Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 8, 1995                   TAG: 9502080064
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CHILD QUALITY

"Its" child-care problems? The often-frantic search by working parents for dependable, affordable child care is now another of "the country's" problems?

To some extent, yes. It has been for years, one that society has been loath to acknowledge.

Now it's hard to ignore the most recent of a handful of comprehensive studies on the quality of child care in America. The results in a word: dismal.

The four-university, multiyear study of hundreds of day-care centers finds that most of the 5 million children in full-time day-care programs get mediocre care at best. And one in eight is in a center of such poor quality that safety and health are threatened.

The more the experts learn about childhood development, the earlier they set critical stages for developing learning and social skills. Yet the study found that in poor programs, the youngest children get the poorest care of all.

The study, published this week, is a bleak companion piece to another done last year on in-home day-care services, which came to similar conclusions.

The quality of a child's care is, of course, of utmost importance to his or her parents. The responsibility to provide good care lies primarily with them - whether that means staying home and doing the diapering or returning to an outside job and paying someone else to take over for 40 hours a week.

Parents among the latter who were included in the day-care-center study greatly overestimated the quality of the centers to which they entrusted their children. Ninety percent rated the programs as very good, while trained observers judged most of these same programs as poor to mediocre. Parents, who care about their children more than anyone else can, have to be the most vigilant quality-control experts.

But society as a whole also has a stake in the emotional and intellectual health of children, and to that extent has a role in ensuring that they have the opportunity to grow into caring, contributing adults.

Notice, we are talking about "the country" and "society," here - not "government" exclusively, though state governments have a responsibility for setting health and safety standards and seeing that they are met. The needs, though, go beyond what can be reasonably expected of a whole department of bureaucrats trying to regulate nurturing.

Institutions throughout society must retool their thinking for a workforce that needs child care now, and for a future workforce that either will have benefited from high-quality care in the most impressionable early years, or will suffer greatly for the lack of it.