions such as better day-care pay and universal preschool. Is the cost so much more alarming than, say, the cost of a prison or a door of 100% metal? Are the ex-cons outside Abuelita’s house so much more compelling than the children within?