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Backup child-care programs aim to offer parents options they can trust
By Maggie Jackson, Globe Correspondent, 2/13/05
At this time of year, the best-laid child-care arrangements become a house of cards. Every snow day or child home with the flu forces parents to juggle a host of unpalatable options - stay home from work, bring kids to the office, foist them on the neighbors, hire an unfamiliar sitter.
Joanne Gaudet, who works part time as a night desk clerk at a hotel in Burlington, routinely has to cobble together care for her children, ages, 12, 6, and 3, if her partner, Steve, gets home late from his job as a plumber. "They end up coming to work with me," says Gaudet of Medford. "My boss is fairly understanding, but she said it can't be a habit."
Finding good backup care is the bane of working parents, and by some yardsticks the picture's getting bleaker. Although parents lose an estimated five to eight days annually due to child-care breakdowns, just 9 percent of companies offer backup care, down from 14 percent in 2001, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.
Still, there's hope. In part, an idea once profoundly discomfiting - handing your child over to a stranger on short notice - is becoming acceptable as companies that provide the care build solid reputations. More important, different types of backup care are being created to meet the needs of the family. No backup care will work, after all, if parents don't trust it.
Take the case of backup care centers. Those opened for sick children failed because parents naturally shunned the idea of dropping an ailing child off at a strange institution.
Now backup centers, such as those run by Waltham's Children First, specialize in caring for healthy kids whose parents' employers buy the service as a benefit. Along with snow days and school holidays, the centers provide care on weekends for accountants during tax season, for travelers at business conferences, even for the elderly.
Having a caregiver come to you is another option that's gaining acceptance - slowly. In Tucson, only about 100 of the 10,000 employees at Raytheon's missile systems division annually use a company program that sends nannies from a local agency to an employee's home if a child is mildly ill or there's a child-care glitch.
"You have to get over the idea initially of a stranger in your home," says Kirk Singleton, an electrical engineer and single dad who uses the service five times a year for his 9-year-old daughter, Crystal. Now he jokes that "if they threw it out, I'd have to quit."
Such programs are popular with employees who, like Singleton, aren't native to the city in which they work, or who commute long distances and don't know their neighbors, says Barbara Marcus, the chief executive of Parents in a Pinch Inc., a Brookline in-home backup care service.
Most parents in a bind still prefer, however, to turn to people they trust. An ingenious program called "Just in Time Care" makes this choice viable for parents. Under the service operated by a nonprofit in Wilmington, Del., two-dozen companies pay any backup caregiver, including friends or family, named by an employee.
Last year, 75 percent of the care paid for under the program was provided by nonprofessionals. "It seems logical in a backup care situation that you want to choose care that you're familiar with," says Gerri Weagraff, a spokeswoman.
But sometimes, we simply need to be there. Somewhat guiltily and inefficiently, I jumped back and forth between writing this story and caring for my two sick kids. But at least I was home. A decade ago, Gaudet was told she'd lose her job as a dialysis technician if she spent one more day with her hospitalized toddler. She took the day, lost her job, and has no regrets. "To me that's just not acceptable," she says.
Maggie Jackson's Balancing Acts column appears every other week. She can be reached at .
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