Keeping a Remote Eye on Day-Care Kids

For Judi McDill, the video window in the corner of her computer screen is the only connection with her son during the day. On the Web, she watches him eat lunch, stand on chairs with that coltish wiggle in his knees, fuss with his shirt buttons. Sometimes, when the 5-year-old notices the camera in his day-care center, he waves.

All day she watches.

Chase, 5, was attending Southcoast Early Childhood Learning Center in Costa Mesa when a man crashed his Cadillac into the playground last year, killing two children. So when McDill looked for a new school, she was sold on Newport Harbor Montessori Center because of its Webcam service. The Webcam offers “some peace to [my] soul” about her son’s well-being.

“I know it couldn’t prevent something bad happening again, but it gives me reassurance about his safety,” said McDill, 35, who lives in Orange. “The teachers know they are being watched at any time. The biggest thing for me is that I can just see him. I can see him. And I can touch him in some way.”

A year-old Newport Beach company offers the Webcam service, which has been picked up by five Orange County child-care centers and is being considered by five others. The company provides the schools with $800 computers, the cameras and high-speed Internet connections for free, in exchange for full participation from parents in the Webcam program, called GuardianCam. The parents pay $10 to $20 a month for the service. All they need is a computer at work to watch. The company also is installing equipment in five schools in the San Diego area and is “talking to” 42 preschools in the San Francisco area.

Jennifer Lovely of Newport Beach said she got the idea for the company when she found it hard to leave her own son Joseph, 4, in a home day-care center. With help from some technologically savvy friends, Lovely created the company and began approaching preschools. She now employs 10 people--and watches Joseph via her computer as he attends Newport Harbor Montessori.

Lovely wasn’t the first to think of the idea. The first online video system was launched in early 1997 at a day-care center in Connecticut. Also in 1997, Cathy’s Kids Club in Tustin installed video cameras in classrooms to broadcast still pictures on the Internet for parents to monitor their children. That system is still in place, an employee there said.

Still, concerns have been raised about such systems, by teachers and sociologists who question just how much parents should be overseeing their children during the school day. And some conservative commentators have huffed that if parents want to watch their children so badly, they should stay at home with them.

But Lovely says she has not heard any such complaints.

“This is just a sign that people are saying, ‘Yes, I have to work,’ but they are finding other ways to connect with their families,” she said. “This is one way of doing it that works. . . . I know it is one-way communication, but it is something.”

Lovely said some schools were apprehensive, especially about the requirement that all parents participate in the program; that adds cost to already expensive day-care fees. But other schools were eager to join in, wanting another opportunity to allay concerns about safety in child-care centers, particularly after the Costa Mesa crash.

“There’s this fear out there,” said Jamee Backus, director of Newport Harbor Montessori Center, which cares for about 160 children. “I feel like this abolishes all that fear. Parents can log on. Then they can ask their children about their day. The parents know what to ask. Like, ‘Hey, I saw you were working on a science project. . . .’ And the children feel more connected with their parents. You can feel it in them. You can see it when they wave into the cameras. It is darling.”

Sometimes the video can be frustrating, however; the quality of the images can be uneven and jerky. The video produces seven frames per second, compared with about 30 for television. The video offers detail and color, but no sound.

But even if technology doesn’t allow for perfect, real-time video yet, participating parents and schools say the idea offers a sense of security.

“For the parent it shows we have nothing to hide,” Backus said, “and they don’t have to come and check on their child.”

Backus said about two dozen parents enrolled in the school specifically for the cameras, and about a third of them were single parents looking for some way to stay in touch with their children.

One 31-year-old mother sends her child to a preschool in the county that uses the cameras. She did not want her name used because of concerns about her 4-year-old daughter’s safety.

She said the cameras were the biggest selling point for her school.

“It just makes sense,” she said. “There’s a lot to worry about. I have [video] on all day. All day. Without it, I can ask her how her day was and she just says, ‘OK’ or ‘Fine.’ But this way I can ask her specifically about what she’s done. I also can call her on it when she puts her feet on the table. She’s not supposed to put those feet on the table.”