unsafe business of looking after our children (1) ~ Health Care, Slimming Tips, Nutrition, News, Fitness and Lots..........

It was 5:30 in the morning when Kenya Mire looked down at her baby girl, Kendyll, who was curled up tight on a foldaway crib.

“Night, night,” Kendyll had just murmured in her quiet, serious way. At 20 months, she was picking up all sorts of words, like “baby,” the name of the doll she kept nearby, and “Bryce,” the name of her big brother. She hadn’t slept much that night, and Mire thought about calling in late to work so Kendyll could get more rest.

But it was only Mire’s second day at a new job she badly needed, as a receptionist at a Houston oil company. Mire, who was 30, with an open face and wide smile, was intent on making a good impression.

The best she could do was give Kendyll an extra hour to nap and prepare some warm milk for her breakfast.

When Kendyll got up, Mire dressed her in a purple shirt that matched her own—purple was Kendyll’s favorite color—and put a pair of purple-striped stretch pants in her backpack.

It was a challenge to get Kendyll to sit still for the hour it took to unbraid and re-braid her dark hair, and on such a hectic morning, Mire didn’t even try. At around 7 a.m., they got into the car and drove to Kendyll’s new day care.

The place was called “Jackie’s Child Care,” but there wasn’t anyone named Jackie who worked there. The proprietor was Jessica Tata, an energetic 22-year-old registered with the state of Texas to look after children in the wood-paneled house she rented on a quiet, middle-class street.

Her regulars included Elias, a chunky 16-month-old with a bowlegged walk, and 19-month-old Elizabeth, who always jumped into her mom’s lap when it was time to drop her off.

As Mire walked back to her car that warm February morning in 2011, she noticed Kendyll hovering at the entrance—a little sleepy, a little curious, gazing at the scene inside. Mire felt uneasy about leaving, especially since it was only Kendyll’s second day there and she didn’t know Tata that well. Shortly after, she called Tata to check in, and Tata reassured her that Kendyll was doing just fine.  

Just after lunch, Mire’s cell phone lit up. The number was Tata’s, but she didn’t recognize the voice. “There’s been a fire,” a woman said.

“They’ve taken all the kids to the hospital, for smoke, as a precaution.” Mire tried not to panic; she clutched at the word “precaution.” Her phone buzzed again, this time with a text message from a friend: “What day care did you say Kendyll goes to?” Mire called the friend, who was watching live TV coverage of a burning Houston day care.

Black smoke was billowing from windows and holes in the roof; firemen were running out of the house, cradling limp babies in their arms. One little girl had braided hair and a purple shirt, her friend told her. She looked like Kendyll. Mire ran to her car.

I can’t panic, she kept telling herself as she drove through heavy traffic and later past ambulances and fire engines.

I just have to get there.rusting your child with someone else is one of the hardest things that a parent has to do—and in the United States, it’s harder still, because American day care is a mess. About 8.2 million kids—about 40 percent of children under five—spend at least part of their week in the care of somebody other than a parent.

Most of them are in centers, although a sizable minority attend home day cares like the one run by Jessica Tata. In other countries, such services are subsidized and well-regulated. In the United States, despite the fact that work and family life has changed profoundly in recent decades, we lack anything resembling an actual child care system.

Excellent day cares are available, of course, if you have the money to pay for them and the luck to secure a spot. But the overall quality is wildly uneven and barely monitored, and at the lower end, it’s Dickensian.

This situation is especially disturbing because, over the past two decades, researchers have developed an entirely new understanding of the first few years of life.

This period affects the architecture of a child’s brain in ways that indelibly shape intellectual abilities and behavior.

Kids who grow up in nurturing, interactive environments tend to develop the skills they need to thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long enough to solve it.

Kids who grow up without that kind of attention tend to lack impulse control and have more emotional outbursts.

Later on, they are more likely to struggle in school or with the law. They also have more physical health problems.

Numerous studies show that all children, especially those from low-income homes, benefit greatly from sound child care.

The key ingredients are quite simple—starting with plenty of caregivers, who ideally have some expertise in child development.

By these metrics, American day care performs abysmally. A 2007 survey by the National Institute of Child Health Development deemed the majority of operations to be “fair” or “poor”—only 10 percent provided high-quality care.

Experts recommend a ratio of one caregiver for every three infants between six and 18 months, but just one-third of children are in settings that meet that standard.

Depending on the state, some providers may need only minimal or no training in safety, health, or child development. And because child care is so poorly paid, it doesn’t attract the highly skilled.

In 2011, the median annual salary for a child care worker was $19,430, less than a parking lot attendant or a janitor.

Marcy Whitebook, the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California–Berkeley, told me, “We’ve got decades of research, and it suggests most child care and early childhood education in this country is mediocre at best.”

At the same time, day care is a bruising financial burden for many families—more expensive than rent in 22 states. In the priciest, Massachusetts, it costs an average family $15,000 a year to place an infant full-time in a licensed center. In California, the cost is equivalent to 40 percent of the median income for a single mother.

Only minimal assistance is available to offset these expenses. The very poorest families receive a tax credit worth up to $1,050 a year per child. Some low-income families can also get subsidies or vouchers, but in most states the waiting lists for them are long.

And so many parents put their kids in whatever they can find and whatever they can afford, hoping it will be good enough.

One indicator of the importance that the United States places on child care is how little official information the country bothers to collect about it. There are no regular surveys of quality and no national database of safety problems.

One of the only serious studies, by Julia Wrigley and Joanna Dreby, appeared in the American Sociological Review in 2005.

The researchers cobbled together a database of fatalities from state records, court documents, and media reports. On the surface, they said, day care appears “quite safe,” but looking closer, they discovered “striking differences.”

The death rate for infants in home settings—whether in their own houses with a nanny or in home day cares—was seven times higher than in centers. The most common causes included drowning, violence—typically, caregivers shaking babies—and fire.

Statistics on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) are also revealing. ChildCare Aware of America, an advocacy group, calculated that, proportionally, about 9 percent of all reported SIDS deaths should take place in child care.

The actual number is twice that. And while overall SIDS fatalities declined after a nationwide education campaign, the death rate in child care held steady.

Fatalities in child care remain relatively rare, but not as rare as they should be. In an investigation of Missouri day cares, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Nancy Cambria documented 45 deaths between 2007 and 2010.

One was three-month-old William Pratt, who died from blunt trauma after a caregiver threw him on a couch because she was frustrated with him. In 2012, a toddler named Juan Carlos Cardenas wandered off at an Indiana church day care. Nobody was watching him when he fell, face-first, into a baptismal pool and drowned.

Kenya Mire was an only child and hated it, and perhaps that’s why she liked kids so much. After finishing high school, in 1999, she started training to be a medical assistant, hoping to work in a maternity ward.

“I was just so interested in the idea of pregnancy,” she says in her clear, measured way. “I always wanted to be that person where I was in the room with them from the time when they came in up through when they had the baby.

I wanted to be the person that you told your story to.”

When she was 22, however, Mire had to put her plans on hold, because she was pregnant herself. She and the father weren’t together and her morning sickness got so bad she had to quit her job in a restaurant kitchen and move in with her mom.

Despite all that, she felt “worry-free,” she says. “I was just so excited to have a child.” Eight years later, when she got pregnant again, it was different. This time, she knew how hard it would be.

Courtesy of Kenya Mire

Kenya Mire and her son Bryce

When Mire went back to work, she put Kendyll in the same day care where she’d sent her son, Bryce: Grandma’s Place—a bright, cheery operation with a professional staff.

But Grandma’s Place was expensive. Even with the subsidies Texas provides to low-income mothers, Mire had to pay $200 a week from her $12.50-an-hour job at a water utility company. Then the recession hit, and Mire lost the job. She had to pull Kendyll from the center.

For the next two years, Mire worked as the hostess at a steak house for five hours a night, earning $10 an hour.

Every day, she also checked in with several temping agencies. She relied on her mother and friends for child care, which meant she often had to pass up last-minute opportunities because she couldn’t find anyone to look after Kendyll.

At one point, she scraped up the money to send Kendyll to a KinderCare franchise, but eventually fell behind on the payments and had to withdraw her. Once, she quit a customer-service job because she had nowhere for Kendyll to go.

When she was offered the oil company position, Mire felt like stability was finally within reach. “This was a really good opportunity,” she told me emphatically. “They were starting me on $12.50, and if I became permanent, they would move to like $13.” But in order to take the job, she needed child care.

First, Mire tried KinderCare again, but they wouldn’t take Kendyll until Mire paid her debt; when she did, there were no openings. She called about a dozen centers, all of which were either too expensive or had no available slots. Mire thought she might have to turn down the job.

“I just kind of broke down, because it seemed like nothing was going right, everything was just falling apart,” she says. “I sat in my car for about thirty minutes. I was just like, I don’t even know what to do anymore. Because I want to start this job, but I literally don’t have nowhere for Kendyll to go.”

Then a solution materialized. Mire’s mother was shopping at Target when a woman named Jessica Tata handed her a business card for her home day care. Mire quickly called Tata, who said she could take another toddler. And the state subsidies—would Tata accept those? Yes, she said, she did it all the time.

Still, Mire was hesitant to leave Kendyll in a home day care—she’d never done that before. When she and Kendyll went to check out Jackie’s, she noticed dirty dishes piled up on the kitchen counters. Over the next two hours, she plied Tata with questions, about everything from her experience to her education methods.

Tata’s answers eased her anxiety. “She seemed like she understood the struggle of single parents and trying to work and take care of kids at the same time,” Mire recalls. “She just seemed very open and honest, really.”

Mire liked the fact that Tata promised to teach the children Christian values through Bible reading and prayer. Most important, she seemed warm with children. Kendyll was usually wary in strange settings, but she left her mother’s side and started playing with the other kids. Maybe the arrangement wasn’t ideal, Mire thought, but it would be OK for now.

Mire’s dilemma was one that American parents, particularly single mothers, have struggled with for generations.

The United States has always been profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of supporting child care outside the home, for reasons that inevitably trace back to beliefs over the proper role of women and mothers. At no point has a well-organized public day care system ever been considered the social ideal.