New Book May Relieve Working Mothers’ Guilt : Researcher Ellen Galinsky reports that parents’ conflict about day care is largely unwarranted. In a national survey, most kids said they’re quite content not to spend every minute with mom.

They don’t ask for much.

Quiz children on what they need and want in those hours between school’s end and bedtime, and they’re pretty flexible. They can adapt. Their needs are simple.

“I think kids like to have a grown-up around,” said 10-year-old Kevin of Anaheim. “Someone that cares about them, someone to talk to and someone to help when you don’t know how.”

So shelve that parental guilt about day care. Or temper that pride about staying at home. Kids say they like both child-care options--and several variations thereof.

In the national debate about cost, quantity and quality of child care, it’s easy to get tangled in the often conflicting opinions of legislators, parents and pundits. The voices rarely heard are those of kids themselves.

Seeking to fill that void, Ellen Galinsky, president of the New York-based Families and Work Institute, surveyed 1,000 children across the country to hear what they had to say about working parents. Among her findings: Only about 10% of kids in grades three through 12 wish they spent more time with their mothers-- regardless of whether mom scoops them up in a Volvo minutes after the school bell rings or a bus ferries them to an after-school program.

“I can tell very quickly when kids feel child care is working if they talk about it as if it were family,” Galinsky said. “The first thing kids want is someone who feels connected to them in a real way, who cares about them as an individual or a person.”

They didn’t use such fancy words to express themselves, but Southern California kids from a diverse batch of family situations agreed with the researcher’s conclusions.

More than a particular person or place, the children said, they would like to see a caring, responsible adult after school. A snack would be nice. Help with homework preferable. And a chunk of time dedicated to playing Nintendo, watching the tube, playing with friends and just relaxing. Freedom is important--but kids don’t crave too much.

Santa Ana resident Nadia, 13, cannot imagine a day after school without her mother’s help with homework or her advice about how to invite a boy to her first Sadie Hawkins dance.

“My mom always picks me up and asks, ‘What did you do in school today?’ ” Nadia said. “She’s pretty much there for me all the time.”

Parents More Critical Than Kids

Eleven-year-old Karla from Anaheim is accustomed to taking care of herself most days. Her classmate Tasha, 11, debriefs with her grandmother after school because her single father, a trucker, spends several days away from home. And fellow student Katie empathizes with the complex economics of day care.

“The YMCA is $175 a week--it’s really, really expensive,” said Katie, who plays Uno and hangs out with her younger sister and friends at the Y after school. “If it weren’t so expensive, we could do more fun things on the weekend or buy more clothes. It’s especially hard for single parents like my mom.”

That said, Katie doesn’t begrudge the arrangement. She just thinks that at age 11 she is mature enough to look after herself.

Often dogged by guilt, parents judge their child-care arrangements more critically than kids do, said Galinsky, author of the soon-to-be-published book “Ask the Children: What America’s Children Really Think About Working Parents.” Kids in her study consistently gave child care higher marks than parents did.

More than 90% of the 13- to 18-year-old children Galinsky surveyed opined that nonparental child care positively or somewhat positively affected their development. Among parents of kids those ages, 70% gave child care such high marks. The parents and kids surveyed did not come from the same families.

“Parents have a larger perspective than children,” Galinsky said. “For parents, there’s an emotional process to finding child care, which can often feel even competitive: ‘If this [child-care provider] is so good, maybe this person replaces me, maybe I’m not so needed.’ ”

For Luz, 13, nothing could replace her mother. She thinks the stay-at-home mom arrangement she enjoys is best, but says the supervision some of her classmates receive from after-school programs and baby-sitters makes a pretty good substitute. The real problem, she thinks, is kids who lack any supervision.

“I see kids who don’t have a baby-sitter and don’t see their parents much,” said the Santa Ana teen. “I see them in detention. They become troublemakers.”

Anaheim student Bill, 10, said his mother stayed home for his first few years of elementary school. Now he attends KinderCare after school.

Day care “is normal,” Bill opined. “There’s nothing bad about it. I do my homework, help clean up and then get to play.”

‘Quality Time’: Trite but True

It’s an old saw, but many experts and kids concur that the quality of time parents spend with their children outweighs the quantity.

Asked what their top four wishes were for their mothers, 23% of kids in grades three through 12 hoped for better-paid moms, and 20% wished that mom was less stressed. Only 10% wanted more time with mom.

The desire for additional time together was more evident when children were asked their top four wishes for their fathers. An identical 23% wished their dad would make more money, but 15.5% wanted more time with their father.

“Parents shouldn’t feel guilty about their child-care choices,” said Dr. Morris Green, who heads the behavioral and developmental pediatrics division at Indiana University’s School of Medicine. “There’s really no reason for it. They should just make sure to spend some individual time with their children. . . . Give them the gift of time.”

That’s exactly what Anaheim’s Kevin intends to do when he grows up, marries and eventually fathers children.

“I’d like for both of us to work,” he said. “But when I first have children, I wouldn’t want to work. I’d like both of us to stay with [the child] until he goes to school and then go back to work. I’d like to have schedules where both of us pick him up every once in a while, so it isn’t just one person” doing all the parenting.

And Katie? She’s angling for a stay-at-home husband.

“That way he could take care of the kids while I go to work,” she explained. “I couldn’t stand staying at home all day. I’d get bored.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

For More Child Care Information

* An extensive list of child-care resources and the complete “Caring for Our Children” series are available on the Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/caring

* The National School Age Care Alliance, 1137 Washington Street, Boston MA 02124, phone: 617-298-5012; web address: https://www.nsaca.org

* California School-Age Consortium, 111 New Montgomery, Suite 302A, San Francisco CA 94105, telephone 415-957-9775; web address: https://www.csacweb.org/

Compiled by MALOY MOORE / Los Angeles Times