"It may be hard to convince yourself that putting children in all these hours of child care is a good thing," says the UW's Spieker. "Not because it's ultimately going to harm them but because it's no fun. They miss you. You miss them."
Making the dilemma even more excruciating is the quality of day care that's out there, which was documented by the NICHD. Most that it observed fell into the squishy middle, neither particularly good nor bad. Just 17 percent of the day care through age 3 was considered "excellent." That's actually a better picture than has been portrayed in the past, but Sharon Landesman Ramey, in her impassioned and compelling commentary, still labels it "shocking and intolerable."
Interviewed by phone, the Georgetown psychologist compares the findings on day care to those on divorce. "People say divorce doesn't affect kids. Their IQ isn't wiped out. They're healthy and they grow up and go to college. And thank goodness. But to say divorce doesn't affect kids is ridiculous." Ramey's point is well taken. It's obvious that having good or bad experiences in day care matters, even if it doesn't seal a child's fate.
Talk to people who have worked in day care, Ramey urges. Many of them have felt unable to meet children's needs. One such person is Donna Thornell, who was employed as Ramey's nanny and went on to work at day-care centers and eventually leave the business. "I found it to be very frustrating," says Thornell, from Birmingham, Ala., where she lives.
Thornell does feel good about her work as a nanny. "There was a special bond between Sam and me," she says of Ramey's son. "I felt like he was part mine." At the day-care centers where she went next, though, she faced the challenge of looking after multiple kids. She remembers working in the infant room of one high-end facility. "The ratio was one teacher to three babies, which is really good, but it's not enough," she says. Sometimes they would all cry at once. "I remember sitting in the room, more than once, having one on each leg and one between them, and just trying to comfort each. It was very, very tiring. I thought, maybe I could do one, maybe two. . . . "
She's also watched children be dropped off for day care at 6:30 in the morning, still wearing their pajamas, only to be picked up at 6 that night. "I didn't want my children to live that way," she says. She stays home with her two kids.
It's a similar picture to the one painted by Kim Buehlman, a former NICHD research assistant who assessed the Seattle-area child care used by the local families in the study. While she remembers some stellar facilities that engaged children with creative activities like skin paints and a Day of the Dead table for remembering deceased loved ones, most did not leave her with a good impression. "I was seeing a lot of care I did not enjoy being at," she says. These were not horror stories. The providers were not neglectful. "It was the ratios more than anything else. . . . They were just trying to get kids' basic needs met," she says. Their emotional needs were often too much.
On the positive side, Buehlman now works with a UW professor on a project to help day-care providers improve. She watches videotapes with providers of their interactions with children and discusses how to handle problems. "The changes are amazing," Buehlman says. All the day-care workers want, she says, "is someone to talk to." Still, in her own life, Buehlman is opting out of day care, at least temporarily. Weeks away from giving birth to her first child when we talk, she says she and her husband are going to alternate days at home so that they don't need any child care for their child's first year. "I don't think day care is bad," she says. But she adds, "The first year of life is so important, and it only happens once. I don't want to miss it."
The research is one thing, and it has told us a lot. Day care does not appear to be truly damaging children, a conclusion that is changing the tone of the day-care debate. Many early-childhood professionals are now talking about improving day care rather than questioning whether it should exist. But ultimately, parents who have the luxury to choose vote on day care largely with their hearts. How do they feel about the day-care providers they've observed? Do they think their children will be happy with those caretakers? How much does work mean to parents? These are questions that scientists can't answer for us. Despite the exhaustive research, there's a lot we have to figure out ourselves.
nshapiro@seattleweekly.com
