A Home Away

Working mothers are hardly a brand-new problem. But with a record 9,300,000 of them in the U.S. labor force today (an increase of 73% in just the past ten years), they pose an increasingly acute problem: What to do with a child or children when Mother is at work? Perhaps the most publicly visible symptoms of the dilemma, and the most pathetic, are the "latchkey kids." They are conspicuous in troubled Harlem, but are also observable in nearly every large U.S. city. Altogether, there are nearly 500,000 U.S. children who wear around their necks this symbol of desperation and neglect. The key unlocks half a million different doors, opens the way into half a million different, equally empty rooms. No one is ever waiting for the latchkey kids--at least not until Mother gets home from work.

In addition, the U.S. Children's Bureau estimates, there are another 500,000 children twelve years old or under who are entrusted to brothers or sisters, thus often keeping them from school. Then there are the 450,000 children of migrant workers who are either taken to the fields with their parents or left behind in untended shacks.

Where's Auntie? But where else can these children go? Who can be found to take care of them? The once standard live-in aunt or grandmother of an older time and more rural economy no longer exists. In today's crowded urban apartment, there is no room for her. Naturally, the problem is concentrated in the lower-income groups, where the father cannot make enough to support the family singlehanded. It is also acute in disheveled families where Father may be here today and gone tomorrow, leaving Mother to cope with the rent and the grocery bill.

Settlement houses, religious groups and individual philanthropists have worked with success, though limited and local, in the field. A larger answer is the establishment of publicly supported centers where children can be left and cared for. But only two cities (New York and Philadelphia) and one state (California) have had a day-care program for any substantial length of time. Last year the Federal Government allocated $4,000,000 to the states for help in the creation and management of supervised centers.

Theoretically, no more is needed than a room where children may be left and a responsible adult to watch them. But in hard fact, a dynamic program would also provide medical supervision and educational training. For the children of such homes cannot and do not get the attention, the training, and the sense of family support that will enable them to enter school confidently and begin the process of education without hopeless handicaps. In one particularly dramatic case, a 4 1/2-year-old boy, already given to wild behavior, was adjudged retarded; not until he was referred by an alert day-care teacher to a pediatrician was he found to be almost totally deaf. Enrolled in a special school, he was discovered, in time, to be of near-genius intelligence.

Day-care centers often need to provide parents with guidance counseling, can also help keep families together by sparing a working mother the desperate expedient of sending a child to a foster home or submitting him to some questionable form of care such as the sleazy package deals advertised along country roadsides ("Ironing, Child Care, and Worms for Fishing Bait").

Also Turtles. Across the country, day-care methods are as varied as the children. In California 273 centers stay open up to 104 hours a day, care yearly for some 30.000 children on a $9,500,000 budget (two-thirds paid by the state, one-third by participating parents). Eligibility is based strictly on need; fees run anywhere from 4-c- to 490-c- an hour. Standard equipment in California's Santa Monica centers includes three large turtles, one small goat, five chickens, a horned toad, and a real leather saddle for sawhorse riding. Explaining a curriculum that includes such subtle delights as the baking of gingerbread, Director Docia Zavitkovsky says, "It is our job to introduce the world to these children."

In Cleveland, children are taught the intricate business of tying shoelaces and are shown where worms go under the grass. And in New York, some 6,300 children attend 85 centers at a weekly cost to parents of anywhere from $1 to $22.75, depending upon need. The Manhattan program, acknowledged to be the best in the nation, has a waiting list jammed with more than 5,000 applicants. And beyond that, maintains Department of Welfare Day-Care Director Catherine O'Connell, there is no way of knowing how many children in New York are being locked in their homes and left alone every day.

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