Child Care Shortage Costing Jobs

The effort to find affordable licensed child care continues to frustrate low-income parents in Los Angeles County and, as a result, many have either lost jobs or not looked for employment, a new survey has found.

In fact, most poor families give up looking for licensed providers and end up relying on family or friends to care for their children, said the study, Transforming Child Care From the Ground Up, released Wednesday by the Human Services Alliance, a Los Angeles social advocacy group.

“Child care is critical for a family’s security but the system simply isn’t working for the families who need child care the most,” Alliance director Sam Mistrano said at a news conference.

Several other reports have documented the acute shortage of affordable child care throughout Los Angeles County--and the dismal care provided by even some licensed facilities. But Wednesday’s report is one of the few that asked low-income parents to talk about their own experiences and needs.

About 500 of them were surveyed earlier this year at health clinics, welfare offices, child care centers, check-cashing outlets and other agencies across the county. Virtually all of them qualify for free or partly subsidized child care because of their low incomes, yet most end up on long waiting lists for such care.

Among the findings:

* More than half--52%-- of those surveyed reported that a lack of child care caused them to lose a job. Even more--68%--said that a lack of child care had kept them from looking for work in the first place.

* Fewer than half of the respondents--49%--currently have child care providers, although 87% of those without providers were looking for one.

* Almost half--48%--who applied for subsidized child care were put on a waiting list for services.

* Relatively few parents--17%--relied on licensed centers and licensed family child care homes, while 47% counted on family or friends.

The problems are especially severe in Los Angeles County, where more than 100,000 children are on waiting lists for subsidized care--despite more than $100 million in state and federal funding for child care programs in the county this year.

The parents themselves said they are hindered by too little information and by a disorganized system that often penalizes them.

Twenty-three percent of the respondents, for example, said they preferred to have their children cared for in a church-based or religious program. Yet only 2% of those surveyed were able to find such arrangements. The parents also expressed a need for late-night and weekend care and almost half--44%-- said that transporting their children to child care was a problem.

Many of those surveyed are welfare recipients facing strict time limits to find work under federal and state welfare reforms. Yet 51% of these respondents said they were not informed about child care services available to welfare-to-work families by their county worker. And 37% of the welfare recipients said they were penalized by having their aid cut because a lack of child care prevented them from complying with welfare requirements.

Raeann Wilkerson, 24, told the news conference that she has experienced many of the problems highlighted in the report. When she left an abusive relationship a year ago and went on welfare, she searched for weeks for a suitable day care provider for her two young daughters, who are now 3 and 1 1/2.

Most centers were not equipped to provide care for infants and some said they would take one child but not the other. With no car, she also could not find providers who would transport her daughters to and from child care.

About six months ago, Wilkerson found a family day care provider who picks her children up at her home before school and drops them off later. But she said mix-ups and bureaucratic red tape in the county welfare office have prevented the provider from being reimbursed.

She now fears that any day, the provider will ask her children to leave.

“I’d have to stop going to school, to interrupt my education and I couldn’t get a job--that would be a disaster,” said Wilkerson, who is attending the Metro Skills Center to obtain her high school equivalency diploma and training as a bank teller.

While acknowledging that glitches may hamper some cases, county officials insist they are doing all they can to inform parents about services that are available, both inside welfare offices and in the community.

The county has put up a Web site devoted to child care programs (https://childcare.co.la.ca.us) and established a hotline for parents who have complaints.

“We are providing subsidized services for more than 50,000 children, so we know the process is working,” said Pearlene Saffold, an administrator with the county Department of Public Social Services in charge of child care programs.

Wednesday’s study recommends, among other things, increasing outreach efforts, especially among immigrant groups, expanding on-site after-school programs and conducting mandatory evaluations of all licensed providers in the county by 2005 while providing them with incentives to improve quality.